lol. lmao.
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It’s because these companies keep driving up production costs on their own. Their next game has to top their last. At what point do we say that graphics are good enough? Who needs these insane amount of details? Why does a game absolutely need to be 100+GB in size? Is Bloodborne not visually appealing enough? What about God of War (2018)?
Can we not find a “good enough” acceptable baseline and just work with that? This infinite growth is annoying as both a developer and a player. Like okay, ooooh, you can render each individual hair on someone’s head and they each have their own physics. Congratulations. How’s the story for the game? Ah, broken to the point of unplayable, but you pinky swear a patch is coming.
i want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i’m not kidding
Fuck yeah. Give me passion projects made by people having a great time any day of the week.
I still play Dishonored every year. Those are not realistic graphics in the slightest, but it still holds up pretty well. Why? Style. I would 100% take a “lower” graphics game with style than a 100GB game with exquisitely modeled sandwiches.
Stylistic games also age better than realistic games in my opinion. Look at other 2012 games like Mass Effect, Far Cry 3, and Borderlands. Mass Effect and Far Cry went more realistic, and I think they suffered a bit for it in the long run.
Not saying Dishonored didn’t age tho. It does have that 2012 feel, lol.
This infinite growth is annoying as both a developer and a player.
wait until you find out what the world economy is built on…
I see what he’s saying, but the market says no.
Honestly, more product categories should do the same, imagine if Apple released a new phone for an extra $100, but everyone just said no.
They would focus on keeping the costs down and whinge about it like game manufacturers do right now, and it would be glorious
It’s true, game prices today are the same as they have been for the past 30 years for AAA titles.
I can’t think of an industry which hasn’t had a price raise in decades.
Gaming had managed to get by on this thanks to increasing market volume as gaming became more mainstream. But it’s hitting saturation now and won’t keep counteracting inflation forever
Games have actually gotten cheaper over time adjusted for inflation even as production costs have risen, it’s crazy. A NES game in today’s money would be around $160.
Game industry is bigger than movies and music combined which was not the case back in the NES era. Game industry has become a juggernaut with a huge consumer target base, and lower barrier to entry that allows for even random people being able to publish games instead of a few larger companies. Rise in production costs has been one that has been self imposed the way some studios go for big special effects blockbusters because they are targeting billions. Meanwhile like with movies you get these indie 2D and last gen 3D looking games being hits right alongside these billion dollar company attempts.
I guess one area you can look at is how niche products get priced lower like mechanical keyboards, and then once productions starts ramping up and things go mainstream suddenly these niche expensive ventures with a few fans becomes more affordable as larger quantities are now being distributed.
You same thing with tech like SSDs and hard drives actually falling price over time while capacities offered grows. Lot of PC parts actually with the exception of GPUs.
The game industry did get that much larger, but that’s on the backs of only a few (non-Capcom) games that sell to the type of person who only buys a couple of games per year at most. Hardly any company is selling as many copies as Call of Duty sells year after year.
That’s only true if you compare game sales to movie box office revenues, and music sales (which have shrunk considerably since they peaked in the 1990s). Once you account for home video sales, streaming, theme park revenues, and merchandise sales, the movie industry dwarfs the gaming industry. Once you account for artist tour and merchandise sales, the music industry dwarfs the gaming industry.
I say big budget games are too large in scope. Too much going on, too ambitious, too much emphasis on certain aspects that I feel developers value more than consumers. Not every game needs to be the biggest baddest game of the year blah blah blah.
Yeah. Every time someone comes up with “games are too cheap” I always point to the fact that the vast majority of AAA games have insane amount of bloat. If AAA devs were struggling to make a profit then a clear way to cut costs would be to streamline the product. If leveling is not vital, cut it. If randomized loot is not necessary, cut it. If horse balls shrinking/expanding with the weather is not necessary, cut it.
There are always ways to cut corners in a AAA games and if the cost was an issue they’d do it. But the fact that they don’t shows how little the actually struggle. So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.
So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.
Starfield is the sloppiest Bethasda game ever, cutting corners to save cost is not how I would describe its development at all.
I agree with what you are saying though. Spending 40% of the budget on voice acting and cinematographic dialog is extremely wasteful. As long as the gameplay is good and graphics are pretty gamers will like the product.
Interestingly enough, if the games industry had kept the $60 price point that they fixed back ~2005 up with inflation, games would be costing around $95 today.
He’s right. Free is a pretty low price for a game.
I’m already 50% of the time on my ship to the seven seas. Do they want me permanently at sea? Same goes with the media companies like Disney+, Netflix and Amazon. They push it any further, I’m pushing off to seas for good.
They *literally, figured out how to beat piracy. The unbeatable problem. And then they had to go and blow it with their greed.
Meh. Capcom games just became $0 for me, because I’ll swear an oath before you to pirate every one of their games, from here on out.
Inflation is a fact of life. Is a price that raises ever all it takes for you to decide to pirate? Did you do so when games increased from $50 to $60?
Poverty is also a fact of life. Not everyone can afford every price increase.
Capcom hasn’t even raised prices yet, and this person just swore an oath of piracy rather than waiting for a sale or something.
Maybe they’ve already been buying on sales.
I’m from a third world country. I still buy games as often as I can, but I also get that these price hikes are stretching people thin. A $70 game is like a third of our monthly minimum wage, it’s a huge chunk of money that people need to live, and most companies don’t bother to adjust it proportionally to our financial situation, even though there is no reason not to do so when it comes to digital media.
That’s just it. First off, I rarely am interested in Capcom games, think the last one I bought was in maybe 2016? (RE7). So this person you are responding to really is going off the handle over a nothing burger, I assure you.
But you’ve hit on an important point, that’s important to discuss. These price hikes are disproportionate to the growth of household earnings, and more importantly, digital media was supposed to drive costs down, and not up for the end consumer. We don’t actually own these games, we more or less lease them. There’s nothing physical anymore. Which is a problem. Not that I don’t like the ease of digital purchases, it’s the fact that at any moment I can be stripped of access to the product. Which makes it a lease or rental, not full ownership. Yet they keep wanting to drive the costs up up up, in light of that fact. It’s getting to be gross behaviour. The products are declining in quality, the costs keep going up, actual ownership of the end product comes into question, and the profits keep going to a smaller and smaller circle of people, some of whom are among the most vile of people alive today.
Enough is enough.
