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Great news!
They are!
... Just typically not the overproduced and overpriced corpo ones.
Wanna drive down AAA game prices?
Stop paying them!
Support your favorite indie or AA game today!
Don't like games with predatory microtransactions?
You'll never believe this, but you can also just stop playing games with them!
Get all your friends onboard with the plan, fight the man!
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.
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.
A fifth thing for your lost: formulaic and predictable af
Why are 90% of AAA games a dude with a gun. How many iterations of dude with a gun can we possibly get?
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 = $82
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.
Edit: I looked it up, the switch to $60 actually happened in 2005, I was probably still working there when it happened. If we were to do that same calculation starting with $60, that's $60 x 1.65 = $99. So there's food for thought
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.
So there's my hot take.
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.
stop pre-ordering games. They'll still be there when they do go on sale.
Yeah but then I wouldn't get the sick Cardi B Wet Ass Pussy character skin 😮💨
Yep. I've been waiting a half a year to get the Dark Souls franchise. It has paid off well.
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.
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.
Have you met our lord and saviour, retro gaming?
And the Son, Emulation?
Or the step brother, piracy?
The only problem is too much choice!
Seriously, when you’ve got thousands of ROMs and vintage PC games to choose from, it’s really difficult to land on one to play right now!
I went down a rabbit hole of emulation last year. I got PCSX2 and tons of games like Ratchet & Clank, Tak 1-3, Jak 1-X, the Sly series, Spider-Man 2, and so many others. I spent a good month and a half just playing old PS2 games and I had an absolute blast
Nice! I’ve been gradually playing through a bunch of NES classics: Faxanadu, Dragon Warrior, Blaster Master, Fire Emblem. The next game I want to go through is Castlevania 1 and then Ultima IV after that!
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.
You can go AAA for cheap no problem, people just need to not get FOMO‘d out of their minds and half-resist the compulsion to jump on the next 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 of money anymore. In the meantime, there‘s 203 untouched games in my Steam library that had reached that price at some point in the past already. Not even mentioning the hundreds of games I got for free between GOG, Prime, and Epic.
And, not buying immediately you get to know if the shiny is real or is just a painted turd. Or if it disappears after a couple months.
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.
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.
Bloomberg's all broken for me, so going by the snippet:
I get the impression the absolute majority of games aren't even past the 40 USD threshold, including the majority of successful games I see in the wild. If the snippet considers the AAA games as a good sample for the gaming market, I'd argue otherwise, that they're a loud minority of games, and a decaying one at that for multiple reasons, including the bloated prices.
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.
Aren't inflation-adjusted prices for video games quite low, comparatively? Charts like this comes up in a quick search: https://infographicsite.com/infographic/console-game-prices-inflation-adjusted/
Atari 7800 Game Devs knew what's up lol
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. That was more about supporting Larian with extra cash.
Bring back rentals
Don’t microslop and friends peddle some game pass and similar subscriptions? Game rental with extra steps.
Subscriptions =/= Rental
Is it really that different though?
Lets say you get the 1 month pass, play any games you want and are part of that “service” for the duration, once it runs out you lose access to the games (unless you crack the downloaded files for them which would be like not returning the “rented” game I guess)
Personally just feels like the same scam cable tv was and now transforming into streaming services with ads.
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.
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.
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.
Too bad companies seek exponential profit due to line having to go up, so pricing games higher wouldn't lead to killing off microtransactions even if priced at $200.
Companies don't hit a point where they go this is enough money. They became companies because their mentality is this isn't enough, and its only the a mount consumers are willing to pay that keeps price from inflating more like companies want.
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.