this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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Game prices should have increased with every new generation, former PlayStation US boss says (www.videogameschronicle.com)
submitted 23 hours ago by inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] MeaanBeaan@lemmy.world 17 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 18 points 19 hours ago

We make billions, but we want trillions

[–] CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 4 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

Don't forget that game development is increasingly shoving the hardware burden onto the consumer by using poorly made tools to streamline development (thus cutting costs) 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.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] MeaanBeaan@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

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.