Exactly, people fail to realise that there's a certain price point the majority won't buy at which point the price gets lowered because nobody is buying so the company isn't making money. It's the same logic where people say monopolies are bad because "then they can charge whatever they want" they can't because people won't buy it if it doesn't fit into their idea of what something cost. EDIT: Before people want to continue replying to me about "What about this bad monopoly that society/people need and have no choice with"...We're on a gaming video talking about video games, use you're brain and get the very obvious understanding that we're talking about monopolies in things like the gaming industry.
Yeah, I live in Eastern Europe and there is no damn way I can afford 100 euro games. I would just buy it down the line with discount. I would also like to point out that even if the price has no increased for a very long time, other things have increased. The number of people has increased and we no longer buy games in a hardware store its all digital. So leaps and bounds more people + digital = insane profits for them. They can spare me the "its to cheap" bullshit. Also the problem they are having is that gaming is not needed for day to day living. As prices go up, sales go down and piracy go up. Unless you are doing well with money like in the west (some people), you will not spent 100 euro on a game. That is like a huge part of your monthly income. What they need to do is pull a Elon Musk and start getting rid of the people who are not really needed for making a game. How many people did Musk fire and X is doing perfectly fine?!
100$ game used to be collector edition with art book, figurine, ost, now you get an unfinished game that will ask you another 100$ for battle pass/ expansion stuff 😂
@@blackcitadel37 People will keep buying it as these companies control the majority of the market. Also it doesnt take many people to buy for these companies to be profitable. If only 10% of the player base buys battle passes and the occasional micro transaction, thats hundreds of millions of dollars. You keep blaming the consumer when in reality most people dont support this stuff. Like in any free to play game, 90% of players never spend a dollar. Yet the game will make record profits.
I remember with New Vegas I got the aluminum case for $80 and some extras, the extra 20 was worth it. similar with halo wars. now I can buy a digital edition of the equivalent for $100 and get literally nothing i want. so sad
@@EggEnjoyer Yes but if price of entry for a game goes up by much higher than average inflation rate, people just aren't going to be able to justify purchasing it at a certain point. We've come to a point where any game I see over $60, I expect to be disappointed after buying it, because AAA devs have gotten so lazy/out of touch with their player base that they consistently fail to deliver. Meanwhile, no game I've bought under $40 for the last five years has disappointed me. There are a few exceptions, like with Baldur's Gate 3, but they are a rare gem nowadays.
@@EggEnjoyer Life is life. No one is entitled to anything, and there are plenty other things to do than play videogames (also, we still have indie games; you can even play older games for free, if you must). We will be just fine. It's unfortunate that they will keep taking advantage of certain people out there, but that's bound to happen at any time, just due to the variability in wisdom, awareness, and consciencessness among people.
I put down my pirate hat back in 2013 and started buying games on discount for all these years. But if games start releasing at 100$...I'm afraid I hear the sirens calling me back to the seas I once abandoned. Well, that or just waiting to buy a game a year or two later on a really good discount.
My problem with paying $70 and up for games is that game quality is progressively getting WORSE. Plus I have a large enough backlog that I could never buy another videogame again and never run out of games.
Game quality getting worse for majority of games i can agree with. I believe gaming season has been dried up for few yrs with only few noteworthy ones worth buying. Single player being Elden Ring or God Of War, etc and these have a lot less replayability than multiplayer but defo passed the criteria for triple A game being worth the money. These gaming conglomerates raising prices on us and lowering quality, while they are using unreal engine 5 which lowers production cost/speed by a lot. So to just name an example the new Cods copy and paste the last few yrs minimal effort is fk'n blasphemy to us gamers an the franchise itself. Should be ashamed for charging their prices...no campaign or zombies either 💀
And dont get me started on Rockstar I must have paid 15-20 for tht San Andreas masterpiece and they askin for 5x the price 20yrs later. For a game tht will prob be ai generated and have the lowest production cost of all of em (excluding inflation obviously). Side note they released Gta 5 in 2013💀doubt any of the same developers tht put heart an soul into the game are still around or we'd have 6 alr lmao. There's been 16+ final fantasy in this time frame ffs 😂 thts a company tht actually deserves are money/admiration
Why would I pay $100 for an unfinished AAA game when I can buy a fully finished and S-Tier Indie game for $15? Or just buy the AAA game a year later when it's on sale.
