Yah but the amount of shit games charging 3 dollars is insane. Really dragging down the median.
Submitted 3 months ago by Agent_Karyo@piefed.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
BC_viper@lemmy.world 3 months ago
SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Good
AAA games aren’t worth $60+
Mwa@thelemmy.club 3 months ago
tbh i can buy a game for 30-60~ usd,but preferably i want them to be cheaper + it makes buying more games easier.
But_my_mom_says_im_cool@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I like some Indy titles but I’m getting sick of the side scrollers
WhatGodIsMadeOf@feddit.org 3 months ago
Pretty much only play free to play games and never buy anything.
sirico@feddit.uk 3 months ago
No it’s the users that are the problem get more jobs idiots
DarkFuture@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I just started waiting as long as I needed to, years if necessary, for the games I want to drop down on a sale to under $20. I really don’t care how long I have to wait. There’s enough games out there now to keep me busy.
OneClappedCheek@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Best example of this is the borderlands franchise. Wait a year or two and get the game + dlc for 80% off.
Alpha71@lemmy.world 3 months ago
…until GTA6 comes out, then all bets are off.
Lemminary@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I wouldn’t be so sure, matey! Yaarrghh! ⛵🏴☠️🦜
omarfw@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Aka the market has rejected your overpriced bullshit. Adapt or die. Welcome to the free market.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a mega corporation and previously had the winning formula. You adapt to meet evolving market demand or you die.
These c suites got too comfy doing everything to only please their shareholders. They forgot that pleasing their consumers wasn’t optional. We are your money supply. If you lose us, it all comes crashing down.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
I don’t have the time anymore, the price isn’t really the factor. Anything new has to compete with my existing library and backlog, and other things on my wishlist. It’s a problem that’s only going to get worse, games aren’t really aging out of relevance at the rate they used to.
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
And if I DO want a triple A game, I wait a couple of years and then for a Steam sale.
jj4211@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Would be interesting to see the stats for revenue by game, price by volume. If someone charges 300 for a game that no one bought. Then it shouldn’t count, hypothetically.
Agent_Karyo@piefed.world 3 months ago
I work in market research. Data at this level of granularity (price band view) is extremely expensive.
Around 300K per year and that would also likely only include a few retailers GameStop, BestBuy, Walmart. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I believe Steam data wouldn't be included.
It's very likely Valve doesn't share the full dataset with anyone. Maybe partial data with some of their biggest partners.
Alaik@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
Because youre overinflated executive and managerial budgets dont justify the fucking price when games like Hollow Knight, Jump Ship, and Stardew Valley are 10x better.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 3 months ago
i almost never buy games on steam anymore…Even on the steam sales. The sales are a poor immitation of the great values that they were 10+ years ago.
I subscribe to Humble Monthly and, eventually, get almost every game I’ve ever wanted.
FallenGrove@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I don’t even do humble monthly anymore. They’ve had periods of months and months where I don’t get anything I want to play or some obscure game that isn’t interesting. Its cheaper just to get the monthly bundle when I do see a game I want. Humble monthly was more than worth it maybe 10 years back.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 3 months ago
i mean… you can pause your month and skip the shit you have no interest in…
imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
Each year there are only a few new AAA games that are worth full price. People be buying indie or older games on discount.
Why buy new bugged COD when you can pick up fixed up No Mans Sky?
Rooster326@programming.dev 3 months ago
No Man’s Sky released at AAA prices and was a pile of dog shit. Feel like there are other games you could’ve picked…
imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
I chose NMS cause it is a perfect representation of AAA project that was dogshit on release but got fixed up to a promised game much later in it’s life. It fits like a glove into “don’t buy unfinished crap on release” category.
7isanoddnumber@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
As much as it’s great to shit on triple A games, this is quite bad for the industry as a whole. Devs cannot price their game above $15 without being held to an absurdly high standard, which makes budgeting for game development extremely difficult for smaller studios. If we want the AA scene to expand and give us more great games as we’ve seen in the past few years, that’ll need to change.
omarfw@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Arc Raiders launched as a feature complete game, mostly bug free, well optimized, with a sufficient amount of functioning servers, and with genuinely innovative game design.
It sold incredibly well at 40 dollars. I’ve bought it 4 times myself.
Expecting every game to meet those criteria is not “absurd”. It used to be par for the industry and it still should be.
AAA games from publicly traded corporations are just absurdly underwhelming. They want us to think these standards are absurd so they can keep their minimal effort bullshit gravy train running. It’s not going to work anymore. That’s the free market. Adapt or die.
atcorebcor@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
If we want that, we’d want to pay for it right?
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 3 months ago
25 bucks? That‘s cute. AAA studios are charging $80 for remakes or $250 for DLC packages. They‘re out of their minds.
