“People are buying indie games instead and I’m not happy about it”
It’s not: “Gaming is unaffordable.” it’s “People aren’t willing to give us more money.”
Whose decision was it to charge 70-80 usd for a game?
Whose ai investments are buying up all the ram, gpus, and ssds?
Not consumers’…
Still a screamin deal as far as $ per hour of entertainment.
Adjusted for inflation, I paid ~$125.00 CAD for The Legend of Zelda when it launched on NES… For an 8 hr game…
The scale and quality of content delivered today is LIGHT YEARS ahead, and frankly, still the best value proposition in any entertainment media.
Maybe if they would stop burning through all the RAM and shoving AI down our throats…
I’m surprised they haven’t come up with a mandatory paid service where AI finishes your game for you. Just pay for the device. Pay for the game. Pay for online access. Pay for the mods. Pay AI to finish the game…Pay extra for a summary of your achievement’s.
There was an article like a month ago about an AI assistant to play the hard parts for you.
A cross-game AI coop player that doesn’t suck would be kind of cool tho.
Even shitty video game “AI” outmatched human players 20 years ago. 90% of video game AI development is dumbing that shit down enough that it’s fun, but still convincing.
Well Asha, maybe you should talk to your boss Slopya about that AI problem that’s raising prices on everything.
I mean, unless you play the last four decades of games in emulation… or the couple hundred thousand indie games on steam… or the other few hundred thousand mobile games or…
Oh, you mean your company profits are in crisis. Yeah. Good.
The amount of money the industry blows chasing PR with the tiniest minority of whiny “core gamers” is going to be the downfall of AAA.
The problem is that investors are brain-dead, so Forbes picking up on negative sentiment from 500 neckbeards can legitimately tank a publicly traded publishers stock.
The vast, vast, VAST majority of gamers don’t identify as gamers, don’t play 50 titles a year, and sure as hell don’t engage with gaming media or online discourse about gaming. 95% of games industry revenue is coming from people who don’t give a shit about gamer “hot button topics”.
The problem, like with most industries, is the speculative commodification of the companies themselves instead of just their products.
Introducing a monthly subscription for next gen consoles and hiking game pass prices /s
High quality indie games are very affordable <3
Ultimately AI is an unaffordable industry. It’ll crash in time, and there’ll hopefully be a whole lot of price drops on ram, graphics, etc. People will not want to stop playing games. The industry has had crashes before and always bounced back bigger than ever.
It will be bad for whoever’s economy is most dependent on it though… And any businesses really heavily invested in it. Won’t it, Microsoft.
I’m looking forward to the oversupply of RAM and SSDs in 5 years from now. Painful at the moment though, I’m praying that my PC survives
This, too, Shall pass
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Well no but also yes.
An Atari 2600 was $160 in 1979. Cartridges were $25-40. Adjust for inflation and that’s $738.56 for a console and $115-184 per cartridge.
Also minimum wage was $2.90 ($13.39). Median family income was $19,660 ($90,750.94).
And it was new tech.
So the prices have come down. There are a lot of amazing games that are cheap that you can play basically forever. Minecraft, Dead Cells, Skyrim, etc.
But our expectations have risen while our wages have come down.
So not wrong, but not right for the reasons you’d assume.
Bonus: A game you no longer play could still net something on the second-hand market, or maybe you’d trade it with someone. I know there was a group of people at my school that collectively had like two or three copies of the various Pokemon games they’d pass around, exchanging and loaning them on the fly.
Steam Family Sharing is a thing, but not quite so trivial to set up as handing them the cartridge. Never mind about reselling digital copies of games.
An Atari 2600 was $160 in 1979. Cartridges were $25-40. Adjust for inflation and that’s $738.56 for a console and $115-184 per cartridge.
Dunkey, is that you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvPkAYT6B1Q
First time seeing this, watched the whole thing, no lies detected. (Though he didn’t touch on my point about income.)
Gaming, is joining everything else at becoming harder to afford.
🏴☠️
Even past that, you can find sub-$10 quality games all over the various online platforms.
I’m old enough to remember a friend in college blowing $1200 on double-GeForce cards so he could max out specs on Oblivion. And from that perspective, gaming has always been unaffordable. But you don’t have to game like this. Nobody needs to go four figures out of pocket to play Slay the Spire or Dwarf Fortress or even Counterstrike.
Hehe yeah, that is sort of what I meant. Gaming isn’t what changed. Affordability changed.
Perhaps making one game per decade is a losing strategey.
Edit: I heard a million excuses for that over the years from AAA industry, but my counter is just pointing to Capcom. Why can they keep up both output and quality?
