The State of Video Games in 2025 | Play, Watch, Listen
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 5 фев 2025
- Donate to Wildfire Relief: tiltify.com/@c...
Composer-Specific Resource: docs.google.co...
State of Video Gaming in 2025 Presentation: www.matthewbal...
This show is brought to you by Patreon! / charalanahzard
Alanah Pearce: / charalanahzard
Mike Bithell: / mikebithell
Austin Wintory: / awintory
Video editor: / jackclishem
Channel art: / ollie.hoff
PWL Twitter: / pwl_podcast
PWL Instagram: / pwl_podcast
PWL Merch: www.redbubble....
PWL Patreon: / charalanahzard
I think what Mike was trying to say about the market not correcting itself was... The new normal might not be a better product. He brought up taxis and ride shares because after they took market share from taxis by having a lower price, they then raised the price higher than what it used to be.
AirBNBs, too. Streaming services. People forget that Hulu used to be free.
This was eerily similar to the "Netflix is competing with bed time" conversation. I'm definitely starting to see leisure time as a choice now: FB, Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, TikTok, video games, books, movies, TV, run, swim, friends, board games, D&D, ... There are now more non-social activities than social ones. More sedentary ones than active ones. And the social and active ones don't have billions of dollars of marketing and psychology research convincing me (and my friends) to do them.
This also reminds me of how we've lost third spaces so much I. E bars and clubs, but also parks for kids to play, and accessible forests to walk in. Those have been taken away, and been replaced by these sedantary activities.
As a person who IS in the legal Mary Jane business, yes, there are whole corporations shutting down/buying out small growers and mom and pop shops. They can only be confined to each state though (for the most part) because it isn't fully, federally legal so it can't cross state lines.
In Colorado, for instance, there is a business called The Green Solution and everyone knows them as the "walmart of weed" because they have so many stores but very low quality.
$100 for a game is crazy to me because I have a hard time justifying $70 games. There’s so many games out there that are cheaper that I haven’t played. Plus there’s so many good Indie titles nowadays. There’s maybe 2 or 3 games that I could see myself spending $100 on. Games that I’m a super fan of and can’t bear to see spoilers online before I get to experience them. That’s it.
On the other hand, maybe they are just accepting the fact that *you* are not their target audience for being a day one purchaser, and that most people who happily spend $70 will also be willing to spend $100.
I'm the same as you. But if publishers decide to raise the price of games to $100 they won't be losing my business, because I don't buy full price games anyway except in the rarest of circumstances.
😅 I would only spend that much on MHW, only 1 game per year. The rest of my gaming library is AA and indies. (But I live in Peru, $100 feels like x4 the cost to us).
A new favorite of mine is high profile (not on this podcast) games media ppl who have often insisted they want more shorter, smaller scale game experiences - dismissinh and/or voicing skepticism about games based on their $40 price point. Classic shit.
In Canada it already costs $100 for a game after tax...😢
If I love a game and can’t get enough of it, I’d probably be okay spending $100 on DLC over time. But no game is worth that much upfront without proving itself first. Pricing games that high will completely demolish the AAA segment of games. Gamers will get more and more conservative in their buying choices, too.
Over the last decade I thought we'd have learnt that the free market isn't as rational or as stable as we're told but I guess we're still working through that.
Really appreciate Austin sharing the really cool presentation!
It's surprising to me that other publishers think that we'd all not only pay $100 for "GTA VI" (we would!) but also shift our expectations and pay that much for every game going forward (much less likely). In the same way that Christopher Nolan is able to increase his asking price post-"Oppenheimer" because he's dunked so. many. times. Rockstar is that rare sort of studio that inspires that kind of loyalty. If prices across the industry jump, while median income for players remains the same, we're a year out from seeing articles with headlines like "Overall Sales Down! Industry In Crisis!"
But at that point it would become a fairly simple math problem. If the increased price is a bigger difference than the decreased sales, revenue overall still goes up despite fewer sales, which could be worth it for some companies. The same way streaming services will do price hikes despite losing some customers, as the increased price still brings in more money with the smaller userbase.
