Video games to up their prices, consumers rejoice

[NJClaw]

Good stuff, just the boost the Indie market needed

Sadly indie game prices are relative to AAA and will probably go up as well.

Let's just hope that in the future everyone will be as cool as Team Cherry, with its 15€ Hollow Knight.

 

[Ghulgothas]

Sounds fine, honestly. The correct way to purchase Triple-A games has always been to wait for it's GOTY Edition bundle to go on sale a year after it's released. Most of my gaming diet is 20-year old abandonware and tasteful indie releases under $25 already.

I wonder if this'll further support the rise of 'Double-A' games now that the overall pricing range for videogames is becoming wider.

 

[Ghulgothas]

It ain't 1990 anymore dude. This is the modern age of 2020! American wages may have stagnated but value hasn't, you gotta adjust for inflation!

 

[Wunderbar]

It ain't 1990 anymore dude. This is the modern age of 2020! American wages may have stagnated but value hasn't, you gotta adjust for inflation!

i'm a filthy thirdworlder, for me 20$ is still a hefty sum.

 

[mk0]

Let's just hope that in the future everyone will be as cool as Team Cherry, with its 15€ Hollow Knight.

Team Cherry deserved more, either they're complete schmucks for selling it for so cheap on release or the indie market is too cheapskate to support higher quality titles.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

You want more people getting your product, not less. Low cost or Free-to-play with microtransactions seems to be the more profitable model, since it can attract whales as well as people who wouldn't buy an expensive game but might drop a few bucks for cool items or characters in that game everyone is playing. The future is probably gachas as far as the eye can see.

The cost also ties into the increasing absurdity of pharaonic AAA games that need to sell a copy to each inhabitant of the Milky Way to pay for itself. Todd Howard circumvents this by selling the same game several times, but even Godd Todd can't do that forever.

 

[Tacgnol]

It'll just mean more people waiting for sales or bundles, or just pirating the games.

Especially with the economic situation right now, I doubt a lot of people have money to waste on vidya.

 

[JarlFrank]

Back in the day I always used to pirate, so I got my games for free. Nowadays that I have decently stable income, I buy my games and spend hundreds of bucks on Steam sales. And yet despite my willingness to shell out money, I don't usually buy games at full price.

The last two games I bought on release were Grimoire, Disco Elysium and Mount & Blade 2, and I backed KotC2 for 500 bucks. Other than that, I haven't bought a game at full price in years. I always wait for sales before I buy games, unless they're so interesting to me I just have to buy them on day one.

Fun fact: neither Grimoire, M&B2 nor Disco Elysium cost 60 bucks at launch. More like 30-40. Indie games like these are already super cheap compared to AAA releases even at full price. But with an AAA game, I never had the urge to buy it at full price. I usually wait a couple of years until a deep discount makes it available for 15 bucks or so, including all the DLC.

Some games like Paradox's releases or Sims 3 and Sims 4 are ridiculously overpriced if you want the full package due to all the DLC. Even on a sale you pay 100 bucks for the full package. DLCs that add 3 new features are priced like some fully featured indie games - 19.99 € can get you one DLC for Europa Universalis 4 that adds 3 new minor features only some nations will get to play with, or it will get you something like ATOM RPG or Stellar Monarch. Yeah, I know what I'm gonna spend my money on - an actual full-fledged game!

Willingness to shell out money all depends on what I get for that money. Is it a niche game in a subgenre that hasn't been properly served for a decade? Imma buy that shit at full price on release day, baby! Is it yet another (((cinematic))) AAA "game" that lasts 10 hours at best and half of that time is spent watching cutscenes? And you're charging me HOW MANY eurobucks for it? How about FUCK OFF.

And I don't buy the development costs argument either. I worked in game dev for a while, I know it's not exactly cheap to develop a game, but it's not like costs have gone up immensely either. You can work a lot more efficiently with today's tools than with more primitive tools. Level design, writing, scripting etc are all much easier today than they were 20 years ago. The problem arises when you mismanage your development and an AAA game with a linear story that lasts 10 hours has a dozen writers, when a game like Age of Decadence with half a dozen different paths through the game has one main writer but a hundred times more writing. Yeah, of course your development costs are high when you pay 12 people for a job a single guy could do. Not my fucking problem that AAA studios are oversized and bloated.

