AAA games moving to $70 base pricepoint? Reasonable or Greedy?

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

I say the former. A <20% price jump after 30 years of almost none is pretty much overdue by any other product's standards. Especially for entertainment media and/or 'extra' goods. Compare, say, price of legal drugs 30 years ago to now. I might be biased there because here in Australia we tax the everloving shit out of anything even vaguely addictive but socially acceptable because why not, but an overall increase of 16-17% over 30 years? That's fuck all. Gamers are just spoiled in so many ways. Steam sales, indie games, subscriptions like ps plus, xbox, epic...but a 10 dollar increase? OH NO.

When Big firms are getting bigger, there is less competition, consumers have fewer choices and pay higher costs. Sony was right, Microsoft would increase Prices if they bought Activision Blizzard. Got to earn more money for that $69 billion acquisition, right?

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awesome999 wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

I say the former. A <20% price jump after 30 years of almost none is pretty much overdue by any other product's standards. Especially for entertainment media and/or 'extra' goods. Compare, say, price of legal drugs 30 years ago to now. I might be biased there because here in Australia we tax the everloving shit out of anything even vaguely addictive but socially acceptable because why not, but an overall increase of 16-17% over 30 years? That's fuck all. Gamers are just spoiled in so many ways. Steam sales, indie games, subscriptions like ps plus, xbox, epic...but a 10 dollar increase? OH NO.

When Big firms are getting bigger, there is less competition, consumers have fewer choices and pay higher costs. Sony was right, Microsoft would increase Prices if they bought Activision Blizzard. Got to earn more money for that $69 billion acquisition, right?

What's your point? Corporate greed exists? Thanks for the breaking news.

This was more about the messaging and consumer sentiment. Will $10 phase me? Not one bit. If I was a parent or struggling on a budget, yeah this might piss me off considering how well they are doing already.

I suppose the old notion of "What do rich people want?" "More", applies best.

I'll just let you two slug it out, shall I?

DS44: The reading-between-my-lines of that post is basically: paying premium for games now is exactly that. Premium. We have so many other options for 'affordable' gaming that I think the pricepoint of AAA on release is a non-issue. Have I paid a hundred bucks for shit this year? Absolutely. See my earlier posts in this thread. I do it because I can and because they're games I know I'm going to get easily 100 hours of entertainment out of. It's a sorry middle classer+ who can't justify a dollar or less an hour for solid entertainment.

Meanwhile I got former AAAs for pretty much free due to subs and massive 'after the hype' sales. Still a win as far as I'm concerned.

But if we want to talk about it from the company's side, well that's a whole other issue and I doubt anyone in here is qualified to discuss it with any real degree of validity or veracity. We are consumers, and that is how we have to approach it.

Of course then you could argue that's basically herd mentality and it's why devs/publishers get away with jacking up prices, normalising aftermarket shit like mtxes and DLCs and so on. But any gamer who's been around the block a few times will know that's just the latest version of a set of business practices game publishers have been doing...pretty much from the start. And it wasn't always, or even I think often, malicious or greedy. Take for example how similar games used to be in a series released separately. They had no choice there: there was no internet, patching wasn't even a thing. I CAN tell the visual difference between, say, Space Quest 1 and Space Quest 2 but these days they'd probably be part of the same game (indeed, the King's Quest remakes were released as chapters rather than separate products). And then there were things like add-ons: voice packs for Wing Commander. Graphical upgrades. Extra courses for golf games. All that.

Internet 2.0 changed everything (big duh there) because now publishers could sell expansions digitally and eventually games themselves. Are they still charging physical prices? Yeah, but I suspect they're also spending a heck of a lot more too. I can't say the pricepoint is justified but I paid 50-60 bucks for those old Sierra games. For Wing Commander. Eye of the Beholder. And so on. And they did not have full orchestral scores, voice acting, mo-cap, *batshit insane PR packages*, minor armies of well-paid devs, and whatever else goes into making a true AAA game. Suffice to say, I don't think it's unfair to look at the production of a AAA game much differently to a Hollywood blockbuster.

And I've already covered how much people will pay for a few hours of one of those.



So in the end it's going to come down to how much people are willing to pay per unit. And I'm 99.999% sure a ten dollar price hike isn't going to affect sales given we've already accepted that AAA on release is a premium option.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

I'll just let you two slug it out, shall I?

I don't have to have a point. If there is a point, it is there, he just didn't see it. If he has catastrophic point perception deficiency, surely this is not my fault.

Some people head might hurts when they hear this. Thus I am not gonna take responsibility for my actions.

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But if we want to talk about it from the company's side, well that's a whole other issue and I doubt anyone in here is qualified to discuss it with any real degree of validity or veracity. We are consumers, and that is how we have to approach it.

They would be secretly laughing in the room, rather than saying out loud who they are.