60$ + battlepasses + gatcha + store + fomo + whales "weve" been surrounded by people paying 100$+ for "games" for years I buy Monster Hunter games, its got a store now since its doing live service. 60$ game, 60$ expansion, and nothing in the store is EXP Boosts or meta equipment like mmos. MH is doing good live service compared to every other AAA company. I buy Souls games and they get expansions too that are worth buying. These two series of games, are worth playing for 100s of hours, hell even 1000s of hours. Not once are you expected to buy anything beyond the game you purchase.
Yes, and all those games aren't finished at release. It's always more intelligent to not buy any games (just pirate them, like Palworld) or to wait until they are really finished with all DLCs, no more updates and get the "Gold/GOTY Edition" whatever with everything for a fraction of the original price. Anything else would be an insult to my intelligence. There are way better things, real things, you should invest money, like the family etc. like things you really need for life.
@@m3Zz2012 Parents playing video games with their kids, and sharing in the experience is also a thing you can do. Yes, there are more important things than video games, however, video games are art. Knowing what good art, is, is something that parents can pass onto their kids rather than just sitting them in front of the TV or a tablet with mobile games.
@Platinumdose420 what's the problem with gamepass? It's a good value right now. I play games on it with my pc and if I like it I'll buy it on steam. Stop trying to flex. It just seems pathetic.
The fact that they want us to pay $100 for the base game, that is probably incomplete to begin with. Then charge for DLC, microtransactions, and more content. It is ridiculous. Then, you have to factor in people who do pre-orders to possibly get bonus physical items such as posters, artbooks, music, and other collectibles. They would be paying possibly DOUBLE if companies are to follow through with this financial shift.
@@BG1435qdecrease executive salaries. Literally there are more games than ever and people spend more money on video games than ever, so they sure are eating well.
Meanwhile, Palworld at $30 is the third best-selling game on Steam. If these publishers want to raise their prices to $100 per game, they should only produce 10/10 games.
RDR2 even if it was completed in full would not be worth 100 dollars asking price,hell even Cyberpunk 2077 if it was released in perfect state with all promises fulfilled would not be worth 100 dollars.They removed all cost from manufacturing and shipping of physical copies and they still remained 60 dollars,no idea what makes them think 100 would be acceptable.Most games from AAA publisher these days are not worth even 60 dollars.
for real at 100$ im expecting a PERFECT game....NO bugs, no boring part,, a fantastic story, and graphics at the top of what is possible....fail even once at one of these and im burying the game as if they personally hurt my mom
imagine paying 100$ for a Ubisoft game, crashing when you enter the menu and the character entering the floor or passing through walls every now and then lmao
Considering these AAA companies can't even launch a complete game (with all of their promised features) upon release, I find it laughable that they think they can upcharge me even more for a half-baked product. No other industry, except software companies, could ever get away with this crap. If a clothing store attempted to make you pay full price for one sleeve and then "roadmap" their way to the rest of the sweater in the years to come, people would freaking LAUGH at them and they would go out of business.
The funny thing all the way from the early Nintendo NES days the standard new price was 50$. That was also standard for many PC games, all the way up till PS3 days. The only real increase was with the console themselves or special editions. So within a decade they shot upward to 60$ standard. Then Blizzard tacked on a 70$ price tag. Now they just want to skip all the way to 100$ right off the bat?
The problem with raising triple A games to 100 dollars is the games we've been getting aren't even worth the $70 we're paying right now. Now I'll be waiting for 40% off sales at a minimum before purchasing any newer games at the $100 price point.