I get way more value from a 30 eurobucks indie RPG than from the latest 60 eurobucks AAA drivel, so I'm going to continue spending my money on cheap indie games rather than overpriced AAA crap.

 

[StrongBelwas]

I doubt this will affect PC prices, the will continue being between 50-60$ range

If it goes anything like last time, they'll stay $60 on PC for a few years and then a sufficiently large game like CoD or GTA will charge $70 and when they get away with it everyone else will follow.
Who knows about key retailers like GreenManGaming though.

 

[Burning Bridges]

"$69.99 may be the new standard pricing for next gen titles,"

nextgen = popamole

 

[samuraigaiden]

I don't think I'll ever have a good reason to buy a game at full price again in my life.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Only schmucks buy high. I saved so much money by waiting that when the right time came I sometimes can afford to buy a second copy for someone else. If you pay 4.79$ for a 3 year old game that originally cost 40$, you can actually do that.

 

[Tehdagah]

Who will win - Sony with a "70$ for a game" strategy, or Microsoft with their 1$ subscription?

Phil Spencer rubs his palms.

Jews

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

I wouldn't mind if Underrail would cost $18 instead of $15, or Dungeon Rats would cost $12 instead of $9

There's no need to suck up to Styg and VDweller.

And why would I do your job for you?

I could provide more examples where I want to see a price increase (e.g. Elminage Gothic for $10 is a crime against humanity and it should cost at least twice as much), but it wouldn't change my point.

 

[HansDampf]

I didn't ask for hyper-realistic graphics and cinematic cutscenes that drive development costs through the roof.

 

[AArmanFV]

At this point I only buy games when they have physical goodies, less than 60 dollars costed me a collector's edition of Megaman 11 for the switch with the amiibo shit and a lot more. 60 bucks for a game that is distributed digital is a steal and the product itself it's not even worthy, add to it the money you need for upgrades to run them for PC versions.

Also out of topic but I find so retarded preordering a game in this days, back then I could understand it because games were distributed in a store and some games were out of stock the same day of release, so it's not like the game that is in an on-line server for download is gonna go away.

 

[MRY]

Because of the world being locked down, I got my kids a Nintendo Switch, and I was staggered by the price of games ($60). I hadn't bought a non-PC game for decades, and because my PCs were always old, I would buy games long after their release. As a result, I had come to view $10 as a reasonable price for games, and $20 as the high end. (I believe I paid $30 for Starcraft II, an allowance i made because the original Starcraft was one of my all-time favorite games; it was a bad lapse on my part, as SC2 was deeply disappointing.)

That said, game pricing right now is just weird. As a kid, I paid $70+ for some SNES and Genesis RPGs, and $30+ was absolutely normal. Sometimes in the bargain bin of a game store you might find something for $10, or in a yard sale or whatever. But that would normally be bad games that were quite old, sometimes with malfunctioning media. Heck, as I recall, even to rent a game for three days from Blockbuster was $4.79 (I'm not sure why that price sticks in my mind). With inflation, those prices would be roughly double what they were back then. Of course, you got a box, a manual, an expensive physical piece of media, etc. But I didn't care that much about that stuff back then. Prices are now so much lower than that, and because the curve of improvement of games has flattened, it's not like Ori and the Blind Forest ($4.95 on Steam!) now looks and feels wildly dated. (By contrast, in 1990, a game from 1985 would likely look and feel very dated.) With that in mind, I don't know that I have a problem with higher prices for new console releases, prices that are still historically low, particularly if the price differentiation continues where you can buy a game for $60 on release or $10 a couple years later.

 

[Thac0]

Because of the world being locked down, I got my kids a Nintendo Switch, and I was staggered by the price of games ($60). I hadn't bought a non-PC game for decades, and because my PCs were always old, I would buy games long after their release. As a result, I had come to view $10 as a reasonable price for games, and $20 as the high end. (I believe I paid $30 for Starcraft II, an allowance i made because the original Starcraft was one of my all-time favorite games; it was a bad lapse on my part, as SC2 was deeply disappointing.)

