Submitted 11 hours ago by lazycouchpotato@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
One way to get out of the video-game industry funk is to recognize that players aren’t spending $70 on most games
Just don’t buy Triple A titles.
The last “AAA” title I bought was elden ring for 30$ (unless you count Silk Song)
There are plenty of indie style, A or AA studios that are in the 5-30$ range.
The more people who move over to that type of mindset and buy from small titles, the more apt that large companies are going to lower their prices.
Pricing is dictated by what someone is willing to pay for it.
For me, $70 USD is too much for the average game that is being sold at that price tag because those types of games(AAA/AAAA) are:
Again, not all, but the average AAA slop title usually has one or more of the above points.
BUT, that doesn’t mean that Indie games at $20 USD are a “steal” or “bargain” either. There are many Indie games I bought at their launch(Silksong), but others I have waited for a decent sale.
If everyone stopped buying games at $70 USD then prices would fall and/or projects going forward would be re-evaluated to either keep costs/expectations down. But people are paying the $70 USD so that price point is here to stay.
This sentiment for a hobby is actually insane. Press X to doubt you can get that quantity or quality of entertainment anywhere else for what… Cents per hour in most cases?
This may sound crazy, but hear me out… $70 might just be relatively cheap right now, when considering historic prices and inflation.
So about 20 years ago, I used to work at a game shop and at that time all new AAA console games were all $50 and I believe the switch to $60 happened just shortly after I left.
That said, a quick web search says that there’s been 65% inflation since 2005. $50 x 1.65 = $99
So at least when compared to other products, $50 to $70 is not a huge price jump.
Now all that said, this does not account for the added cost of micro transactions and paid dlc which didn’t really exist in 2005. So the actual lifetime cost of a top pricing tier game may actually be higher than $70. Honestly, I have more of a problem with that than with the higher base cost, hidden costs are deceptive.
That’s the thing. Pricing in a direct comparison of inflation and base game label price ignores all the ways in which that same game would have been diluted to increase the average price with microtransactions, deluxe editions, and early unlocks for pre-orders or whatever. It’s not apples to apples with the past.
And that’s all totally true. Though there is a way around that trap… Don’t buy the dlc!
That’s my secret, I treat the base price as the only price, and if the game doesn’t stand on its own without dlc, it’s a bad game. And I will 100% say that out loud, I’ll give it a bad review, I’ll avoid buying it in the first place. If a game needs pricey dlc to be worth playing, it isn’t worth playing at all.
Become a patient gamer. This winter sale, I bought probably 25 games totaling around 30 dollars. It’s enough to keep me busy for the next 5 years.
This… Put games on your wishlist, set your wishlist to only show sales, and sort by price. Then only buy games from that list when they go on a significant sale. Plenty of decent games out there regularly go for $5-10 or less. With very few exceptions I refuse to pay more than $20-30 for a game and, even then, only if they’re like 50% off and not likely to come down.
Also… stop pre-ordering games. They’ll still be there when they do go on sale. You don’t need to play them as soon as they come out. Conquer that FOMO shit and develop some integrity.
Yep. I’ve been waiting a half a year to get the Dark Souls franchise. It has paid off well.
I put a rule not to buy any game util i finish what I already have. I have not bought anything for the last two years.
You don’t even have to be that patient these days. I got Arc Raiders 3 weeks after release for 60% off, it was like $18.
Have you met our lord and saviour, retro gaming?
And the Son, Emulation?
Or the step brother, piracy?
You can go AAA for cheap no problem, people just need to not get FOMO‘d out of your minds and half-resist the compulsion to jump on the newest shiny thing immediately.
The newest DOOM is around 27 Euros rn and not even a year old. Buy on release - or worse yet, pre-order - and you‘ll get the worst deal (financially as well as technically).
Game prices are fine for me because I literally just wait until they‘re at a point where I don‘t see them as a waste. In the meantime, there‘s 203 untouched games in my Steam library that had reached that point in the past already. Not even mentioning the hundreds of games I got for free between GOG, Prime, and Epic.
Basically do the same thing. Until a game hits $20 or less, I won’t purchase it. For $70, I would rather buy something useful like new shoes.
Counterpoint: It’s just so much fun when you are starting on release day, not getting spoiled, no one has a clue where what is there is no meta and a lot of community interaction.