@@OggiOggiOggi I can afford to pay 100 for a game, doesn't mean I want to (which I don't, so I wont), I'm more than willing to wait a year or two to play a AAA game to go cheap enough on sale as not to offend my sense of worth when it comes to time/money spent
To be honest 60 dollar 15 years ago and now is a complete different proposition of worth. Every other product rises with inflation too, so why logically should games be different. It's just funny that Blizzard of all companies has to spearhead it.
I think a $100 price point for games will make people more discerning with their purchases. I may just be naive but I think $100 could actually backfire for gaming companies
don't forget this is still in USD, other countries with their exchanges, in UK it will go up to 80 and you're daily income is around 80 BEFORE tax, in Australia its $150 on your average wage that's 1/4 of a weekly pay, the increase in prices will if not mostly encourage piracy, i know a few years ago when i saw a game selling for 40 USD i would just pirate that shit, but if its 100 im 100% gonna pirate that shit, price increase is fine when leveled with wages and its value
It is even more funny at poorer countries. Here we have games that are 60-100 USD, and average salary is 500 USD per month. Before tax, before bills, before food and other costs of living.
@@leftoverpizzza3337 99% of the videogame community love to shit on AAA games, whilst handing over money for the super mega deluxe pre-order super cool version. Every. Single. Time. If they stopped being thick, we'd get good games, at good prices, but, man-children gunna man-child.
most games are released incomplete and super buggy these days. Imagine paying full price for a car that randomly shut itself off while driving and the manufacturer says you have to wait for the "engine stability patch" to be released...
@iviaverick52 that's a lemon car and why warranties are needed and info is about the car is required to be gone over before purchase. While most digital game fronts do their best on the other hand to get in the way of refunding garbage.
Im rarely even paying 20$ for a game now a days. I almost always buy games at a 50%+ discount or I wait till they are discounted. I have too many games to play without a care to a game just coming out and being popular.
If it's the game that I will spend a little time I pay 20$ for it cause it at that price range that I wouldn't care if i would play it or not, if it's the game that I know I will enjoy for countless hours I pay 40$, anything that is higher I just wait for discount till it's in price range. 60$-70$ is non an option, for that money i could eat 1-2weeks...
I have been through this so many times with friends. I have been a gamer for a long time. About 10-12yrs ago the game companies put out a probe to see customers reactions were to a possible AAA price hike to $70. Well it didn't sit well and the issue went away. Any product is going to have a real worth value to the majority. It doesn't matter how long the price has been stagnant. If your at the cap....then you are at the cap. Normally products get improvements over time and the price creeps up but this industry has not done themselves any favor in this department for about 12-15yrs. They haven't exactly shown they know how to make good/fun games anymore. Quality has gone down and bad business practices have expanded. That previous negative probe response came back in the worst possible form. We get basic bug-ridden skeleton games because they don't put effort into them and they carve them up and sell you the content they held out as DLC. They have 3-4 versions of games that you can give them more money for worthless additions. They still push pre-orders when its not even needed anymore while they promise to deliver on content/fixes etc....In many cases it never happens. They even fleece you with the infamous "Get early access". Is the game ready to release or not? Its just the release date but they wring you for more money thinking you have some special access when all they are doing is pushing the filthy standard version buyers back. So really they been scamming many of us way over $60 for many years already because we told them NO years ago. They created this bed......they can sleep in it.
