(sorry if it’s the wrong place for this kind of discussion)
Yesterday The Riftbreaker raised its price 50% for base game and 65% for dlcs. I know Steam said all devs to adjust prices(in January), but this feel more of trend where once a game gets popular the price skyrocket.
As someone who waits a game go 75% or a stable 50% discount before buying it, if i didnt buy it by then sure i ain’t buying that now unless there is a massive discount (not even gonna talk about games that raise price to fake a bigger discount).
I dont want to sound cheap; I grew up with no condition to buy games and spent a lot of my internet in torrents in my youth, now i gladly pay for games but once a game raise its price i unwishlist it.
Patient gamers gang?
You know it, baby
lmao I just finished this with my gf last week, fantastic game
Abandon the FOMO completely. I do not reward shitty behavior. Destiny 2’s launch was the end of that. Let other people pay top dollar to playtest it and work all the wrinkles out. Let all the DLC come out and the game GOTY edition if it’s that good. Let others buy that. THEN, when they are going to launch the sequel, all of that pap will be sold at basement-level prices. Maybe wait a bit longer if it was really popular.
I’m playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 right now. ;-)
While you’re overall right, DOS 2 is a terrible exemple for that.
Some of us learned with Destiny 1 and it saddens me they got so many more
victimscustomers with Destiny 2I got that lesson with call of duty ghost and assassin’s creed 3 back in 2013. I was extremely hyped for the games and they both ended up sucking.
After that I will just buy a game after it’s been out for a couple months
Meh AC3 was a complete game you didn’t enjoy (valid reason not to pre-order still!) so I’d say it’s less flagrant than destiny et al which nickel and dime you as they manufacture FOMO. Bungie’s list of sins is much longer lol
I don’t see any price change for that game looking at the price history (USD). It’s possible you’re seeing an adjustment in exchange rates which would only see an increase in certain currencies.
As for what I think, I generally just ignore base prices and only buy games when they are a price I’m willing to pay for what they provide.
Perhaps it’s was the regional price, Steamdb link, funny enough, the price change history vanished(dlc still recorded) but still has the new price.
Just don’t buy them, they are not going anywhere. Wait for a decent sale.
@Vcio@lemmy.world for me, it just means that I’m not going to pick it up longer. I’ll wait until the price drops to a dollar amount that makes sense to me.
Inflation means things cost more. Games and other things will continue to rise in price.
If your not comfortable paying the price of a game, then the best thing is to wait for prices to start falling or for a sale.
It’s bound to happen, but not every game needs to be bought at launch, the game will still be available for purchase at a later date.
I’m completely done with that crap. Games becoming €80 while they’re either mediocre, lots of bug/ glitches or flat out unplayable.
I rather wait for a heavy sale or well - the instance I’m on should say enough.
Feel like in the future games going to be €100 normally and €120 deluxe etc.
It’s unavoidable. Not only are player expectations for bigger and better looking games getting higher every year, but games are also becoming more expensive to make due to bigger teams and global economic inflation. Luckily I think indie games will continue to exist at a range of prices, but I expect them to get a bit more expensive too because inflation affects everything.
Removed by mod
When a games been sitting in my wishlist for a while it’s usually there for a reason. Sometimes it’s just that I have a glut of other games to play in that genre, sometimes I’m waiting for the game to improve. But usually it’s because I’ve looked at the game and said “I don’t think it’s worth that price” and am waiting for it to fall to something I consider reasonable. Obviously, a price hike isn’t going to help it reach that point.
I looked at Riftbreaker’s steam DB page and it looks like it was only some countries who got a price spike, so I’m guessing it was some sort of currency re-balancing. You know, the Ruble is weak so prices relative to the Dollar went up or whatever. All that being said my first point stands, if I didn’t want to buy a game at price X , I’m going to want to buy it even less at X * 1.5, regardless of what’s happening in international money markets.
That depends on:
- If the game is in Early access, the price is justified to change as it becomes more fleshed out.
- If the game gets a massive update (Such as Quake II recently) a price raise feels justified.
- Also, none of this applies if the game goes over 60$, you should never pay more than 60$ because of a price raise. But, these are all just my opinions.
I paid $70 for majoras mask at Walmart back in 2001, if anything games have become immensely cheaper taking into account inflation.
Yea people seem to forget the pricing of n64 catridges back when it was the hot thing like ps5, etc is today. It was actually insane. Considering inflation too, you were paying a lot more for a single game then.
The price of games hasn’t gone up in decades. We’re only just starting to see games that cost $70 instead of $60.
The cost to develop games, on the other hand, has gone way, way, way up.
Think about it in “cost per megabyte”. Players have been getting more and more content - not playable hours, but content that needs to be created by a human - for the same amount of money. While developers have larger and larger staff, with more and more demands… For the same amount of money.
There’s a reason live-service and freemium games are becoming the monetization scheme of choice.
Cost of games needs to go up or we’ll just see more and more exploitative monetization.
Let me also add that $60 for 20 hours of entertainment is one of the best deals there is. And the best games give a lot more than 20 hours of gameplay. Books are about the only thing that comes close
Regarding “cost per megabyte”…
I see your point, but for me it is more important the “entertainment per €/$” factor, and there you can’t beat indie games.