@@RRR3000gaming You might be right, but there's a difference between Netflix doing a price hike and *all* streaming services increasing their price tag. If the latter were to happen, folks would keep Netflix but drop other services. In this case, I think Rockstar wins regardless, but other studios should be wary about following the example.
if you buy gta 6 for $100 you are a fool. gta online is the *worst* thing to happen to the industry. period. its the reason rockstar left rdr2 to die - why develop more content for a good game when you can develop cheap and easily scalable content for a lame game where people pretend to be cops?
glad to see someone showing more than one slide. But I still bang the drum. The "State of Video Games" title for this powerpoint is deceptive for a broader audience. This was designed (and probably commissioned) by AAA publishers to show: "Where is the easy money?", "What money wells are dry?" and "In what ways can we get more money?"
It is just a matter of looking at the presentation format and order and the information gaps.
My Spotify started playing the new episode of this podcast and I think I was about as excited for this as a new episode of severance. Keep the conversations going guys they are always so interesting
I am sure people will buy GTA VI for a 100$, but that just means people will spend less money on other games.
I don't think Rockstar will do it, they make more money with Sharkcards.
41:14 Addendum for Austin: Monopolies are not inherently unstable. It depends on the type of market they operate in. For example, if a market has high entry costs, it does not necessarily require government intervention to keep the monopoly alive. This is a large advantage for first movers and leads to the formation of "natural monopolies". Then there are other mechanisms in which monopolies can stabilize themselves, most of which practically include disincentivizing competition. For example, they can temporarily sell at a loss and bleed out competition, especially if the competitor is geographically limited. Or they can alter their service to lock people into their system, leading to higher switching costs for consumers. And they generally have more wealth to influence policy to their advantage or just subsume all potential competitors before they become a threat. There are other factors, but my econ classes are a couple semesters back
I already responded to another similar comment, but just wanted to say a few things:
Natural monopolies can exist but are always temporary. I don't deny transitory ones; that's just life. But a true monopoly that formed through market forces, and stayed firm eternally? Can you name one? I can't and I have searched out of curiosity just now, and every single one of them involved companies that managed to lobby for government contracts (or were formed initially by the government itself), which is the opposite scenario.
Said another way, yes sometimes customers only have one choice and it's not really because government saw to it, but just a sort of coincidental sequence of events that let a company rise to prominence. But eventually, they will expose weakness to competition one way or another and be forced to innovate / improve, or lose market share.
Your last comment about them having wealth to influence policy is what I mean what I mention government intervention. Of course corporations do that! That's how they operate total or near-monopolies! They get the government to un-level the playing field! I am confident we're both opposed to that!
I think (based on nothing, I'm no expert) that y'all didn't consider 2 factors when talking about the "AI is not as cheap as it seems and eventually the AI companies will charge the real cost and things will explode", which are a) the workers and b) time. By that I mean: the AI companies don't have to start charging the real cost *instantly.* As long as there's money funding it, they can wait it out. And what happens when 5 or 10 years later they're *still* undercharging? What happens with all the workers that were substituted by AI? What happens to the creation of new professionals in the industry? How long would it take until there aren't even enough professionals anymore if the industry decides to go back to hiring real artists?
I don't think it is comparable to Uber or Doordash in any way, because taxi drivers just became Ubers and that's it. It's shittier but they're still doing the exact same job. The thing with gen AI is more akin to industrialization substituting artisanal crafters imo (idk how to phrase that better in English and it's 4:30am here, sorry).
I don't think it'll come to that point, I think the bubble will burst much sooner and I find gen AI pretty stupid (although technically interesting), but I think that's how the thought experiment should go. And, in that sense, if they can wait it out for long enough, I don't see how the industry could recover. The professionals will have simply moved on and migrated to other occupations, and new professionals won't be created because the industry won't be hiring anymore.
Anyway, those were my rambling thoughts, I could be just flat out stupid but this is how I view the thought experiment.
Great episode, as always!
I'm totally with Alanah in wishing we could get 10-15 hour game experiences back.
A subscription model makes short games more viable IMHO.
I actually want more like 6 to 10 hour games. Portal 2 is under 10 hours and it's one of the greatest games of all time
That‘s the reason why i am way more excited for south of midnight than GTA6. And i am not gonna pay 100$ for one game even gta6.
There’s plenty of 10-15 hour games around right now. 8-15 is the sweet spot for me, I rarely play anything longer than 20 hours.
@@StephenYuan not really. I work in the industry and an acquaintance of mine runs a studio that has been doing premium Apple Arcade games for years now. Apple actually gave them a very lucrative deal for timed Apple Arcade exclusivity. They've just started moving their games to Steam (5-15 hour experiences) because Apple has changed the kinds of games it considers for the subscription model - they now want experiences that can essentially "trap" players into a practically infinite play cycle.