🙄🙏 Preach. I 100% agree. If the quality of the product is there, the revenue from sales would reflect that, and developers wouldn't feel undervalued by their userbase only buying at sale prices. If the developers feel like they aren't getting an appropriate cut, that is between the devs and the publishers, and is not the consumers fault to cover their misappropriation of resources and funds. There are way too many cooks spoiling the broth. Mind you, console ports tend to make things even worse, and online service based games/ modern multiplayers change the dynamic a bit.. But that aside, not all of us can afford to support that toxic AAA preorder culture with our disposable income, only to receive disappointing and irritatingly subpar content riddled with gamebreaking bugs and glitches. They price hike it and they'll have worse launch sales, and the smart majority will just wait 'till the holiday sales and such come around at 20-80% off, during autumn black-friday or winter X-mas Holiday etc, or even a year or so later when many titles might have GOTY editions with most if not all the microtransaction/ preorder goodies/ DLCs/ Season pass contents bundled in while on sale, when the creators try to get that last spurt of profit. Then it'll more than likely be in the updated and slightly less glitchy state it should have been released with in the first place, like what used to be required for cartridge/ disk game releases without updates to even be viable. If not, by then we will see via reviews/forums if it has been abandoned by the devs and online playerbase because they made a quick buck and never fixed any bugs after making hollow promises... [*Dirty glances toward Bethesda, Blizzard, etc..*] Assuming the woke culture doesn't allow them to censor us and report/hide negative reviews for "slander" and "review bombing" while the snowflakey devs and execs whine about their customers being cheapskates and mean old bullies.. They'll need to learn the hard way, through the wallet- "the customer is always right".. Case and point though, over the last 14 years my steam account alone has over doubled to 18.5k in current market value according to steamdb, and I've probably spent FAR closer to the minimum, roughly 4.5K total, by being frugal with my practically non-existent recreation budget, and watching for sales on humblebundle etc. Granted I've been through a few $700-$1200 custom gaming PCs roughly 7 years apart with misc upgrades to each along the way, but that is still fair game with the price of recent consoles I didn't feel the need to fork out for, and that's not even mentioning my retro console collections which are only growing, and skyrocketing in value due to the resurgence of popularity due to modders and refurbishers kicking it up a notch during/following the lockdowns!
And even funnier is that lot of the time the indie game you bought for $20 actually has way more things to do and way more value than those AAA-games. Palworld is good recent example of this.
Just look at what happened to CA the quality of their dlc has dropped and the quantity of content too for a higher price… result less sales and less money by a big ass margin and then they are obliged to cut people off. Additionally, the cost for a game is not the same everywhere for exemple here in Canada, a game after tax will cost around 90$ if it goes up to a 100$ in other county like the US the Canadian cost will go up tremendously. Not just by 10$ but like ~35 ~40$
10 page manual? that's hardly a manual... look at the manuals that came with old games like EverQuest, Oblivian, Icewind Dale, Baldurs Gate etc. etc. they were BOOKS
I remember a time pre-internet where if you released an unfinished game, there were no patches and you would fail, plus if you bought a game, you owned it. Now they want $100 for something you will never own, can be deleted and will prob be released half baked. Dear consumer....you are partially at fault here.
Actually, no, the games never belonged to us. If you read a manual from the time what we bought was a license to play the game via cartridge/cd/etc. Understand by this that once the support reached the end of its life, there was no plan to give you a new one because it was never a lifetime license. That being said, the advantages were that we could still resell the said license, which is generally not allowed by dematerialization.
You're speaking their language. We aren't consumers we are customers. If you see yourself as a consumer you might as well waste all your money "consuming" like an idiot.
If people keep buying they can charge whatever they want. I do think though you will see many more people waiting for reviews or to see what their friends have to say about games over a $100 price point before they make the purchase. At some point the expense is high enough that nobody is really buying it on a whim anymore and only people who are seriously invested. Another thing to note is that a lot of the most popular games are cheap or free: Fortnite, League of Legends, CSGO, PalWorld, Dota 2, Vampire Survivors, Among Us, etc.
The worst part is that they won't compromise and charge $100 upfront but have no micro-transactions. We will have $100 games filled to the brim with $5 to $20 dollar micro transactions, $40 dollar expansions, etc. Then you're spending around $250 to $500 dollars for "the full experience". All this will achieve is me pirating stuff again.
This is what Square Enix did with FF 16. I bought it day one for 100 EUR to support the devs given the fact we no longer see such big budget games and a few weeks later they announce DLC for 20 EUR so basically it will cost me 120 in total because I want to get the full experience. F*** Square Enix.