I’ve bought the whole Halo collection… that’s a metric ton of megabytes right there, but I’ve only installed it once and never again. In contrast, I’ve bought Loop Hero (about 200 MB) and haven’t been able to put it down since. That’s a lot more value for money, in my opinion.
That’s you :) I bought the halo collection and spent >200hrs playing it. I have >1600hrs in the Destiny franchise. Can’t just look at your own experience :)
The cost to develop has gone down, if anything. You don’t need powerful hardware. You don’t need expensive industry software. You don’t need proprietary devkits. You can create a perfectly good game on an old laptop with Blender, Krita, Aseprite, Unity, Unreal, Godot. You can target consoles on regular hardware and regular consoles.
Tell me you don’t make games without telling me you don’t make games.
You can make perfectly good games, yes. But good luck making anything AAA like that. The games you’re talking about are indie or niche. For example, they will have no mocap.
And even in those cases, there is a difference between “cost to start a studio” and “cost to develop a game”. The costs you’re talking about are the cost of getting started. Those are barrier to entry costs, not development costs. When we talk about development costs, we typically talk about everything after you have all the hardware and software you need. Studios already have those things so they barely factor into the ongoing development costs
Also you only don’t need proprietary dev kits if you have no intention of doing per-platform QA. Fine for indies. Not fine for AAA
Yes, the barrier to entry has gone down; the minimum cost to ship something, anything, is lower than ever…but only by comparison to the peak cost. Even small indie studios are spending as much as studios did when making $60 NES games
Sure, if you want to only talk about AAA games, yeah, the cost is going up. But in general, cost has gone down.
I’m not only talking about AAA. I’m pointing out some of the things you missed in your assessment.
Like I said, even indie studios today spend more to make their non-sprite, full featured games than studios did making NES games. And then those indie games sell for $20 or $30 instead of the full $60 price point. So the content-to-development cost ratio is still shit
Unless you only one scrappy in the games made by three person dev team they really haven’t. The cost for making a game that was good in 2015 has gone down, sure. But it behooves you to show that game development in general, and yes that includes indie developers, has gone down.
A 10 person dev team in any major city is going to cost you between $500,000 and $1mill a year just to staff.
Before, a handful of people could develop the most technically advanced game of the year. Today it’s common that hundreds of overworked people are involved in the development of a game.
Each person must have their own expensive equipment and salaries. Not to mention the cost of renting an office. The costs adds up quickly.
Smaller games made by one or two people are probably cheaper, but the cost of these games aren’t $70 like the big budget games.
That’s really not the bulk of development costs though: The real cost is in labour; as game dev teams have increased the labour costs will increase too. Delay in game? Costs go up.
It’s offset by the industry becoming bigger; back then a game selling 100k is a huge success, now it’s more like 10 million. At some point that’ll cap so that’s why the studios area increasing prices now. Oh and if the studio is public, they need to feed the
parasitesshareholders.I generally don’t buy big games of late so I’ve not had to put up with super expensive games, but it’s just something to keep in mind why prices are so.
It’s not for the same amount of money, though. Video game sales also went up significantly over the years.
Doom 2 sold less than 2 million copies by 1999 (released in 1994) and made about 100 million. Doom Eternal sold 3 million copies first week and make over 450 million in revenue in just 9 months…
Per Cormack, Doom 2 development cost was $550,000. Doom 2016 dev cost was $90,000,000 (couldn’t find Doom Eternal’s but that should be close)
It’s not about how much one or the other has gone up. It’s about how much they’ve gone up in comparison to eachother
Bro I paid $80 for Final Fantasy 3 (now 6) on SNES. From Toys R Us.
Yuuuuup. Price if games has been stagnant for too long
You see more and more exploitative monetization because people are dumb enough to buy into it. The AAA industry is fucked and is not worth investing a penny into, they wouldn’t raise the prices and avoid MTX, they would raise the prices and STILL attempt to fleece as many people as they can with neon skins or whatever bs.
“Businesses try to maximize profit. News at 11”
Like, I’m anticapitalist as hell, but c’mon. Your problem is with capitalism, not game dev
Your comment is talking about monetisation, which the devs have nothing to do with apart from implementing the features. So what even is this response? I dont understand your point now.
Well, I can say from personal experience, devs absolutely have a say in monetization if they’re not wholly owned by the publisher.
But my point is that I was speaking to the motivation businesses have to prefer one monetization scheme over another. Your comment was just “corporations evil, micro transactions bad”.
If the cost of games had kept up with inflation and development costs, micro transactions wouldn’t be nearly the beast it is today because there would have been a viable alternative, and customers would have more options, allowing them to “speak with their wallet” more effectively. But as it stands, it is very, very difficult for most developers to sustain themselves on single-burst, long-tail tail monetization
I don’t pay sticker price and I don’t pay more than the historical low. So I’ll just wait longer if a game does that, or end up not buying it at all as other games catch my interest. I have games that have been on my wishlist for years that I’ve had to go and clean out.