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
If you asked me to name a major gameplay innovation in the last 5 years, I literally couldn’t. Clair Obscur won a fuck load of awards for doing basically what Final Fantasy did 15 years ago, but not completely losing the plot. Hollow Knight blew everyone’s mind for making a decent Metroidvania game. Balatro made a game where you make a series of combos that people have been making for over 200 years. You don’t need fancy gimmicks anymore to be considered good, you just need to be good. Major publishers waste their time because they don’t know how to put “be good” on a spreadsheet.
I_Jedi@lemmy.today 3 months ago
I know of a major gameplay innovation in the past 5 years, though it’s incredibly unpopular to many.
AI2U features NPCs that are run by Azure AI. The goal is to make the ChatGPT NPC do what you want so you can solve the escape room.
This gameplay feature hasn’t really caught on, but I’ve only seen it be used recently.
Rooster326@programming.dev 3 months ago
I for one can’t wait for them to stop playing their Azure Bill or run out of credits.
Rooster326@programming.dev 3 months ago
I would argue Expedition 33 is a lot closer to Legend of Dragoon released 26 years ago. Its claim to fame was the active turn based system pulled right out of that game.
Crashumbc@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Who has money for games?
EightBitBlood@lemmy.world 3 months ago
As an indie dev, this article is fucking stupid.
Want to know why indie games are priced at $10 to $15? Becaue AAA has been putting everything they’ve made in the last decade on Steam and it’s all going for $20 - $25.
Indies can’t launch at that price point anymore because they’re competing with AAA games from 10 years ago that have been discounted to death.
The Steam winter sale is the best example of this, where most people will buy RDR2 for $19 instead of the new mega hit indie that’s $20. So indies have been lowering their price to actually get sales. That’s why team cherry priced Silk Song at $20.
Basically, AAA is now just competing with the bottom part of the market they spent that last decade flooding.
They’re complaining about people actually choosing where to spend their money wisely because that means they might actually have to make a good product if they want to sell a game for $70.
MetaStatistical@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
Terraria has always been $10. Stardew Valley: $15. Undertale: $10. Braid was $15 when it launched, and even then, people were bitching about the price. So, the price tag has always been in that range since the first indie game launched.
I think you’re ignoring the incredible amount of oversaturation in the industry. Games are everywhere. I could throw a thousand sticks into the wilderness and it would smack into a thousand different game studios, all working for years on their big hit that (in their eyes) would make them millions of dollars.
But, people don’t have time to even play their own Steam backlog. On average, people buy more games than they even have time to play, and that’s not even counting the sheer amount of movies, music, TV shows, YouTube videos, whatever that is competing for people’s time. If they are playing video games, then they are not watching or listening to other media.
It’s not just the gaming industry. The entire creative industry is propped up on the backing of a 98% failure rate, or sometimes even a 99.99% failure rate. The lucky few get to spout off their survivorship biases, under the bones of former companies and individuals, crunched under the weight of oversaturation.
EightBitBlood@lemmy.world 3 months ago
My dude, I’m very familiar with the 14% of videogame players new game devs are vying for. And every one of the games you mentioned launched at that price because they were developed by a single dev (two at most) who could profit off of the $10 - $15 dollar space that was below the smaller studios putting out games like Shadow Complex, or Mercenary Kings, or Shank 1+2 for $20.
Now all of those spaces are being crushed together. Mostly due to economic factors. Thats where the biggest problem really lies, in the fact that people just have less money to spend on all that entertainment. Just pointing out that it’s competitive at all is obvious my dude, but the direction its going in is one in where there’s less anything being made (including games) because not as many people have money to spend on anything but necessities.
That’s why AAA is now scavenging at the bottom of the totem pole, and pricing their older games at $10 or less on sale, it’s because the few people that have money find that price point appealing. So it’s now one that not just the people who made Terraria, Braid, etc compete in. The money those devs made previously in that space is now up for grabs to AAA companies that never had anything to sell at that price before.
Theres a very tried and true formula for any business, including making games, and in the last 2 years it has completely broken apart. Mostly due to the Embracer group merger failing, combined with AI, combined with economic uncertainty, combined with AAA companies stabbing indie creators in the back (Subnautica, Disco Elysium). Your game doesn’t have to be a massive hit to be successful, it just needs to have a big enough audience to be profitable. But that audience has shrunk over the years as economies have tightened, and the companies getting squeezed have been invading markets they never had a presence in before.
So it’s just desperate times more than anything. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make a living off of making games. I know dozens of small teams funded by government grants making small games you’ve never heard of to help kids in hospitals learn about their cancer. Or teach kids in underprivileged schools about resource scarcity. Making games as a business goes far beyond entertainment and the hopes of narcissists. It’s an artistic medium like any other, and as such benefits society by making the toughest parts of it more accessible.