All that will happen is the big developers will die off... want to charge $100 for the next pokemon... OK Palworld exists for like $30... want to charge $100 for Diablo 5, that's cool poe 2 is free to play and surprisingly generous with its pay structure. Tldr - all that will happen is new indies will capitalize on the failures of giants.
$100 is very steep for me (South East Asia), even with discount down the line, it will probably go back to $60 which is borderline. For those who want to know, USD 1 = MYR 4.73 and our basic salary is set at RM1500 (in main cities). So, a AAA game at $100 is basically 1/3 of average salary. The 7 seas look so good nowadays.
Same everywhere in South East Asia, even India after graduating salary is 400k at best & even after 8 years it's 1200k in major jobs. And 1USD = 83.11INR now. So 8.3k for a game without regional pricing at 400k a year? 33k a month means it's more than a forth & close to a third of salary
Game prices are so dumb for poorer countries. Why is a game 1/30th of a salary in one country but 1/3rd in another? No wonder people pay $80 for new games, it's like $20 for a poorer country.
I got a sim racing wheel and started with Forza Horizon 5. They want money for the Hot Wheels, Rally expansions. More money for car packs. You can easily spend hundreds. Then I found BeamNG and after buying the game I can just add cars. No need to grind for hours to get a new one.
If companies are expecting consumers to spend 100 bucks, then as a consumers I’m expecting games to be complete and not need day one patches in order for me to play.
Exactly. Then, if you can prove to steam that the marketing was misleading, you'll get a refund past the 2hr limit. I got refunded for Destiny 2 Lightfall after like 20hrs.
This will absolutely lead to less sales if games are gonna be $100. And the thing that hurts the most is that all the bullshit with microtransactions and all the shady underhanded monetizations practices will still be there on top of the heightened entry fee. They want their cake and eat it to. This is purely driven by greed and not a NEED.
I will wait 3 years and buy them for 19.99 but will never buy a new release again. I may not buy any more digital games which is all nowadays. I want control over my games.
It's purely driven by inflation, much of which was caused by the average American that doesn't understand that if you raise the minimum wage to 15 dollars an hour that the cost of everything will go up to compensate for it. Well, if you wanted that big minimum wage hike, you got it. Along with everything that comes along with it. Not only that, but video games have cost about 60 dollars for, at least, the last 20 years. Why is it that cost of everything else under the sun goes up due to inflation, but games are supposed to stay the same forever, and never go up? That just doesn't make sense. If you want all the crappy microtransaction to go away, then you have to be willing to pay a bit more for the actual game. These corporations are going to get the prophet margin they want one way or another. The only way to effectively protest that is to stop buying games from the companies that do it. But people wont stop. No one has any integrity these days. Instead, they'll resort to stealing, which just makes the problem bigger for everyone.
Even myself making basiccaly the avrage pay for my area its rough. With how expensive everything hase gone up and a few medical things last year draining my bank account, im trying to save money. If Aaa makes games 100 anytime in the next few years then il be buying very few at launch, hell im already planning on holding off on gta6... and its not like iv not spent a ton over the years but ya up the price that much so quick then im gonna be far more choosie.
It actually is, here in brazil we even get cheaper prices on steam since the conversion on the prices are not 1-1, and still the minimum wage around here is a bit more than 1k (in our currency) and like $100 is R$496 currently so its pretty much half of the minimum wage, it is terrible and Brazil isnt that horrible with our economics but damn imagine how it goes on other places
All due respect, that is the reason why the product sucks, they cut corners because they don’t raise their prices. If they raise their prices, then they have the sources to service the product, make a profit, and not try to recoup money from whales. There are no free lunches. It is like how airlines charge $40 for a plain ticket but they the taxes and fees are $68, and then Biden went around talking about banning bs fees. I agree, no one wants to be price gouged and pay more for less, but there is truth to the fact that everyone needs to money to deliver products and services. It is up to us to consumers to signal what we want. It is like when people live off their savings instead of working. Living off your savings doesn’t mean you don’t have to work anymore. All it means is that you can put off the activity of working for as long as it takes to burn through your cash reserves. Eventually you have to work if your burn rate exceeds what you have is savings.
