Except costs went down when they switched from cartridges to discs, and then again to mostly digital.
So, no. It should not have.
Game prices should have increased with every new generation, former PlayStation US boss says
Submitted 10 hours ago by inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Costs have ballooned, but on the production side, not the distribution side. Perhaps the reduced costs on the distribution side are partially responsible for prices remaining so stable in the face of inflation.
piefood@feddit.online 6 hours ago
The costs only ballooned because the companies keep bloating themselves. It's gotten cheaper to make games, but more expensive to run giant companies that pay ludicrus amounts of money to executives.
Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
Yes, companies have made very bad decisions in what aspects of production to focus on in the last decade. They’re pouring more and more into ever decreasing rates of return on visual fidelity.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
Cartridges to discs were definitely a massive savings… and happened basically one and a half times (Sega to the CD and Sony from nothing to the Playstation)
Digital… is complicated. It definitely benefits the platform holder and lowers production costs for the major publishers (and makes indie games viable) but it also fundamentally changes marketing. Because people generally don’t browse the PSN Store to find new games. They only get recommendations from influencers. Whereas plenty of us have fond memories of standing in a Best Buy or Circuit City and picking what game looked good on the shelves.
But yes. I agree that not every single generation should have led to a price jump. But I can definitely see an argument for most of them to have raised the price of “AAA” games with tiered pricing beyond that. Because it really is a problem and not just for the major publishers. Indie games basically need to launch at an effective price of 10-20 bucks on PC to stand a chance and… that is great money for the small dev teams but not so much for a medium sized C/B tier game.
rainwall@piefed.social 2 hours ago
The huge win in digital for them was killing the resell market.
No used games means no competition from previous owners. Prices can stay at $60/70/80 forever without any user market forcing prices down.
Every media vendor wants digital only to cut production costs, but it's really to own the market. Consoles did exactly that for decades. The shift to subscriptipns for not only online at all but also to "sont own games, just gove us a monthly oart of your invome forever" was them pushing this advsntage to its maximum conclusion.
Only now, with falling sales and falling interest due to "quick media" like tiktok/instagram/etc, is microsoft giving up on its console moat and sharing all games across devices. Only a loss of relevance as an entertainment medium is forcing them to open the market up again.
deafboy@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
People don’t browse the PSN store, because it’s crap. I mean, the steam store is pretty bad, but I still manage to just browse and bookmark some games there to get back to later.
Gork@sopuli.xyz 8 hours ago
Who chooses to buy games based on influencers? I rely on reviews.
SlartyBartFast@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
Former PlayStation US boss can go fuck himself!
slazer2au@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
So should the quality.
And not just graphical quality.
sk1nnym1ke@piefed.social 10 hours ago
Unfortunately you get half of the games and the other half is splitted in DLCs, season pass, and pre order bonus.
Fermion@feddit.nl 10 hours ago
Which is to say that prices did increase every generation.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 hours ago
Video game budgets are still lower than film budgets and ticket prices for movies haven’t steadily climbed, arent anywhere near $60 a pop, nor have there been all these freaks coming out of the woodworks to say movie tickets should cost more.
Karjalan@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I don’t know how universal it is, but movie tickets here have at least tripled since I was a kid, 20 odd years ago.
Meanwhile, me and 4 friends pooled our pocket money together to buy a video game that we could barely afford. Brand new video games are the same price now.
I’m not saying “they should increase their price”, but it is wild how somehow they haven’t in decades
Katana314@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Wasn’t GTA V more expensive than most movies?
That’s the thing, a lot of investors almost don’t like the idea that video games are low budget. They want to be able to double their funding and quadruple their success, like with a lot of growth properties.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 hours ago
$256 million. Most expensive video game ever made. Since Avatar, there have been dozens of hollywood films that had a budget almost double that.
VonReposti@feddit.dk 10 hours ago
There were more sports cars in the parking lot in the PS1 era than there were in the PS4 era
What a struggle. Should we then have tripled the prices so the poor publishers could afford 2 sports cars instead? Or, hear me out, just play indie games that’s higher quality and doesn’t have a useless middle man.
blattrules@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
How many sports cars were in the CEO’s garage during each era though?
ceenote@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
The title should read "Playstation US boss is mad that spending a ton of money making games look slightly closer to real life didn’t make people want their games more.