All subscription models basically devolve into - how can we force the audience to keep coming back while putting in the least amount of money possible. And the easiest way of doing that is to turn everything into a pseudo-live-service experience.
I love how they admitted they are uninformed about the political issues but then still proceeded to give their opinions on them.
overconsumption of social media is eating our free time we could invest in meaningful enterteinment (gaming, reading, tv, etc) its crazy how different my brain feels in a weekend after having played 5 hours vs 5 hours of screen time.
Pls make it weekly ❤
One Love!
Always forward, never ever backward!!
☀️☀️☀️
💚💛❤️
🙏🏿🙏🙏🏼
Great to see you guys back & ok. Concerning times. We missed you. I enjoy P.W.L regularly. GG. 👍
36:59 It's only a matter of time until quality LLMs can be run on local hardware, so the "must be online" and "cost ineffective" arguments will be less of an issue. AI will most likely have a bigger impact on the production side of game development, used as more efficient tools and bringing down cost, that's one way the AAA industry could see another boost or at least find a temporary sustainability again, but we are not there just yet.
deepseek is already a glimpse of this, if not more
The reason the English speaking world seems to be in decline is because of... Capitalism. It's the end result of decades of profit as religion. In order to make more money each quarter, every western conglomerate has basically sold all our manufacturing knowledge, equipment, talent and assets to the far east. It led to bigger short term profit, but when you remove all the jobs from the west, at some point the population, which used to be employed making all those products, have all had their jobs outsourced to the far east, leaving very few ppl left who can afford to buy the products those companies make. Which then leads the same companies to use cost cutting measures like off shoring even more, leaving even fewer jobs. And all the time that ppl are still buying those products, all that money is flowing from west to east. Which is why the Chinese middle classes wealth has exploded while there is no longer a substantial middle class here... Only rich and poor. And now those same companies are removing jobs from one of the few unaffected sectors: creators. Even the heinous Henry Ford knew that if he paid his employees enough they would be able to afford to buy more ford cars.
While this is perhaps a contributing factor, this certainly does not fully explain why the English speaking world is seemingly (and, importantly, it is seemingly; we are not time travelers) in decline and is a very simple, reductive, reactionary answer. The waning of Western influence globally is not just "because capitalism".
@H3110ification I'll be more specific... The decline is due to wholly Unregulated, laissez faire capitalism. When almost everything we consume is produced by companies which are owned by a dozen or so conglomerates, and those companies ALL outsource production to the far east in the never ending hunger for short term profit, it's a race to the bottom. Under the current system, the people who consume the products are NOT the customers... The stock market investors are the real customers, & all decisions made by the companies are informed by that fact.
@H3110ification I'll be more specific... The decline we are seeing is due to laissez faire, Unregulated capitalism. When a dozen or so conglomerates own the companies that produce almost everything we consume, and those companies have been allowed to outsource and offshore their entire production apparatus in the never ending hunger for infinite growth, it's a race to the bottom. Consumers are not the customers under the current system... Investors are.
It is the language for aviation, space and programming.
I only buy like 1 full price AAA game a year because of the prices and I'm not the only one and a lot of us are just not gonna pay 100 bucks for a game because we either can't afford it or have other priorities 30 extra bucks is groceries or gas money
So interesting listening to Mike share those points about AI and LLM in particular when he said "unlss there is a breakthrough" I think that is exactly what just happened with deepseek
I'm glad Austin isn't a teacher. 😂
I think that there is a lot of recent evidence that suggests that if you overprice your game even a little in the eyes of the consumer, that can harm your game a lot. Ubisoft has run into this with Skull and Bones and Lost Crown, and Concord is a good example of what happens when you charge $40 in a market that is usually free to play. Maybe GTA will try it, maybe they'll get away with it, but I'd be surprised if the general games market doesn't correct back to the mean because Gamepass still exists, free to play live service games still exist, and social media, which is largely free, still exists, and as Alanah points out, that is competition for the time of gamers, who spend increasingly more time watching game content than they do actually buying and playing games.
I couldn't help but come back here after reports on Deep Seek AI and it's leaps in AI training costs. Like damn that was quick!
This discussion is miles ahead of 99 percent of the mindless drivel you find on teh internet video game discourse nowadays.