There’s plenty of ways to run a company doing just that - and just because the world economy is in free fall doesn’t mean the entire business of making games is something for the lucky few. It’s just for anyone that wants to learn how to run a game company. Which isn’t easy, but extends far beyond the simplistic view you are portraying.
Wahots@pawb.social 3 months ago
I think you probably hit the nail on the head here. I’ve been holding off on MGSV because it’s $20, and I’m waiting for that 50% off sale.
Buuut, that didn’t stop my from buying silksong at full price. Or Factorio. :)
EightBitBlood@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Thanks! 🙂 Appreciate you confirming that. We actually changed the price of our latest game to $10 (from $20) because we launched last December and got buried by AAA selling for $15.
Almost every dev team we talked to this year felt the same about the $20 price. That is, it’s much better to go out at $15 or $10 as a LOT of people see indie games at that price as better than modern AAA. (All while still holding out for classic AAA that go on sale for $20.)
And that being said, I’m totally cool with losing a sale to MGSV or Witcher 3 😁 Just wish the $20 space wasn’t getting so crowded. It’s making it rough for the smaller teams to compete at that price too now.
Phegan@lemmy.world 3 months ago
If you sell me a good game at a reasonable price. I will buy it. Otherwise, fuck off.
jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Piracy is free. If you’re charging 70usd for a game, then I’d rather just spend the time and pirate it. If it’s 10 bucks, Im just lazy to do a Google search and pay you for it.
Randelung@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Plus those 70$ games invest so much of that $ in fucking you with DRM.
jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Oh fuuuuuck the DRM. I purchased CIV5 for my phone and it requires an active internet connection or it boots you out. I only play on an airplane. So I ended up downloading the pirated version so I can play the game I purchased.
MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 months ago
That plus so many games that are genuinely good and I have lots of hours into are in the $5-20 range.
jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
So much truth
Treczoks@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Always compare value and price.
More often than not, AA games seem to come with a AAA price tag.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
Almost all of the “Top 10 most replayable games” I have are Indie games, especially in the last 10 years.
They’re games like Factorio or Project Zomboid which I keep getting back to a year or two after I last played so much of it that I got fed up.
Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero, worse so for games which seem open-world but are in fact linear.
Mind you, some older AAA jewels in that style (such as Oblivion) do get me to come back eventually, but it takes something like 5+ or more as I basically have to forget most of the story before it’s interesting to play such a game again.
If price matched “hours of fun”, the AAA stuff would be way cheaper whilst many Indie games would be far more expensive.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 3 months ago
The developer of Barony is insane like the Stardew Valley guy, and just. never. stops. updating. I’ll play the game forever at this point.
Quantenteilchen@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
Similar to “we absolutely swear this will be the last major update!! For reals this time!” ReLogic. I still wonder how in the hell they are still making enough/any money to keep their studio working on games after all this time?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero
I mean, I gotta disagree, at least in part. Some of these games don’t age well. But I still know folks who line up for the “WoW Classic” experience. Hell, I know people who have been playing since the game came out in '02/'03(?) and now they’re out playing with their kids. I know one family who plays with their grandmother, ffs.
I think one thing that really gave Blizzard titles staying power was the choice to deliberately tack towards the cartoon-y style of art. When you’re not going for that hyper-real experience, the games age better. Hard to pick up a vintage Laura Croft or Devil May Cry without feeling its age. But Wind Waker? Mario 64? They do just fine.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
For me it really depends on the game and whilst the “glitzy” is often an indirect indicator of a game which is limited in its replayabiliy - I suppose because often they’re games were there was much more investment in looks than gameplay - I should have added “highly curated” to that sentence since for me games with a story meant to be experienced in a certain way are pretty much “play once”.
Most of the games which I keep coming back to again and again in quite short cycles have emergent gameplay elements and even the entire game area is different from play to play - not just Indie Games like Factorio, Don’t Starve, The Lone Dark in Survival mode and Project Zomboid but also something like The Sims - whilst of “story” games, there are very few I go back to (as I mentioned Oblivion but also Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3) and when I do it’s after much more time, I suppose because I have to forget most of the story for it to be fun again.
My impression that in the last decade AAA has focused mostly on just two kinds of games - “Glitzy AAA open-world-ish” RPGs and multiplayer battle games - and for me the first have limited replayability unless they’re a world with A LOT of depth were the story is but a small part of the game, whilst I can’t be arsed to play the latter ever since online battlefields were swamped by kids in consoles as I really don’t have the patience to babysit somebody else’s ill behaved kids (still waiting for game makers to figure out that Adult Only servers would be immensely popular).