Jaeger86@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Not to mention the likely equal spending on advertising
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
This is the fucktard that said he could not understand why people wanted to play old games
Fuck him
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
Shhhh! Nobody tell him about Steam and GOG…
I want to see the Playstation brand implode on itself like the PS3 price shock again, so people move to PC!
XD
MeaanBeaan@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Fucking why? These dudes always cite the cost of making games increasing as a reason for this nonsense but they never talk about the many many factors working in their favor already.
First, most people are probably not buying physical games very much if at all anymore. And because of that people don’t really buy games used anymore either since used games in general are much rarer. So more people are buying games directly from company storefronts. These same storefronts that also make games stay more expensive for longer periods of time. Not only that but there are literally more people playing and buying games now than have ever done so in the past (at least up until very recently)
All of these factors should be increasing Sony’s profit margins. If anything games should be getting cheaper. Not more expensive.
And I don’t buy that a ps5 game is significantly more expensive to make than a ps4 game. There’s barely a difference between each system’s capabilities in terms of graphical detail in the assets a team needs to produce. Most of the benefits of ps5 come in the way of higher resolutions and higher frame rates. I have yet to see a game release on ps5 that couldn’t have also been ported to ps4 with lower resolutions and frame rates.
Even the games they said needed the ps5’s speed were eventually ported to PC and run on the Steam Deck just fine. (Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart for example)
These statements aren’t anything more than a company executive trying to gaslight people into accepting unacceptable pricing strategies.
slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 6 hours ago
We make billions, but we want trillions
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Don’t forget the game development is increasingly shoving the hardware burden onto the consumer by using poorly made tools to streamline development with garbage optimization which is why a gaming rig now has to be powerful enough to simulate a gaming rig from 10 years ago down to the atomic level but the graphics haven’t gotten appreciably better.
MeaanBeaan@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
While thats definitely true for many games it’s less relevant for console makers and its hardly true universally; definitely not true for the insomniac games I mentioned.
Plenty of games are coming out that are optimized very well. Unfortunately, UE5 has gotten way too popular and devs often don’t seem to really know how to optimize games developed on the engine. Kinda the downfall of having an engine that appeals so much to artists but not so much to engineers. I think the only remotely well optimized game I can think of that was made in UE5 is Hellblade 2. And even as impressive as that game is from a technical standpoint (nothing can fix how boring it is) I still have stuttering problems with it. Though my rapidly aging R5 2600 is not helping things there.
But there are still impressive PC games out there. Recently Doom The Dark Ages, indiana Jones, and Kingdom Come Deliverence 2 come to mind as games that are impressively well optimized on PC. Especially KCD2, that game feels like black magic to me.
I think this is less of an issue of cost cutting by devs and publishers, though it’s definitely a factor, and moreso just devs not being as knowledgeable about optimizing games as they used to be.
alxvs@lemmy.ml 7 hours ago
ahn they did? 40 and 50 USD on ps2 50 and 60 USD on ps3 60 USD on ps4 70 USD on ps5
zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com 3 hours ago
Plus dlc and mtx nickel and diming, and special editions
ConstantPain@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Our wages too…
jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
So does piracy
teft@piefed.social 10 hours ago
He’s not wrong since games pricing hasn’t kept up with inflation. If it had we’d be buying $120 games. The problem is wages also haven’t kept up with inflation either. If gaming companies had increased the prices they’d have fucked themselves.
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 8 hours ago
Instead, investors did the fucking, and now here we are.
Katana314@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I could also point out: If the main sales race was for the gold-plated base copy of a game, instead of nickel and dining people who only have nickels and dimes, then it’s possible we would have a gaming world entirely focused on churning out AAAA singleplayer experiences, back to putting out trilogies of obscure gaming experiences.