Something I didn't hear you mention is DeepSeek. This Chinese AI model, which matches the best western models in performance, was reportedly trained for 6 million dollars. This would be about a thousandfold difference compared to its US counterparts which reportedly had a few billion put into their training. Apparently the Chinese have figured out how to optimize their algorithms.
If that is the case, AI is going to be incredibly disruptive to the video game industry, and many other industries.
How I wish I could flick a switch and make it so all this GenAI nonsense simply didn't exist.
At a critical inflection point where we, as a species, should be careful and try to conserve our resources... We are too busy burning our water and energy away just to generate bog-standard emails, misinformation, and pictures of what Star Wars would look like if it was directed by Wes Anderson or whatever the fuck. All so that rich people can continue to make "number go up".
What an utterly bleak state of affairs.
Yeah deepseek is gonna change the economics for sure. And it also shows us that we don't know what will come out the blue and surprise us...
Wouldn't one of the main reasons why it's that much cheaper is because they're not first?
On the PWL point - I completely agree, it's so nice to have a podcast that actually sparks this kind of discussion in a healthy and nuanced way. I suspect this episode was filmed before DeepSeek made its broader waves in the news.
On the DeepSeek point - we wait to see whether that 1000x (or whatever order of magnitude) improvement in efficiency can be reverse-extrapolated back to an 1000x improvement in quality if we run the more efficient models on that 1000x hardware. I'm genuinely not sure what we'll see / what I'd bet on.
@@ConnorEllisMusic They aren't the first and they're also Open Source, which means that they're the beneficiaries of a bunch of shared information, which perhaps has something to do with their success.
I deleted any social media with shorts from my phone. Instead I bring my 3DS everywhere again and play some pokemon, mario, etc. when i have a few minutes of downtime. It also incentives me to watch a real movie instead
Regarding the game price discussion: I feel like GTA 7 can get away with bumping up their price because the game will (likely) be very high in quality and people are excited to play it. Not many big publishers have a game that is held in such high regard. Star Wars Outlaws underperformed at $70, FF: Rebirth didn't meet sales expectations at $60, and Concord lasted 11 days at $40.
I feel like there's just too few games that mass audiences are really stoked about to justify a $100 standard.
The audio was good this episode. Thanks! And I would totally listen to a "I love my job" podcast.
17:55 I found myself in this boat as well. I would spend more time on my phone consuming social media and RUclips than playing a game. I had to make a conscious effort to engage in my hobbies more often (video games, reading, etc). I'm now off most social media (deleted my Twitter, Instagram, and FB accounts) and I find myself engaging with my hobbies more often, and my desire to do so has increased. I still watch RUclips, but it's primarily for educational and gaming content.
The Ouraboros effect is I think just end stage capitalism and lots of things seeing that finally.
I don't understand how even if GTA 6 does end up being priced at $100, how do other game companies think that will justify them raising their prices? Those other companies aren't putting out games on the same level as GTA or Red Dead. Rockstar is on a whole other level when it comes to quality, polish, scope, etc
The opening cementing that it's just 3 now was heartbreaking 😢
Yeah I wish Troy hadn’t left
So, the idea behind tariffs is that the goods being more expensive to the consumers will influence them to buy more local goods. It's not a direct attack on the exporting countries or the companies importing the foreign goods, but an indirect attack because sale of these goods in the U.S. would theoretically drop in favor of local.
Obviously, the magnitude of this effect would depend on a number of factors, including people's cognizance of the price increase and differences, and whether that would actually influence them to change their purchasing habits. But, I'm just explaining the theory behind tariffs.
Interesting point about the number of Steam games launched last year. The number of games that "made it" was very similar in number to previous years. So there was a lot of games that went under the radar unfortunately.
It would be incredibly funny to me if GTA6 was priced under current norms. Especially because the majority of the income frocthe gta series as a whole now is from the online component rather than the initial buy in
Thought there was gonna be post-credits content and got excited...😂
GTA 6 can cost $100, no problem. If other publishers try and copy that, it will crash the industry. Games that sell 2 million copies at $70 will sell 200,000 (if that) at $100. We'll see sales numbers plummet leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in losses per game released at that $100 price point. The goal should be publishers wanting to copy GTA's quality and fan response in order to sell for $100 per copy. Yet instead, they'll release the same mid-tier broken mess and still want to copy the price point.