It’s not that AAA can’t do games with massive replayability, it’s that the AAA part of the industry seems to have gone down the route of games being either “curated experiences” or massive multiplayer were the emergent gameplay comes the actions of other players, whilst many Indies - having way smaller budgets - have gone down routes were the gameplay is “self-assembling” emergent, often with the game area being procedurally generated, which adds up to something less predictable were two runs of the game whilst sharing some similarities are in practice sufficiently different not to feel repetitive.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 months ago
Fallout New Vegas still hooks me in.
mlg@lemmy.world 3 months ago
KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
What’s that? Capitalism fixing problems?
Checkmate atheists.
MotoAsh@piefed.social 3 months ago
Capitalism isn’t fixing anything here. In fact, it’s showing that the companies mindlessly following market inflation to keep profits up are doing worse.
KingGimpicus@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Why buy AAA slop when indie gold cheaper?
Checkmate juden.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 3 months ago
My rule is I’m only willing to pay a dollar for every expected hour of play, so you can imagine I buy few things at full price.
The last two games I paid full price for were Elden Ring and Mandragora. I am far more likely to pay full price for an indie title that I’m excited about than anything else, because as an artist myself, I fully understand the impact of a pre-purchase on an indie studio.
uberfreeza@lemmy.world 3 months ago
That’s generally how I follow it also. Though I add the stipulation that they’re enjoyable hours, and it’s not hardline. I know not every game can be measured that way. If it’s a particular genre or series, l might take the dive anyway. For indies, it goes even further than that. Some I track for years before release, so I pre-order as soon as it becomes available, just to support as much as I can. So $/hr is a good baseline, but it’s deeper than that.
2FortGaming@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I’m totally ok paying $30 for a ten hr game, I appreciate shorter games. But if it’s boring or unfun for a whole hour in, I’m getting a refund.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
It all depends on what you’re looking for. I’ve put hundreds of hours into games and gotten way less than $1/hr, and I’ve also had a great experience paying significantly more.
So I don’t see games in terms of $/hr, especially these days when I’m more limited by time than money. Instead, I look for unique experiences with cost being a much lower factor. Generally speaking, I spend much less than $1/hr since I buy a lot of older games, but I’ve spent far more ($5-10/hr) on particularly interesting games.
But yeah, generally speaking, I’m willing to pay more for indies than AAA titles because indie games are more likely to offer that unique experience.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
I would also generally consider £1/hour of gameplay to be pretty terrible value tbh. Truly good games are more like £0.10/hour or less
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 months ago
People spend like $20 to watch a 2 hour movie, $1/hr isn’t that unreasonable
Jambalaya@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
If you only look at $/hr, there are some 70 hr games which milk your time and should have been shorter, like Assassin’s Creed, and then there are short, story rich games, like Outer Wilds, which are absolutely worth it even at more than a dollar an hour.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 3 months ago
That’s fine. I don’t.
Rekorse@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
I like some of the early access development styles used in things like Enshrouded and Satisfactory, so mostly ive been spending on games like that. I like the idea of collaborating with a player base to create a game together I think.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Oh definitely. I’ve enjoyed the experience of helping devs mold a title into something better in exchange for a lower price.
camdog2000@ttrpg.network 3 months ago
Charging anything is tricky.
I’m comparing it to what I could be getting for free, either with torrents or emulators.
Most games being released aren’t even worth my time, let alone my money.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
This, I think, is the big open secret about the push for consoles to move towards pure digital distribution.
It’s easier to not have to compete against your back catalog for gamer attention, if you cut off end-users ability to access it!
Rockstar already tried something like this, when they released the
DefinitiveDefective Edition.It failed successfully, in no small part to the remaster being absolute garbage, but for the AAA publishers, it’s merely a small setback that they will try again in the near future.
themurphy@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Most games being released aren’t even worth my time, let alone my money.
I dont think you are in their target group then.
darthelmet@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Yeah I pretty much almost never buy AAA games anymore outside of some very specific creators/franchises. Price is definitely a part of that, but the bigger things are creativity and business practices. Indie games are where all the new ideas are and where you get honest expressions of the artist’s intent. And you generally don’t need to put up with bullshit micro transactions, DRM, etc.
I’m not gonna pay $60+ for Call of Duty 500 when I can find full, fun, inspired indie games for less than $30. I will still buy the handful of more creative AAAs that do come out sometimes.
Lemminary@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Same here. The last AAA game I bought was probably Diablo III, and I barely touched that piece of junk. I’ve learned my lesson and either pirate it to try it out first or wait for sales on Steam. My most prized games in my collection are the indie ones anyway, so I’m not rushing to buy AAA anymore.