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Of course then you could argue that's basically herd mentality and it's why devs/publishers get away with jacking up prices, normalising aftermarket shit like mtxes and DLCs and so on. But any gamer who's been around the block a few times will know that's just the latest version of a set of business practices game publishers have been doing...pretty much from the start. And it wasn't always, or even I think often, malicious or greedy. Take for example how similar games used to be in a series released separately. They had no choice there: there was no internet, patching wasn't even a thing. I CAN tell the visual difference between, say, Space Quest 1 and Space Quest 2 but these days they'd probably be part of the same game (indeed, the King's Quest remakes were released as chapters rather than separate products). And then there were things like add-ons: voice packs for Wing Commander. Graphical upgrades. Extra courses for golf games. All that.

It is different stages of a product life cycle. In the begining it is about increasing the marketshare and video games is a niche. Companies are more focus on mass production and affordability. As video games market mature, companies get bigger and the market got bigger. Companies got more efficient at making money, there are more people spending and you can have Market Segmentation.

You can have an economy product, a mid-range product and luxury product on the SAME PRODUCT.

Blessed WERE we, not because the goodness of their heart but of necessity of circumstances. For good fortune do not last, and misfortune could be plenty.

When you'll soon need a $1000-2000 GPU to run those $70 games, they don't really seem that expensive anymore.

Personally, I would probably be OK with paying $70 for a game, if it wasn't loaded with MTX's, battlepasses and other ways of tapping into your wallet after you've already paid $70.

I haven't bought any game since they were $35, it is overpriced and their prices will drop eventually once they realized that most players are just teenagers with pocket money.

But no the price did not dropped, it increased instead, up to $70 per new game and $100 per "deluxe edition".

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DarthSki44 wrote:

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Reinhart wrote:

If you followed the news a bit you would know central banks printed a lot of dollars/euros, making them less valuable, increasing production costs of pretty much anything.

Will I pay 70 bucks? Hell no, you can get games for way cheaper. Just need to know when and where.

Yes, no one is disputing inflation or economic issues over the last 30 years since prices saw the last sorta universal jump.

The argument here is the record profits being being posted because the gaming market is well north of 200+ million customers in the US alone. There were only 250 million people in the entire US in 1990, now that's basically the video game market. That's crazy. Not to mention the global reach, digital storefronts, and proliferating live service DLC, MTX, and so on.

How do you justify "needing" a price hike given the profitability data on current games?

Simply saying that companies are now making "record profits" is kind of missing the point. It's about risk and return on investment. If I made a game for $4 million in the 1990s, and it brought in $24 million gross, gross profit might be only $20 million, but that's still a 5x profit return on only $4 million worth of risk.

If I make a game for $80 million in 2022, and it brings in $240 million gross -- yes -- it has made a profit of $160 million, but I had to risk $80 million to make that. On paper, I'm "making record profits," but that's an awful lot of money to risk to only get 2x in profit return. The industry is prone to fickle consumers who jump from one trend to another, and even the most hyped games can completely bomb.

People like to mention that the size of the video game industry has grown immensely, while ignoring the significant costs associated with operating globally. Your game needs to be localized for every region, which means needing different language/social norms experts, and navigating different laws and standards. That corporate lawyer you're gonna hire to help you understand a country's new digital media laws is going to charge you $1,000 per billable hour. Some countries straight up demand bribes to operate within them; other countries force you to take on a publisher who happens to be a subsidiary of the state, and you need to split revenue with them. Then there are server costs, navigating various tax codes, and other costs associated with doing business globally. Upscaling your business isn't just free money.

A curiosity that I ask for confirmation.
It seems that the collector's edition is sold only as a gadget, without containing the game (no activation code or key).
the content would be:
- Candle of electric creation
- mouse pad
- cloth map of the sanctuary
- Art book of about 300 pages
- 2 art prints
- 1 Horadrim Brooch
all "made in china" at an indicative price of about E/$ 110 + shipping costs (about another 19 €/$)

It seems that this choice was made to avoid having to create too many collector versions for each type of game platform.
But apart from this commercial choice, I have the clear impression that the material offered is far lower than its actual value.

I remember, (indeed I still have the receipt) paying the D3 collector €/$ 79.99 but it included the game as well as the gadgets....ok more than 10 years have passed in the meantime, but today if the game alone it costs €/$70
and the collector 110, we have a nice €/$ 180 of expense. (if you want everything)

I've always liked the physical boxes of games, I just wish that to buy the base game there is a physical box and not just buying a fucking activation code online.
Maybe I'm just a nostalgic old man who liked to see video game stores with shelves full of boxes.

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Phrazz wrote:

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Personally, I would probably be OK with paying $70 for a game, if it wasn't loaded with MTX's, battlepasses and other ways of tapping into your wallet after you've already paid $70.

Totally agree with your thinking.
it often happens to me, with current games, to totally "ignore" these practices of theirs.

Since I started playing game circa 1986, PAying for them was not a problem to me.

However it became a problem in the era 2000-ish when those AAA title started to be so short I could finish them in 2-3 hours.

I don t like paying 70 euros for 3 hours. I will buy Baldur s gate 3 for example because I know the game will be much longer than 2 hours.