There was a stretch in the late 90s where squaresoft released a final fantasy nearly every year for 5 years. Now it’s once every 7+ years. I don’t believe it should be that hard to make games these days. There are more people working on the projects, more tools and pre-made engines/libraries available. It’s purely a management/budgeting problem.
The more the hardware capabilities and our expectations rise, so does the outright complexity of making the games. I’m sure some of us would be fine with less ”bleeding-edge” games if they were otherwise written and designed great, but I think it makes sense, from publisher’s perspective, to hedge the bets and try to also impress with the fidelity of presentation.
If you are looking for a sofa and find one that smells a bit off but is otherwise functional, comfortable and looks nice, you might think you’d be able to live with the smell and buy it.
You almost certainly won’t and will likely regret the choice, but the sale was made and it’s a whole thing to do returns for something so big and hard to transport and move around.
That’s what you want to go for, even if you think it might smell fine. If it looks good enough, it might nor matter if it happened to smell rank ultimately. Numbers must go up!
I have no idea what your sofa analogy is trying to say.
My friends and I made fun of ff7s terrible graphics when it came out, but the game was so good the bad graphics didn’t matter. Ff16 looked amazing, but the game is so boring it doesn’t matter.
People don’t want bleeding edge from final fantasy, they want a good game.
Bad analogy perhaps. But I mean, sometimes games are shit, but look good, and people buy them due to that. Then the sale is made, even if the game is shit.
Perhaps the smell thing was off, but the sofa breaking right after buying or having sharp spikes under the mattress that poke you if you sit wrong, would not work because things like sofas have warranty for those kind of things. I’d bet smell wouldn’t pass so easily there.
Anyway, point was, good games need not look so pretty and “modern”. Bad games can entice you to buy even if they are bad, if they look good enough. Nothing deeper than that
The problem is that making games (and software in general) has become more high-level, and enshittification has also gotten rid of highly skilled people. So the top studios in the industry are not capable of making resource-efficient, beautiful games anymore. Not because it’s physically impossible, but because they’re not geared for the processes and decision-making that would allow those games to be made.
When you switch from an artisan mindset to a mass-manufacturing and outsourcing mindset without exercising strict control you eventually become utterly dependent on service and product providers that will see to your costs going up so you’ll keep paying more for less.
All the large studios will come to a breaking point eventually because it’s unsustainable, and will be acquired for the franchise rights by corporations that make their money in unrelated industries. But the PC platform is also breaking down so this might be a moot issue in 10 years from now.
Why can they keep up both output and quality?
A lot of games produced under the Capcom brand are merely financed by Capcom and developed by smaller studios. Like how GameFreak makes Pokemon games for Nintendo. Clover Studio produces a bunch of indie games under the Capcom banner. Ninja Theory produced several of the Devil May Cry releases. Inti Creates spun out of the old Megaman team to keep turning out new titles when the franchise lapsed. Pragmata was built by a fully independent development team inside Capcom.
And… idk about “quality”. They’re as prone to releasing a flop as anyone. They just turn out a lot of iterative and derivative materials. Why are there 18 different Ace Attorney games over 24 years? Because there’s just not a lot going on between versions, mostly. Same reason the Megaman franchise could turn over so quickly. One basic engine could support a plethora of titles.
There have an amazing catalog of affordable games that were launched over the last 25 years (or more). There’s a lifetime of fun available. Gamers may chose to play those, instead of the over expensive new games or worse, subscriptions.
The arms race inherent in the world of computer gaming is reaching a point of unsustainability. I started thinking that way back when I could donate cpu time on my ps3 to protein folding simulation.
And, like most of our field, it’s a ratchet that only goes up. Efficiency and clever engineering to create an accessible experience is almost always lower down the list of priorities for these big corporate AAA publishers .
They’re more interested in swinging their dick further than the other guy. A lot of the time this doesn’t actually buy something more fun, popular, or playable. But the mind of an exec beholden to shareholders is obligated to invest in bloat. meanwhile I’m having a delightful time running clever little indie games on my steam deck.
Is it though? I feel like there are a ton of indie games these days that are reasonably priced and run well without using a fuck ton of resources.
I don’t really care if GTA 6 is $100+. It’s the best of the best, maximum effort, no expense spared tier of video game making. I might eventually get it and I might not.
Keep in mind that Super Nintendo games were $60 or $70 in the mid 90s. Games have come down in relative price recently and are only now starting to creep back up, but that’s because gaming has become a massively popular hobby and a lot of people want huge masterpieces like GTA 6 or Elder Scrolls 6.
It’s probably never been a better for indie games.
