Submitted 7 months ago by inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
What is with these people?
The CEOs of company yeah they don’t seem to understand how capitalism works. What’s something is worth is depending on what the market will bear. If the market won’t bear a $90 game then it isn’t worth $90.
It’s a double edged sword
The factors that influence development costs in order to keep up with the quality of the times is no doubt complex, but at the end of the day you’re spot on. It’s only worth what the consumers will pay.
If anything Steam showed us thay 60$ game is a stupid idea. Free markets pay what they feel like paying and thats when creators and consumers are the happiest not some fixed random price.
Capitalism and the free market is supposed to encourage efficiency and innovation in order to remain competitive in order to keep prices low… Is Sony against capitalism? Is it against the free market? Is in adverse to innovation? C’mon Sony … Stop being lazy.
Yes, yes, and yes. By securing a monopoly you at the highest possible profit at lowest possible investment.
Sony and Xbox is not true capitalism because their consoles are not free markets so of course they dont like capitalism when they benefit from absolute control and can fix the prices for everything in their ecosystem.
Part of why steam is so successful is because they regularly do enormous discounts.
People come to steam because of how good the deals are but they end up buying quite a lot at full prices as well.
I predict an increase in market demand for sea shanties.
It’s hard for me to imagine anyone buying brand new AAA games these days. Between the huge back catalogues of previous gen consoles as well as the PC and the insane prices for new AAA games which don’t innovate very much anymore, I can’t see much reason spend that kind of money.
I have a hacked New Nintendo 3DS and it can basically run every console emulator up to and including PS1 as well as natively run GBA, DS, and 3DS games. The library for the thing is enormous and with a 128GB microSD card you can store a ton of stuff on it.
Oh and it can also run DOSBox and SCUMMVM games though I haven’t tried them so I can’t vouch for the play experience. I should think the stylus would make a decent mouse replacement but I’m not sure how well it works in practice. Arcade-style DOS games that use the keyboard only (Duke Nukem, Crystal Caves, Commander Keen) should work great though!
From what I understand, with the 3DS, you had to get roughly ‘Version 1’ of those before they changed the actual hardware to make… basically ‘rooting’ it more difficult… or maybe I’m thinking of the Switch?
Either way, what I’m trying to say is basically ‘thats impressive’ if you were the one to actually uh… cough, install the sea shanties.
I went the easier route and just have a Steam Deck, and yep, they are perfect for emulating basically everything up to roughly current gen - 2… and most stuff within the last two gens can be made to run on it in some way…
… I was doinking about with the 3DS remaster of OoT earlier, and was actually very surprised to find that with my setup, the touchscreen… just worked as a 3DS touchscreen, I didn’t even think to intentionally configure it, accidentally poked the screen and oh well there ya go, lol.
Anyway, yep, we are absolutely gonna see a uh ‘return to tradition’ so to speak, as many high budget high fidelity modern games… basically suck, and are outrageously expensive.
As to a stylus as mouse for DOSBox and SCUMVM… i don’t know what the actual software configuration solution would look like there, but if the touch screen is high enough dpi dense… then it should at least conceptually work, as most of the games from that era that use a mouse are like, point and click adventures.
I’ve recently decided that I’m not spending more than $10 on a game until I’ve cleaned out my backlog.
There’s hundreds of games in my backlog, so it’s going to be a while.
The min wage and salaries in general should have increased with every generation. Me says.
When I first started working it was still back in the days where you were given cash in an envelope. After we were paid we always used to go out to a pub together for a few rounds, I rarely used to get through all of the change I’d been given, I never got into the paper money.
You used to be able to get a pint for silvers, these days you need to give them folding money for a bag of peanuts.
It’s a mad world.
Uhm, they have?
What do you mean? Our generous corporate overlords have kept the price steady for us at 60. We’re lucky they haven’t done scumbag things like a Deluxe edition for 80, a complete edition for 100, a ln ultimate edition for 120, an ultimate collector’s edition for 200, season passes for an extra 40, 10 different “micro” dlcs for 10 each, or cosmetic packs for 7 each. They’ve also definitely not cut content from the base game either!