Anybody can charge $100 or whatever they want, but the MSRP for AAA games is $70 this generation. Doesn't mean they should because they'd be pricing out the more numerous casual consumers out there. They certainly wouldn't reach GTA V sales again with that boneheaded strategy.
Who forgot to trim the comp?
Wow...6 minutes at the end of honoring the people that support this type of content. Thats a lot
I can only speak for myself, but as a person that's mega hyped about GTA 6, if it turns out to be $100 (£85-90 equivalent) I think it will probably be the first GTA I don't support at launch. Like I like to support Devs but it just isn't worth that much to me at that price point, I'll just wait for a sale.
I’m just happy this podcast is a thing. 😂
Austin was on fire for a few weeks?? Damn, that is rough, hope your skin has recovered.
47:00 I don’t know, are people afraid of pain? Or are they experiencing overwhelming hardships, and people are experiencing a lot of pain and trying to find outlets. I’m not sure. I guess I found this conversation very cynical about humanity, and I get why. But I think people are trying harder then you’re giving them credit for. I use my public library. It probably would be easier to buy on Amazon, but I go to my local bookshop and the library. Most of the people I know do things that are less convient for them for social connections all the time. I don’t really buy into this idea that people are only chasing pleasure. I think were all just trying to get through as best we can. And this idea that people are becoming lazier and pleasure focused, avoidant of pain, to me feels like a simple explanation for a much more complex problem. Which is people are more engaged with the horrors of the world on a global scale then ever before. And its effecting us in a way we cannot totally understand. But I’m personally not interested in treating that as a laziness issue on the part of people, I think it’s an issue of social and political disfunction, rising polarization, and the isolation of so many people from their local communities, as well as many other intersecting issues. People are so overwhelmed by the current state of the world. I just don’t see this as avoidant, I see it as people trying to survive under terrible circumstances.
43:30 To still push back against what Mike was saying here, while prices are "sticky" and naturally occuring market corrections can be, generally (given elasticities, transaction costs, etc), somewhat slow in practice, there's no reason to assume that they are in general inefficient (holding for a moment that reality will play out differently from theory). They *can* be, but that is entirely dependent on what equilibrium the market corrects to. I don't see how the market correction process itself could be inefficient, unless Mike means to say the lack of immediacy in corrections is unacceptable, but that does not imply inefficiency in the strict sense.
Also, Amazon & Epic have been giving away free games for a while now. Not free to play games, real standalone games. Ok they are a few years old, but still why would people buy games when they know eventually they'll get them for free? As a gamer who spends quite a bit of money on games, I regularly go to these marketplaces and toss whatever is given away for free in my basket. Later on, when i feel like playing a new game, I just look up what's in there and I'm like: ah yeah, i forgot i had this! Saving some money that I would have otherwise spent on newer games.
I understand the inflation and cost, but also full priced games sell more and are already over a 100 with dlc and extra content. I'm never ever paying 100 for a game, idc if it's GTA 6 made by game Jesus. I'd rather wait years if necessary.
I think you guys were dancing around the monopoly issue a little bit. It's true that monopolies don't correct in the case that they don't have to. If there is truly no alternative and the product or service is necessary, why adjust? I think the main things missing from the monopoly part of the conversation were that: AAA games are not a monopoly and will can be in the way some industries can, and also that games are not necessary for most people. As mentioned, entertainment does often go up during downturns, but as also mentioned, everything is entertainment now. People won't pay $200 for a game when there's Netflix and TikTok and so on, not to mention lower-priced indie games. Not to say that games won't or shouldn't cost more than they currently do, just to address the monopoly of it all. I guess beyond that, the MSRP for a game is really just for day-one purchasers anyway. I don't have stats on this but I have to assume most people buy games at full price anymore rather than waiting for sales. Probably only their very anticipated games are worthy of the ~$70 in most cases.
Honestly, the jump to $70 wasn't that big, and I already buy fewer games because of it. If games start costing $100, I'd probably stop buying new games altogether and wait for big sales. Of course, I say this as someone who did not sign up for Netflix after they stopped the password sharing. I don't need a $100 game when I can watch my favorite streamer play it for free. Or watch something on one of the streaming services I do still have or read a book or watch a youtube video or hang out with friends. There are so many options for entertainment these days, and no matter how big the game is, it will almost never be worth $100 to me. I don't have time to complete most of the games I buy, so it doesn't matter if it has a map the size of Asia and 1,000 hours of content. I will not touch the vast majority of that because I don't have time, and there are so many other things vying for my attention.