That said, game pricing right now is just weird. As a kid, I paid $70+ for some SNES and Genesis RPGs, and $30+ was absolutely normal. Sometimes in the bargain bin of a game store you might find something for $10, or in a yard sale or whatever. But that would normally be bad games that were quite old, sometimes with malfunctioning media. Heck, as I recall, even to rent a game for three days from Blockbuster was $4.79 (I'm not sure why that price sticks in my mind). With inflation, those prices would be roughly double what they were back then. Of course, you got a box, a manual, an expensive physical piece of media, etc. But I didn't care that much about that stuff back then. Prices are now so much lower than that, and because the curve of improvement of games has flattened, it's not like Ori and the Blind Forest ($4.95 on Steam!) now looks and feels wildly dated. (By contrast, in 1990, a game from 1985 would likely look and feel very dated.) With that in mind, I don't know that I have a problem with higher prices for new console releases, prices that are still historically low, particularly if the price differentiation continues where you can buy a game for $60 on release or $10 a couple years later.

The Switch tax is fucking heavy and they have sales only 3 times a year with big games only going down 20-30 % if at all. The switch might be the most expensive console out there with high controller turnover and need for a lot of accessories.

Outside of sales this is the cheapest way to get games there, 50$ per game. You need their strange online service tho.
https://ec.nintendo.com/DE/de/pretickets/70020000000081

 

[Creamy Muffin]

Well the joke's on them. I don't buy or play games anymore.

 

[MRY]

Thac0 It's all kind of immaterial; scrounging for a $5 discount on a game that last for months when I pay $10 for lunch a couple times a week isn't an efficient use of my time. It's weird that the Switch with four games (side scrolling Mario, Mario Odyssey, Mario Kart, and Breath of the Wild) and four controllers has cost me something like four times what I spent on all the gaming I did from December 1998 to March 2020, but so it goes.

 

[Thac0]

Thac0 It's all kind of immaterial; scrounging for a $5 discount on a game that last for months when I pay $10 for lunch a couple times a week isn't an efficient use of my time. It's weird that the Switch with four games (side scrolling Mario, Mario Odyssey, Mario Kart, and Breath of the Wild) and four controllers has cost me something like four times what I spent on all the gaming I did from December 1998 to March 2020, but so it goes.

He who does not save the penny is not worthy of the dollar.
I kind of like chasing discounts tbh, its not even primarily about the money, just the feeling that I paid less than I would have normaly makes my dopamine receptors go ding.
Switch controller prices are unholy for what they are, bootleg controllers cost 20-30$ compared to the 2x40 + 20 = 100$ you pay for a single of those default controllers with the charge thing.

 

[ScrotumBroth]

Nintendo is a cult now, you should have thought your kid how to emulate N64.

 

[MRY]

He who does not save the penny is not worthy of the dollar.

o7

But the foremost luxury good that I enjoy is the ability to no longer be paralyzed by the need to get the absolute lowest price on even everyday items. There was a time in the not-so-distant past where I would buy the semi-spoiled "Manager's Discount" meat at the grocery store for the extra 25% off and break my orders of coarsely used books into parts to stack Alibris $2 off coupons. I may have deserved my dollars more back then, but my time and sanity welcome the break from those days.

Nintendo is a cult now, you should have thought your kid how to emulate N64.

The worst console ever. The controller was the stupidest thing I ever saw. Back in high school when I started dating my wife, her younger brother challenged me to matches of Golden Eye and I literally could not manipulate the controller; I, who was the champion of my school's Quake LAN games. (Ironically, this seeming indulgence of the kid perhaps put me in better esteem with the rest of the family, though it led to a deserved lifelong contempt from him.) In short, no. I reared the kids on NES and SNES, the consoles of their parents, but then skipped straight from there to Switch, the Nintendo console of their peers.

 

[deuxhero]

If humanity's first contact with alien life was in 2063, why did Nintendo release an input device designed for Edosian physiology in 1996?

 

[garren]

Paying 60 dollars (or euros in my case which is even more) for even a new computer game is absolutely insane imo. I usually just wait till a game is priced 10 euros or less, maybe if I really want the game then I'll pay 20 max.

Yes I have many games on my wishlist that have been there for years and years (fucking japs never lower their game's basic price, so even on sale it's still too expensive for me)