I Miss The Times When Games Came In Full Package Rather Than Broken Mess Filled With Microtransactions
I Miss The Times When Games Came In Full Package Rather Than Broken Mess Filled With Microtransactions
The gaming industry has drifted away from offering full-fledged games to putting unfinished titles that are jam-packed with microtransactions on the market.
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The gaming industry has drifted away from offering full-fledged games to putting unfinished titles that are jam-packed with microtransactions on the market.
Games also used to cost a substantial amount more in real terms.
https://retroonly.com/how-much-did-nes-games-cost-in-the-80s/
A budget NES game would cost $27.53 in today’s dollars, the average game would cost $110.14, while the best games would cost $165.21 in today’s money!
Like, if someone shipped a game with a base price of half of what an AAA-class game used to run, that'd already be into very controversial territory.
But people are, apparently, okay with buying games in chunks. They just really don't like one, large, up-front base pricetag. So...game studios do what you'd expect. They sell the thing in chunks.
I mean, while I agree that that has some drawbacks, I'm kind of okay with that to the extent that it means that games that suck get cut off in production before they turn into too much of a disaster. If your base game doesn't sell well, there probably isn't gonna be a bunch of DLC published.
Like, if someone shipped a game with a base price of half of what an AAA-class game used to run, that'd already be into very controversial territory.
$55 as an average price is pretty good. Not $70, especially when its highly likely to be barely 1/4 as good as games from 15-20 years ago.
Also, games used to cost more because the number of people buying games was tiny. Not like today, where gaming makes more money than the movie industry, and probably music industry combined. When there is so much demand and a literal infinite supply when a game is made (back then cartridges had substantial manufacturing cost, nowadays most games are distributed digitally with a manufacturing cost of exactly $0.00), there is no reason prices should be going up. Prices should be going down.
Your logic works if you assume that we are making games at the same scale and the same way we were 15-20 years ago.
Games now more or less are equivalent to games back then. If you factor in the technology of the time, games were mostly on the bleeding edge of technology back then. Ocarina of Time was using primitive motion capture technology, for example, and it was so big for the time Nintendo had to make a special cartridge that had the largest storage capacity up to that point (and later games got even bigger, like Resident Evil 2). The N64 was a relatively cheap home console had texture filtering that at the time was a PC only feature if you had a top of the line GPU. Mid to low tier GPUs didn't even have that technology back then. Compare that with todays games targeting 4k or 120fps or including more detailed texture work, it is more or less equivalent.
Games back then took 20 people. Now, upwards of 2000 for modern AAA games. It's nowhere near the same.
The technology was severely limited back then, it is not now. It is more or less the same.
Development teams these days are bloated. You could probably cut more than half the marketing budget and the game would still be fine, just with like 150 less people in the credits.
Shaving 150 people off of the credits does not make up for that price differential. It's probably a much more worthwhile discussion to ask if games truly need to be as big these days as they're being made. Technological constraints or not, it's always going to be way more expensive to make games so large when they might be better games if they were smaller.