Alanah, I really like this podcast and have been listening to PWL for a very long time so I don't mean this in any rude way but can you please let others finish their points. Sometimes Austin or Mike are in the middle of a sentence and you interrupt. I want to hear their takes too. Thank you.
good talks, actually interesting looks into the industry. But I would really enjoy if there wouldnt be so much talking on each other.
4:50 for discussion in the title
And that is why I get my weed from a 15 year old, who wants me to call him Ghost.
Sounds like Mike has been following Richard Wolff, and I approve.
if games go up to $100 (GBP for me but we already know the exhange rates don't mean shit, games cost 70 pounds but also 70 dollars a lot of the time), then i am basically never buying new games ever again. i already struggle to justify day one games at 70 pounds. this industry is so anti-working class that it's already starting to price a lot of people out. i don't even see subscriptions as the solution, because there's no consistency to any of them. i could get indiana jones for 15 pounds for a month, but PS Plus (premium) is more expensive but has almost zero day one games. obviously indies are gonna never be that expensive (at least not any time soon), but in terms of big budget, big studio releases... 100 pounds a game would completely price me out for good. what a strange industry.
I’m most definitely not paying 100 dollars for one game. In this economy? With the world burning, a Nazi in power, and an uncertain future? I don’t even buy $70 games. I just wait for a steam sale. If I really like a game and want to support it I’ll buy it physically. Or in full price. But Rockstar doesn’t need my support and I’m old enough in my life to appreciate the games I already have that I don’t need to hop on the latest trend/ release. If anything I appreciate older games and indies a lot more. I for one would love to see them try though.
Gosh I hope the game economy crashes so hard. We’re all going through it. What’s something more in this hellscape really? Greed and capitalism can only take and expand so much before it reaches a boiling point. Infinite growth is a fantasy. Unfortunately the world is run by single brain cell children that believe in whatever fantasy they want simply because of the power they think their money has.
Money only has the power it has because we decided to believe in it.
…
But we’ll get there.
no one bates an eye at the horses and buggy drivers because at the end of the end it was better, for the horse, and for the community itself, because they had an extremely huge problem with horse feces in big cities at the time XD
I'll be in the minority I'm sure but If GTA 6 costs more than £70 I will wait for a sale. Don't care about the fomo.
People argue but with inflation games are cheaper than ever but salaries haven't gone up with inflation and cost of living has.
weeed is not independant if you follow the money its politicians wanting to tax specific farmers so they can bring in new revenue so they can give a good review to their admin. and its specific farmers with large overhead wanting to farm it be 20% own 80% of the land. like its the same things as the rest of human history. and the selling of it..... like we hada store chain called "almost paradise" that also exists in other states, and once stuff got banned here they just moved that stock to other states
Love the pod
I've made my stand here in Australia .. i will not pay $120 AUD for a base game, no game is worth more than $100 AUD ... hell no game should cost $100 i'd grudgingly accept that AAA bullshit can be $90AUD .. you want my $120 AUD ... SHOW ME THE VALUE, ie there better be a substancial dlc pass ect for that price.
If Rockstar do charge 100 dollars and other publishers follow then it's the end of the industry as we know it. Rockstar may be fine but no one else will. The game industry will just collapse. Because The economic situation currently is not good and in the future really very not good.
the anti LLM stuff is really silly, you're looking at the tech as it exists now and imagining it will always be like this (i'm not pro AI as it currently stands i think these people want to own the world btw) and that's not how prediction works, you have to look at where it was, where it is right now, how long it took to get there, where it could be eventually. i feel like you guys look at it and think "oh, it's like this right now therefore for the next 30 years it will continue to be like this" the idea that you can dismiss their product which is working btw, people are adopting, people are using the services, doesn't matter that it's bleeding money it's still funding their research, doesn't matter that it's more expensive than hiring someone. it was always going to cost money, go look at nvidia exploding in value in a way that gaming alone wouldn't have caused, the promise of AGI will drive people to chase that tech relentlessly, they have the funding to do it, they have the intellectual incentive to chase it. meanwhile we just sit over here worrying about how games aren't doing so well while reality is burning
i find it funny when people say things like "my hope is that AI will bring the overall cost of development down"... how? how would it do that? what can LLMs actually do that would be as good if not better than the current output of actual humans? how would any of this reduce costs? no one has any actual idea how that would even work, maybe... because.... it's a load of marketing bullshit from executives whose sole purpose is to get richer and richer? funny!