Transitioning to Digital distribution does not remove production costs entirely. You still have to consider the cut digital storefronts take, especially with how quickly discounts start rolling in. Those discounted sales numbers impact the end earnings, whereas most physical sales, the retailer acts as a middleman, buying the games from the distributor at wholesale, but then selling at MSRP. Those retail copies are sold at a discount when the retailer needs to clear old stock from inventory, and they're (usually) sacrificing a portion of their profit (based on original MSRP). They're probably not taking a loss, but they'd be making only a portion of the up-sell from wholesale to the MSRP. Also, there's a good chance that more of that "production" money is instead being routed to advertising, not just set aside in the "money we didn't have to spend". Advertising gets more prolific every year, and I would argue, purely anecdotally, that advertising suffers from diminishing returns, and for some of us who are so goddam sick of ads being pushed into everything... we Adblock everything, we use PI-holes, and we generally ignore the rest of the bullshit ads that manage to break through to reach us.
Dude games aren't even worth the $70 we pay rn. Most AAA games come out in an unfinished glitchy/buggy mess nowadays it's already a crime that we are paying as much as we are, and now they want to raise the price even more, Why? It's not like we're getting well made polished fully finished games anymore, not to mention how companies nickel and dime us for (Most of the time) dogshit DLC's too. Look at BG3 for example an absolutely beautifully made AAA game fully realized in it's finished state, and it was only $60. It's criminal what these other studios are trying to pull and honestly this is looking like lawsuit material. In my experience when you buy something from the store you expect to get the full product, right? Now imagine if you had to keep going back to that store in order to get the next piece of whatever you bought, bit by bit you'll finally have what you actually bought MONTHS AGO, now apply that to these studios and that's exactly what they are trying to do.
Dude... what do you mean lawsuit material? Can you go to a luxury clothing store and sue them for selling at prices that you can't or don't want to afford? Everyone can have their own opinion about prices but this is peak entitlement. Game publishers and devs are free to charge as much as they want for the product. It's up to each person individually to either buy it or don't.
And a lot of these games they're not going to support the multiplayer for the entirety of the game. And they still want us to purchase DLC they are tripping.
Bro, I never thought the day would come when I might have to stop buying videogames. I thought I'd do it until I died and I still do but $100 for unfinished games? That's not it.
Honestly that hurts more gamers from developing countries, imagine kid in US contemplating of giving 100$ for a game, maybe his parents will grant him that or he will have to ride a bike to deliver newspapers and paddle for 10$ an hour, not a big deal really, now imagine a 3rd world country kid asking their parents to give him 1/6 of their monthly income so he can sit at PC playing his new video game? Gaming is really becoming a very expensive hobby...
Why this big companies cant selling games under 80 dollars, and the indie and more smaller companies can sell games for 30-50 dollars? This proves that the price is only a choise of the companies not a need.
To be honest, this is probably just a scare tactic to nudge people towards subscription based models, because their long-term goal is for "people to own nothing and be happy about it". They suggest something ludicrous at first, expecting it to get rejected, then settle for to a more "moderate" idea that people will begrudgingly accept as a compromise; the latter was the goal all along.
That's what I also believe. Best way to turn people to subscription is to keep rising your price. They want people to go towards monthly income instead of one time pay income. Not long until you see all these greedy publishers releasing their own subscription services.
They are idiots though. Right as they are doing this, AI is making indie game development orders of magnitude easier. They will be replaced by companies who have passion and make good games.
Is there not a system where everyone can get what they want? Subscription based models work for me, have you seen Xbox game pass recently? It’s already saved me hundreds of dollars easily, since I’m the type of player to buy/play a new game fairly often. I do think maybe one day when we are all converted to the subscription model they will start screwing us over with prices like Netflix and Hulu has been the past decade. But to say that a 30$ Netflix subscription isn’t better than a 110$ directv package is a joke, even if when you subscribed it was only $6.99 and it’s been going up ever since. Everyone can benefit from the subscription model. If it doesn’t work for you, don’t subscribe.