The more expensive Sega Genesis games were $90.
N64 game prices were $60-75 back when the console came out in 1996… so no, they’ve been static for almost 3 decades.
But they production cost has gone way down with digital releases, no more shipping and inventory in many cases. Can reach way wider audiences with just internet. They made $2 billion in profits in 2023 in their gaming division. Sony can suck my tiny little dick dick, and I’ll even dip my nuts in soy sauce just so they can get a taste of home while they’re at it.
N64 games were upwards of 90-100 dollars for some.
Lol
The longer they take to lower the price of their game, the longer it takes me to buy it.
Nope, not going to argue against obviously dumb points from executives. Do it. Raise your prices yearly. Fuck it, you think prices need to incrsse? Increase them.
It takes me five clicks to close Steam, open Firefox, open my favorite piracy site and download your game. Raise the fucking price, test how much I value my money versus five clicks.
Well if they’re gonna charge those prices, they’re probably gonna opt for Denuvo and then we can’t pirate it. But if enough of them do it, then we might see a concerted effort into breaking denuvo
There’s a handful of people out there cracking Denuvo games.
This just shows execs do not understand why piracy diminished
You can price your game however you want. But it doesn’t mean I need to buy it. I still have a choice.
Not sure about the future where we will work for corporations for free and they will pay us with products we don’t want, because we’re heading this road pretty fast.
“There were more sports cars in the parking lot in the PS1 era than there were in the PS4 era, …"
dude, fuck you, your parking lot and i wish that giant acme anvils drop on every fucking sports car you’ll ever own.
I’m pretty sure the few overpaid execs that are “fuck you” rich are still there, and they’re probably richer than ever. However now they probably consider themselves too important to park with normal people.
Tells a lot about this guy and his ilk that he thinks you measure a healthy company to how many assholes actively flaunt their money with shallow luxury shit.
Um… show us how the salaries of game devs have risen compared with game prices?
“No” -John PlayStation
as well as my salary. but it didnt.
Former PlayStation US boss can go fuck himself!
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.
Yeah it’s hilarious to me they wanna charge more and don’t expect to sell less. Ppl would go from being iffy about indie games to checking them out more if 4 at base price cost what a AAA one does
yea, cant justify the orignal switch and shtty swsh games, and then theres the new switch too.
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.
Must be nice living somewhere where cinema prices did not climb. I can assure you its been different where I live.
You got to look at it relatively, a movie never cost even close to $60, so why would it end up there. It cost something like less than $10 but now the average is around $16. Games were maybe $60 and now could be $80, so it is actually a very comparable increase.
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
they haven’t increased because the cost of production has drastically dropped. cartridges were expensive as hell to make. discs were cheaper but you still had all the extras like bespoke formats, copy protection and manuals. with digital distribution, the production cost is zero. even when you buy a physical release, you get an empty box with an off-the-shelf bluray.
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.
$256 million. Most expensive video game ever made. Since Avatar, there have been dozens of hollywood films that had a budget almost double that.
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
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.
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.
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.
Can’t say I agree with you there. The handful of games I get around to in a given year that are pushing the state of the art still run well at high settings on my machine built four years ago. The number of games pushing that threshold are so few that I might get a longer life out of my machine than usual.
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.
We make billions, but we want trillions
Someone needs to start cracking Denuvo again.
in a way it did with dlc
ahn they did? 40 and 50 USD on ps2 50 and 60 USD on ps3 60 USD on ps4 70 USD on ps5
Plus dlc and mtx nickel and diming, and special editions
Our wages too…
So does piracy
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…
Supposed proponent of the “free market” thinks that the market was unfair to massive corporation. More at 11. /s
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.
Not to mention the likely equal spending on advertising
This is the fucktard that said he could not understand why people wanted to play old games
Fuck him
zecg@lemmy.world 7 months ago
By all means, every increase in price is welcome, it’ll be that much less of a temptation. How are Concord and Fairgames doing?