You won't like hearing this, but the poor gaming industry NEEDS to raise prices to at least 100 USD

ALSO you don’t raise prices to “adjust to inflation,” that’s not how inflation works. Raising prices IS the inflation.

Ok now adjust my salary by inflation

my favorite living Russian is FitGirl

It is absolutely true that, adjusted for inflation, video games were more expensive in ye olden days; an NES at launch costed more, inflation adjusted, than a PS5 costs today.

The fatal flaw they’ve committed here is that they’re applying macroeconomic shifts to a microeconomic product. Inflation is a measure of total prices, prices can go down or stay neutral in one sector while drastically increasing in others and hence net inflation. Tech is notorious as a sector where real prices have dropped, as there’s way more factors in prices than “muh polygon count.” The PS2 era was much less competitive than the current era, for example.

the market for games has also exploded though

very popular game in the late nineties would be lucky to break a million sales in it's opening week
now that's completely expected for any aaa game no matter how shit

if you can't afford to price your game at $60, then you should just make a smaller game. AAA game devs should stop pumping out bloated garbage

There's like a billion gamers now, anything above 15 money is theft and should be pirated

I'm not just going to say no, but I'm going to say hell no. For instance, my pet peeve this season is having loved Mortal Kombat for over two decades, only to find that they're implementing a wi-fi filter to essentially tell players like me, who live in a place where we can't just run 50 to 100ft of ethernet line to suit some pissy settler on the other side of the state, that we're not welcome. What the actual black-and-blue fuck makes publishers think I'm paying 70 bucks for some fuckshit that can filter me out of the reason I came to it, which is for competition?

No cap I fuckin hate gamers nowadays. Seems like they're all spineless corporatized wretches who're just LOOKING for reasons to split the wallet open for their overlords.

The audience size when this person was little was a tiny fraction of the size of the audience today.

This motherfucker pays for game. What a loser.

Now a days you don't need to absorb physical media costs and are open to the Chinese market. Almost half of all steam users now are from China.

I'll go enjoy my fifth playthrough of a $20 indie game instead thanks

Video games have gone from niche to mainstream meaning they sell more copies than they used to. If we wanted to keep profits in line with where they were in the past, we would need to decrease the cost of games to compensate for the increase in sales.

What if I told you games are actually priced efficiently for the current market? They don't want the games to be more expensive because fewer people will buy them. They want microtransactions because they make more money with them then they would if games didn't have them but were more expensive. The true desire of publishers is to have both expensive games and microtransactions. The market will eventually shift to have both, you're already seeing it in some cases like MWIII. Once they hit the limit with microtransactions, they will raise prices on the base game. Don't worry.

When you've just learned about inflation in Econ 101 but you haven't taken Econ 102 yet so you haven't learned about price elasticity.

In 2001, the AAA game FF10, for the Playstation 2 cost me 60€.

However, in 2021, I could purchase that same game for a pittance - merely 5€.

Inconceivably, this game had better game play, a more complete and compelling story line, more hours of game time, and in several instances better graphics than the 60€ equivalent FF15, released a full 15 years later.

This would suggest that games are actually deflating in price year-over-year, despite suffering from increased DLC and native advertising bloat.

This is due to a little thing called SUPPLY and DEMAND. You see, the SUPPLY of video games is always increasing. Every year, dozens of new games are published and they all have to compete not only amongst themselves but with ALL PRIOR GAMES. However, the DEMAND for these games is predicated on the number of people who want to pay microtransaction freemium crap, and this pool of buyers is falling as appreciation for vintage classics is on the rise.

If you simply took a little time to brush up on your ECONOMICS 101, you would realize that this should bring the PRICE of VIDEO GAMES back DOWN. Your claim that games should be increasing in price is both ILLOGICAL and AHISTORICAL, as the market rate for games has been falling consistently over time IN THE FACE OF INFLATION.

So maybe put that in your PIPE and SMOKE IT.

Why would a good capitalist company that implements microtransactions remove them if they raised prices? That would just be leaving money on the table.

Ok, now can you tell me why adjusting for inflation has a single thing to do with what the price of something should be?

Gaming is a bigger industry than Hollywood. Do you think they are running on low margins or something?

Then raise them to €90. They're acting like they need consumer permission to raise the price. Sell your slop at €90 and see how many people buy it, lmao.