This is not blaming gamers for not accepting higher prices for incomplete games; publishers moved where the money was, and I don’t blame them. I blame the rest of OTHER industries for not updating their wages so the world is livable and people have extra for entertainment.
cattywampas@midwest.social 9 hours ago
Gaming is one of the cheapest hobbies and forms of entertainment there is. The price I have paid per hour for playing my favorite games is miniscule compared to something like seeing a movie.
k1ck455kc@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
The quality of games did not improve, in fact game quality and diversity has deteriorated. The quantity of content has dropped off as well. Graphics fidelity and production costs have skyrocketed though.
Graphics are so superficial when it comes to games anyhow, why would anyone pay more for a pretty waste of time?
Fermion@feddit.nl 10 hours ago
“Fancy graphics” also doesn’t correlate well with how visually appealing a game is. I would take Ori graphics over CoD any day.
iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
Neither quality nor diversity are objective measures, and I’d certainly disagree with you that they didn’t improve.
k1ck455kc@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
Yes both very subjective. Accessibility and streamlining gameplay has seemed to be the focus. Developing unique, novel but also enjoyable new gameplay experiences? (the reason i believe most people game) That ended with the Wii, Ps3 and 360
Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Well, because purchasing power has also collapsed in that span of time, obvi
/s
Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
All everyone shoveling money and then praising remasters incessantly.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Diversity and quality are both going to be difficult to measure objectively, and I’d argue both are still in better supply today. Quantity is far easier to prove objectively. Not only are there just far more games out there, but try some like for like comparisons of some of your favorite long-running franchises on How Long to Beat. Assassin’s Creed II was 20-25 hours; Assassin’s Creed: Shadows is 35-64. Halo 2 was 9-12; Halo Infinite is 11-20. Baldur’s Gate 3 is close to as long as its two predecessors combined. Call of Duty is three games in one now.
k1ck455kc@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
Quantity is directly proportionate to quality though, starfield and its 1000s of repetitive planets are the perfect example of this. Would any halo fan rather play 20 hours of infinite or 20 hours of halo 2…?
Yes there have been outliers of increased quality and quantity over the last decade, but in the full priced AAA space nowadays, that is the exception not the rule.
Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 9 hours ago
Supposed proponent of the “free market” thinks that the market was unfair to massive corporation. More at 11. /s
taiyang@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I mean, inflation exists. That said, they just use dlc and other microtransactions to recoup costs (plus in some ways production is cheaper, just not overall).
I like to remind people that they’re taking advantage of a thing called consumer surplus. In short, any given person will spend X amount of dollars for a product, be it $60, $30 half off, or $120 collectors edition, etc. Hell, “free” gets the most heads, hence how mobile market works.
Flat $60 (or the shift to $80) will inevitably cut off anyone unwilling to pay that price, which at a certain point is bad for business and why you get sales. Plus, most sales are digital now, so it’s not like there’s a per unit overhead. Keeping a dynamic pricing structure is simply better in spite of inflation, which obviously this former boss apparently doesn’t get.
darkkite@lemmy.ml 7 hours ago
in a way it did with dlc
MangioneDontMiss@lemmy.ca 6 hours ago
Someone needs to start cracking Denuvo again.
Empricorn@feddit.nl 8 hours ago
The purchasing power for myself and other consumers has never been lower.
Tell me more about how your profitable company is entitled to more of my shrinking money…
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I think even if they did, we’d still have arrived at exactly where we are right now. They sold more copies of games because, after inflation, the games became cheaper and more accessible for the average consumer. Now that prices are rising again, that average consumer is getting priced out, and they’re not making up for that volume in the higher price. $70 seems to be what the highest tier of production value can get away with in 2025 if they’re maximizing sales, GTA and Mario Kart notwithstanding, as they’re outliers.
Quazatron@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
One factor they don’t seem to consider is that they are competing for a finite resource: consumer attention.
There has never been so much content to consume: not only games, movies, series, music, books, podcasts, and even old games.
New games have to compete with and stand above all that content to justify the price.
As others have said, purchase power is down, people subscribe to more services (net, mobile, streaming music and video), all that bites into the available budget to buy games.
Bottom line: it’s getting hard to justify spending that amount on a game you don’t have time to play.