I’ve always been of the “vote with your dollar” or “If you don’t like it, don’t buy it” mentality until recently. Now it seems like the heavy concentration of market power into a few companies is spurring on the continued development of “pricing innovations”.
Remember when they said digital distribution would make the games cheaper and they would pass the savings down to us? (surprise that was a lie). That’s just the cost of innovation.
Diablo 4 isn’t a “bad game” but for games as a service that contains microtransactions, it certainly isn’t a game worth a $100 expansion pack. They didn’t even include the game with the collectors edition. Sell the collectibles without the game for a premium! Get paid twice! Innovation!
As more and more disappointments land face first on the concrete floor of the empty swimming pool surrounded by apathetic"entitled " gamers they still will not learn from their mistakes because the money says otherwise. They would rather go out of business then sell you a product you actually want to buy. That’s the cost of innovation.
I don’t know if this is the right place to say this. I urge everyone to collect physical copies of games, back them up, share them and archive them. We’re never getting back what we’ve lost no matter how much we’re willing to pay for it.
Relative to the cost of everything else / inflation, games actually were pretty cheap. They had been $50/60 for nearly 30 years. Now we’re in the shitty time where it’s $70 for the base game, $30 for day 1 dlc, battlepasses, micro (really macro) transactions, etc.
Games were cheap for a long time. It was a competitive market. When the N64 came out, game cartridges were 80$ in the US (depending on the title). Neo Geo games were $200 a cartridge new before that. The prices resembled a (arguably) higher quality item.
The Sony PlayStation had games typically around the $30 to $40 dollar price point and that enabled Sony to sell endless copies of Blasto and other (arguably shovelware) games at the time. This loss leader strategy Sony had destabilized a lot of the market. Systems makers had to lower the price of games to increase the install base and they constantly lost money (sega Saturn games used to sell as low as 10$ new in 1997).
$70, $80, even $120 Dollars for a triple A title like Elden Ring or Super Mario Galaxy wouldn’t be that crazy to me depending on the state of that market. Some people are buying OG PlayStation games like MegaMan Legends in excess of $200. In the end though, you have the game. It is your copy.
The wake up call for me was when Microsoft has to be shamed into walking back their weird anti consumer Xbox game cd key sharing policy because Sony made this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA
Rant
I’ve always been of the “vote with your dollar” or “If you don’t like it, don’t buy it” mentality until recently. Now it seems like the heavy concentration of market power into a few companies is spurring on the continued development of “pricing innovations”.
Remember when they said digital distribution would make the games cheaper and they would pass the savings down to us? (surprise that was a lie). That’s just the cost of innovation.
Diablo 4 isn’t a “bad game” but for games as a service that contains microtransactions, it certainly isn’t a game worth a $100 expansion pack. They didn’t even include the game with the collectors edition. Sell the collectibles without the game for a premium! Get paid twice! Innovation!
As more and more disappointments land face first on the concrete floor of the empty swimming pool surrounded by apathetic"entitled " gamers they still will not learn from their mistakes because the money says otherwise. They would rather go out of business then sell you a product you actually want to buy. That’s the cost of innovation.
I don’t know if this is the right place to say this. I urge everyone to collect physical copies of games, back them up, share them and archive them. We’re never getting back what we’ve lost no matter how much we’re willing to pay for it.
Relative to the cost of everything else / inflation, games actually were pretty cheap. They had been $50/60 for nearly 30 years. Now we’re in the shitty time where it’s $70 for the base game, $30 for day 1 dlc, battlepasses, micro (really macro) transactions, etc.
Yes that is true.
Games were cheap for a long time. It was a competitive market. When the N64 came out, game cartridges were 80$ in the US (depending on the title). Neo Geo games were $200 a cartridge new before that. The prices resembled a (arguably) higher quality item.
The Sony PlayStation had games typically around the $30 to $40 dollar price point and that enabled Sony to sell endless copies of Blasto and other (arguably shovelware) games at the time. This loss leader strategy Sony had destabilized a lot of the market. Systems makers had to lower the price of games to increase the install base and they constantly lost money (sega Saturn games used to sell as low as 10$ new in 1997).
$70, $80, even $120 Dollars for a triple A title like Elden Ring or Super Mario Galaxy wouldn’t be that crazy to me depending on the state of that market. Some people are buying OG PlayStation games like MegaMan Legends in excess of $200. In the end though, you have the game. It is your copy.
The wake up call for me was when Microsoft has to be shamed into walking back their weird anti consumer Xbox game cd key sharing policy because Sony made this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.