Gaming is my main hobby the past couple of years. The last full price day 1 game I've bought, was Lies Of P (September 2023?) . Before that, RE4 remake. In 2024 I didn't buy a single one 70-80$ game. I've bought smaller 20-30 ones day 1 , but never full price. I either wait for discount, or get them physical second hand from people who played them and sell the disc afterwards around half price. This year I'll maybe get AC Shadows day 1 (huge fan of the franchise and it seems I'll get what I want from the new one too) and wait for Death Stranding 2. I may get spoiled on a few things since I mostly play single player games (Outlaws, Veilguard, Silent Hill 2) but my bank account appreciates this. 😁 Don't let FOMO get you to make overpriced purchases.
Hey where’s Ryan
Why cant we get Mr. indiana jones on here. I know hes already booked for every single game but cmon now. Its only an hour
Troy is a bit of a diva. Thinks he's too big for the podcast.
@zaidabraham7310 unless you know him personally maybe don't make accusations like that
@@meman320people LOVE making bullshit accusations and assumptions about people and situations they don't know enough about.
Everything HAS to be some drama. Can't be that someone simply lost interest in something/had other priorities (like ya know, work and raising a child) and left amicably and still have communication and are seemingly on good terms with their colleagues. No! Surely it has to be some behind the scenes drama and they're a diva!
@@meman320I love when people accuse others of being a diva, it's pure projection to say the least. Troy is simply a busy guy and cannot really stay committed to doing a regular podcast. It was even a miracle in the first place they had him on for so long and that was only really during COVID times where the work was on a downturn to the point Troy was looking at other avenues for revenue because he didn't have as much voice work booked at the time (to the point where he was considering the whole NFT thing at its peak because he ignorantly thought it could be of some benefit to him as an artist until he was educated in how it would actually hurt him.)
Considering that the landscape is now different and Troy simply doesn't have as much free time anymore on top of raising his kids, it is no wonder he isn't committed to the podcast anymore but is still very much friends with everyone here still.
Unless another pandemic comes that completely obliterates the work going around in the gaming industry again, Troy's not going to have the time. If anything his voice work is even more popular somehow now than it was previously and he already was one of the top picks in the industry for voice work. If I was that man, I would be totally thrown into my work too with the amount of roles I could get and how many different games I can be a part of
@@johnniewolf133 I mean, the guy has been in a TON of AAA games at this point and will be for the foreseeable future. Plus, he's in his prime. Gotta make that retirement money when you can.
I don’t think you guys have to be so humble speaking about tarriffs next to the “He doesn’t mean what he says, unless he does” crowd.
Well you got Musk trying to insert himself into the government over there and also at the same time spending money to essentially cheat or boost at video games for what could only be the sole purpose to make himself look like one of the "boys" but not just that he wanted to appear to be one of the top 0.01% of boys but that backfired hard (I actually think the average gamer would connect with him if he just played games for the sake of it and not pretend he was top 0.01%) so it is to be seen if he still considers himself a gamer or if he will turn on the industry and throw a tantrum like he always does when he gets called out though he seems to have moved on from gaming into channeling his best innermost Nazi which is probably far more worrying.
All of you are smoking on this one, even if GTA6 is sold for $100 there aren’t many other games that would be able to sell at that price. It’s been 12 years since GTAV so people might be able to justify that but if Ubisoft tries selling an assassins creed or farcry game for $100 it will end up hurting their sales because not as many people would see the same value in them
I’d buy almost any game for $100 except for GTA lol.
Is Ubisoft even worthy of any trust? Most of their products are mediocre at best. They are infamous for recycling the same game mechanics within a game. Their games feel soulless.
I mean technically Ubisoft already does charge that with their Ultimate Editions, but that includes extra content along with a season pass. The cheapest option is to subscribe to Ubisoft+ to play all the content at launch. Even if it's not a permanent purchase, a lot of games are one playthrough and done anyway. If anybody wanted to revisit the game for a new DLC drop they could always resubscribe later, or perhaps by then the base game will be on a deep sale anyway.
I don't see the AAA game MSRP changing mid-gen simply because of the popularity of the development studio or its games. Mainly because it'd price more people out on day 1 than it's worth, and most people would see it as unjustified because it's not for a brand new generation with new features.
Wow I’m early. Cant sleep.