That's weird, I explicitly remember paying $100 for Mortal Kombat 11 (I know I'm a fucking idiot) and yet I still see microtranssctions and paid DLC in that game's menu 🤔

Okay let’s do some back of the napkin math

($60/game - Cost of distributing physical products) * not that many sales = Not that much money.

$60/game * many many sales with no distribution cost = Much more money

Digital sales and a much larger market mean game prices should’ve gone down not up. If a company is making a profit, even if it’s just one lonely dollar per year, they do not need to raise prices. And game company profits have been going up over time.

Edit:

In their first year of sales, GTA 3 sold 4 million copies, and GTA 5 sold 45 million. If we adjust for both inflation and increased sales to make the same amount of money, GTA 5 should have sold for $6.60 a copy.

Gamers are fascinating, because the industry is one of the most blatant examples of capitalism being unfriendly to consumers, yet they will steadfastly refuse to ever form any sort of class consciousness about it, and will always blame literally everything else other than the idea that the system encourages companies to adopt this sort of behaviour.

Charge me more for my slop

Please, can we start a subculture of "alt-gamers" or something?

Fuck gamergate for flooding the gamer identity with rightoids so you get idiots begging porky to charge them moar. The only criticism they will ever give to games is that it sometimes makes them examine their own biases. Quite literally, their only complaint about games is that it makes them think sometimes.

If you don't want games to be littered with microtransactions or ads, then you have to accept that

Y'all motherfuckers remember like, a decade ago, when these gamer types were talking the same shit, about how it's microtransactions or higher prices! in games?

And then the standard msrp of games went up anyway?

Activision makes billions every time they release COD and now they’re $70 and you still have ads and microtransactions. It’s the same justification for streaming services and premium versions and you still get ads, just “reduced”

There are millions more gamers now so anything above 15$ is theft

When I was a kid, the neogeo console came out for $650 and the games were $200 a pop. Uphill, both ways!

i have ultra broke friends that will scrape and scrounge to upgrade video cards so they can play really pretty looking games at launch and they're always trying to get me to upgrade my shit so i can be part of the spectacle. we're all well into our 40s now and playing some new game on the highest settings just doesn't improve my quality of life the way that it did when i was in my early 20s. if i'm gonna drop some hundos on something now, it's gonna be like shelving or tools to make my life easier. there are so many enjoyable games that are run like a dream on a 5+ year old video card.

trying to stay on top of all the latest is rich people shit and it's wild to me how many not-rich people get sucked onto the treadmill.

Cool, still gonna steal em.

Makes sense to me, Fortnite is so good because of the shocking and embarrassing amount I've spent on it

Don't worry, if I don't like hearing it I'll simply choose not to listen to you. And if I don't like paying whatever the prize should be I'll simply not do that either.

More games are sold now than twenty years ago, more DLCs are sold now than twenty years ago, advancement in computer technology has made production overhead cheaper, most games are sold digitally which makes production costs even cheaper, programmers are not unionized and constantly overworked, and people will not buy baseline games approaching 100 dollars

What irks me is that the people who are willing to pay higher prices for commodities with weak rationales / illogical arguments are sometimes the same ones who think it's OK for people to starve to death because they're poor and would never dream of permitting health care to be universal because it means higher income tax. Lots of "little people" are perfectly content remaining "little" and giving their money away to the "big boys" who already have the big money.

This is a really good point since videogames are a niche interest with high original development costs.

Not like companies are charging $70 for the same shit every year and you don't even get a physical copy of it anymore.

LOL, LIMEWIRE

Wouldn't that just drive people to pirate more?

Permanently Deleted

Given that games are like the ultimate luxury product, I really couldn't care less if the treat-addicted gamer piggies have to pay more. What I do care about is developers being compensated fairly for their work.

My hope is that it would allow Independent developers to actually sell their products at a fair price, since there seems to be the implicit expectation that they can't cost more than $20, despite often being better than comparable AAA products.

Not to mention that the market is much smaller for Indie games so they end up suffering twice.

My only point of reference is growing up with the Wii in the early 2010s, games were like $50 at most and now basically all the major titles on the Switch are $60, despite the Switch not really being a huge upgrade tech wise (at least compared to like the PS3 vs PS5, always played Skyrim at my friend's house and the graphics were nothing compared to games like Elden Ring)

I’m not sure I even fully disagree with this. What I do disagree with is the share of the surplus value that goes to the people actually producing the game!