E.g. Elden Ring, we started together at 12 am when it launched, killed the first couple of bosses. Then the next few days forums were filled with posts, people had different theories, NPC questlines were being discovered. It was the same two years later with the DLC. A friend of mine bought it finally and started playing last week. But he is .missing all of that.
That’s the definition of the FOMO OP is saying to ignore
On that note, Dark Ages was probably my favorite game I played last year and was worth the cost new as well. For half price, it’s absolutely worth it even more.
Check out ITAD then… lots of ways to make sure you get stuff super cheap.
Though it’s really confusing to set up.
Btw, do i have to manually unsubscribe games i unsubscribed/bought on Steam and GoG? Synch is set up.
If you’re doing sync, you can tell it to remove items from your waitlist when they are added to collection. It won’t work retroactively, but it will do it going forward.
They already are. It’s called - sales.
The problem are people going out in droves, willingly spending $70 or more on special editions. They’ve caved to FOMO and it is a them problem.
We’re still in the best age of gaming where there are sales in all directions.
I haven’t paid over £35 on a game in years. Quite a few games are free now too, though some have kinda scummy cash shops.
Same here, only exception: Baldurs Gate 3, because i loved the mindset of the devs and i knew from their prior games that they deliver quality.
I haven’t paid over $20 in 5 years. I honestly can’t justify spending more than that on a video game. I don’t care how good: price will drop eventually, and I will wait.
Whole community with that mindset btw!
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
The only game I couldn’t wait for in the last 15 years was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. That shit broke down my walls in more ways than one 🥲
That’s what indie games are for, instead of these absurd-budget blockbusters that often aren’t even fun, but also, the world just needs to be cheaper to live in. Games are first on the chopping block because disposable income for entertainment is always the first to collapse.
Unfortunately, some genres struggle going indie because they’re too expensive to develop and aren’t guaranteed to sell well. There is a reason PlatinumGames can’t afford to make Bayonetta if Nintendo doesn’t put up the money, for example, and almost every indie studio that attempts a similar feat has to spend years and years in early access.
The Genokids developer has been working on the game for +5 years and has only 2 chapters to show for it. Mahou Arms released on Steam in April 2020, and is still in early access today.
The world has become too expensive for some things to comfortably exist, or exist at all, unfortunately.
Aren’t inflation-adjusted prices for video games quite low, comparatively? Charts like this comes up in a quick search: infographicsite.com/…/console-game-prices-inflati…
Atari 7800 Game Devs knew what’s up lol
No they don’t. For every indie dev who made it there are 100s of software engineers doing some voodoo math 90 hours a week to make my triangle look cool getting paid literally half my salary.
Y’all screech and bitch constantly about an absurdly healthy and competitive industry. It’s tiresome.
Perhaps a privileged take but I’d be completely willing to pay way more for games with no micro transactions or other “live service” BS. Like if economics make it so that it doesn’t make sense to sell most high budget games for $70 without micro transactions then sell me one at $100. Video games were way more expensive when I was a kid and prices haven’t risen with inflation at all. Consider that Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time retailed for $59.99 in 1998 while Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom cost $69.99 in 2023. That is a 16.7% increase over 25 years, or an average increase of 0.619% each year. Meanwhile, average CPI inflation is usually ~2% per year.
Video games were way more expensive when I was a kid
They still are, for a kid. Inflation this, inflation that, but the free money a person has has not increased. It has been going down for quite some time.
I have kids and I have a huge library of games on Playstation and PC. What are they playing?
Fortnite and Roblox which they could play for free if they didn’t want to get cool skins. So, no, games aren’t as expensive for kids as they used to be, except if they waste a lot of money in predatory schemes in games where they could play for free and just 1-2 things to support the devs.
The price of new games isn’t a problem for me as they are still cheaper than what they were when I was a kid. In my country Switzerland, an expensive new game is stll less than CHF100.- when some Nes games were CHF120.- thirty years ago. Back in the Playstation 1 era games were around CHF89.- and now most Playstation 5 games are around CHF79.-.
And that’s not taking inflation into account!
Gaming is one of the few things which has become cheaper in my lifetime, especially now that I get a lot of old games on my Steam Deck and only racing sims on my Playstation 5.
For me the problem is that you can pay such an amount and still be subject to many popups begging for your money (microtransactions) or DRM’s (always online or others).
Or that, thanks to digital games, you’ll soon not be able to resell an expensive game that you didn’t enjoy enough to keep.