It will be so fun, if gta6 release for just 50 dollars just to troll all the other video gaming companies 😅
In my opinion, the problem with scooping back to 20-hour games is that the genie is already out of the bottle. A 20-hour game is nice. If they all were, we'd start to feel cheated.
I don't ever think about length when determining a game's value. If anything, I'm less likely to play a game if I see in a review that it's full of vast environments that waste a lot of time being traversed without much variety in terms of side activities, meaningless busy-work quests and general grinding for the sake of it.
I'll take a well-crafted and polished 10-15 hour experience over a repetitive & long-winded game any day. Hell, one of my favorite games ever, Gone Home, can be beaten in under an hour. However, it's got a well told story with an impactful twist, engrossing atmosphere and lots of world building to investigate during the initial playthrough.
@@EternalCMO Oh I get what you're saying but I also didn't skip Cyberpunk because it was too long. And if CDPR came out and said "In the interest of scaling back scoop and cost Cyberpunk 2078 will be a 10-15 hour experience." There'd be riots on these digital streets. That's what I meant by the genie is out of the bottle.
This episode felt kinda cold and dark :/ I mean, lot's of shit is going on in the world and there are lot's of reasons to be pessimistic. But I started watching the podcast during corona and those times felt dark, too. However, no matter how grim the outside world and the topics, the podcast always warmed my heart in a way. I am a bit afraid it might loose that ...
Well maybe it does just for me or maybe I am just colder and projecting. I don't want to talk down or unfairly criticise. Just thought to share my feelings and see if anyone can relate.
Hoping everyone is doing as fine as possible these days.
Meanwhile in Canada, we've been paying 90 for grames for years...and already 100 for totk and ff7
I think RUclips is hurting games in more ways than one. Gamer RUclips is a cesspool of creators cashing in on outrage. It has taken me a LONG time to tune my algorithm to reduce the recommendations I get from RUclipsrs that do nothing but complain about video games being too buggy, too woke, too expensive, too short, too ugly, etc. People don't seem to know the difference between criticism and straight up complaining, and I have to think listening to someone complain about a past time will make you want to spend less time doing it.
Second!! ALWAYS loved her hair 🤩
The "I'm not paying $100 for a game!", as a Canadian who's been paying OVER $100 for about 5 years now per game, is a very funny thing to watch unfold.
Rip our wallets even harder with 2K jacks up the price. $130 per new release I'm gonna PUKE.
(Am I gonna stop buying games? Lmao you crazy)
whatever the price of GTA 6 turns out to be, it will be a reflection of its budget. If you are making a billion dollar game and people can actually see that in the game you made then yeah, the price won't be much a problem. I'm not sure other developers can excuse a high price like that though.
In my country, Playstation Store existed in a tax loophole that, effectively, made their games duty free. When they closed that loophole and they were required to pay taxes, they kept their prices exactly the same and put a line at the end of the transaction, adding the exact amount for taxes. Over here, you never see taxes as a costumer. Yoh see final prices; NOWHERE, except the aony store you get a line with taxes. If I go to a brick and mortar, Astrobot has a tag for $70 and you $70 and no more, if I buy from Sony, Astrobot is $70 plus taxes.
If anyone thought for even a second, that Sony is gojng to pay tariffs from their side, hou are dreaming. Games will be going up for at least the amount of those tariffs, in both physical and digital.
GTA 6 probably will justify the spike in price for it, but that is a Rockstar game now a once in a decade event... the rest can't seriously think can compare OF COURSE THEY'LL TRY TO CHARGE 100USD not making their games better first... good luck.
Guys Tencent is majority owned by a South African company, not Chinese...
yeah no, it's majority Chinese owned. As of 2023 at the latest.
@@DavidGowers I dunno. google "tencent majority owners" and you will see Prosus (which is NAPSTERS) at 24% and if you go to marketscreener you will see Chinese own 1%
@@DavidGowers Not true - google it (I can't post links here, it just removed the comment)
so Troy is officially out huh
Is Troy too busy these days for his friends?
Hey man, Troy hasn't been aon the podcast for a pretty long time and they have clarified he's just very busy and went in a different direction
@digitalarsenal5234 Thx. I know he hasn't been on in a while, I was just lamenting that fact. I hope he and Austin are still friends.
@Ted2of25 No worries! It's unlikely there was any friction, Analah actually mentioned trying to get him on the podcast for the Indiana Jones episode, but wasn't possible