And also the fact that games aren’t really prettier than 10 years ago but that you still need better hardware to play them.
I think game companies really need to have a look at why their games are becoming so expensive, because I don’t think it’s because they are treating their employees better.
I think the last game I paid full price for was the MGS Collection for PC. Otherwise it’s waiting for sales, usually 75-80% off original price then I buy.
Games have been $60 since the 90’s and people need to quit bitching about this.
Games were more than $60 in the 90s.
But video games were limited by physical copies back then. Supply was limited, and it cost the publisher multiple dollars, sometimes in the double digits, to manufacture the physical goods to sell. But with that you got a usually complete game, as patches werent really a thing and making physical revisions was expensive. You also got the entire game that you paid for, tall the content in the game was available to you from your one purchase. You can lend it to a friend if you want, too.
Nowadays we get sold half of a game that barely works for $70, so you can get the other half by buying the next 14 $20 battlepasses and playing only that one game for the next 5 years to finally get all the content of the game. You also cant let your friend borrow the game.
I don’t need to pay for a dev team that is overbloated with people, a marketing team that thinks every ad needs to have a Beatles song, and an executive that just demands more profit. Dev teams need to get smaller, marketing needs to shrink, and exectuives need to be less greedy. They already make record profits, they do not need more.
haha, that’s certainly true for your Call of Duties and whatnot. But I will always gladly pay $60-$70 for a mainline Zelda game, especially for the physical copy. I agree that digital copies should be discounted.
60? Maybe. 70? Never until now. 80? Definitely never until now.
And the DLC and “Deluxe” editions… The price of a AAA game is well over $100 now.
true that.
Have they? I’ve seen many games costing up to $100 or more if you want the complete game.
Many standard editions of triple-A games have been chopped to the point where even the proper ending is part of DLC that requires a season pass.
Some design their games in such away that they can sell quality of life features or some kind convenience for players. (Basically subtle form of P2W)
Some have turned their games to billboards for DLC, micro transactions, season passes and even other games.
Bring back rentals
Don’t microslop and friends peddle some game pass and similar subscriptions? Game rental with extra steps.
Subscriptions =/= Rental
Remember Gamefly?
Gamepass wasn’t a bad idea, and it was actually pretty cool when it first came out. It was basically Microsoft’s Gamefly.
Last game I paid over €20 was Remnant from the ashes 2, and it was €50 with a whole year of DOC content included. Most of the games announced this week like the sequel to Kena, will buy when the are €20 too. Yo get the game at a fair price AND actually finished.
The only wise approach in these times of unfinished and half-assed games. Just wait a year or so. Added bonus is the discount 😊
Prices did just creep up over the decades. I came across an old flyer frop '93 when I was visiting my house, and there were new games in it for $20 to $30 CAD. Which was expensive, but not like today when you want to get a kid a copy of Smash for Switch and they’re still retailing that for €70 over here in France (like… 9 years later).
My favourite games over the last decade have been cheapies.
Have you played Annalynn? On sale for pocket change, short, fun, challenging, cute. Getting Indie games on sale is so great, and you can replace Annalynn with any indie release you want and change the adjectives. Ant game that is made by people that clearly enjoy games is better than the monster overpriced games on store shelves.
AAA games are significantly cheaper in real terms than they were in the 90s.
30 CAD in 1993 is about 58 CAD today, and those weren’t even the most expensive games in the flyer you saw then.
Especially console titles were expensive by modern standards, the main titles like Mario games retailed for something like 150 USD in 2026 dollars.
Do you know how inflation works? Cause good God this statement…
Final Fantasy 7 Remake on Switch 2 is only 40 Euros / Dollars instead the full price, because the game is on a Game Key card and not on cart. It is digital only, therefore they give you a discount on price. But why don’t they do that with all digital only games? Also for other stores like Steam?
In Nintendo world, games are generally more expensive in the online store compared to physical cartridges, at least that was the case when I bought my games
But that’s not what I am saying? SquareEnix made the game on release cheaper, because it is on a Game Key card and therefore cheap to produce. It’s only 40 compared to all other stores like Steam, that launched with 80 Euros. My complain is, why don’t they make digital only games cheaper in general, all games and all stores compared to their physical counter part. (I know why, it’s not a real question I ask.)
0li0li@lemmy.world 11 minutes ago
Or live with AA and indie games like many of us do, at tell AAA publishers to get fucked by not spending money on their live-service crap.