The reason why games in the early days were so expensive because they were putting custom chips and more on the cartridges to actually make their games possible. It's different from asking for more money then giving you a broken game and asking for you to buy a battle pass day 1 and some cosmetics like today.
It seems like suits are looking at the cost of games back then and the cost of games now and trying to justify why we should be paying more now than before, despite all of the efforts to releasing a game being less expensive now (in terms of physically distributing it) than before, if they choose to only sell these games digitally.
They were also selling to an extremely small number of people compared to today, where gaming is mainstream. You were weird if you were a gamer 20 years ago
@@Zed-ch9fg Game pass will end up like Netflix eventually, now it's got all the games bc its new but what happens when each developer has their own subscription service?
People never discuss the global implications of this. Regional pricing is already dying if not dead in several countries. Average income in these countries are not increasing proportional to these price hikes. Publishers can't risk people using vpn to buy games for cheaper elsewhere so they'll try to reach global parity in their pricing. We could very well have another game piracy boom on our hands in the near future and it'll be worse than before. To try and counteract that publishers will incorporate more invasive anti-piracy softwares and measures which, like their present day ancestors, will only serve to annoy the actual paying customers by ruining their gaming experiences. Something needs to be done about game pricing before gacha takes an even larger market share as well with their freemium monetization model.
Since everything went digital I cannot justify spending $50+ on a digital purchase that can be voided at any time. I just wait for a Steam sale and get it for $20-$40max. I think the only full price release I would buy right now is probably the Eldenring DLC because they really put the work in and make an outstanding product and I want to support that.
Inflation. Games are harder to make. Games take longer to make. Games require more resources than years ago. These things actually matter and I am not a game dev. Im not defending it, but games have always been pricey. When I got a game for the N64, it was a treat, but games were very simple back then. I would rather pay 100$ for a complete game, with no battle pass bullshit, no FOMO, no gatcha etc.... than pay 60$ for a time sink video game full of battlepasses and weekly challenges to force you to play the game for more time. Buy games that are worth playing for 100's of hours like Soulsborne games or Monster Hunter. These games have a grind of course, but they let you actually have fun. Baldurs Gate 3 is also something Im looking forward to playing
@@MikeSW This has happened to me with minecraft and Age of Empires 3. Pirate anything with Microsoft name on it. They are thieves and will take what you pay for at any time. It's only ethical to take everything from them. Every game you ever purchase has a clause in it that says they can end service or access to the game at any time without explanation. 99% Of game companies never make use of that clause, or very rarely. Microsoft uses it to rob you of legitimate purchases so they can milk money out of anyone dumb enough to pay for stuff twice+. Absolute scumbag thieves. You can't steal from those assholes enough.
@dimitrilitovsk2372 see this is fair and that's what I was saying that games need to March the price baldurs gate guarantees a 100 hours like persona 5 those games are worth it. Call of duty for example doesn't
My steam wishlist wouldn't be 200+ items long if I was okay with $100 games. I always wait for summer sale, winter sale, and to keep track of upcoming games I think would be fun. If the new games are priced too high, I'll simply not play them until they hit the 'bargain bin'-equivalent, which tends to be 5+ years later.
Same. Buying full priced games are like buying a new car. Some people like buying full priced new releases because it comes with its own experience, but for the financially motivated customer they will just wait until the price matches the perceived value.
They already charge 100, they just slap "Special Edition" on it, give you some crappy map and some MP3 downloads ... Nowadays, If its a PC Game on steam, I always go to one of those discount software sites and get at minimum 10% off
I think more and more gamers are saying the extra budget is simply not making game better for the most part. If you want more money show us that you can spend the money you already get in a way that does more than make the grass look 3% better.
Extra budget does help to a point but once you get to $60 or $70 at the absolute max ... anything more is just bad money management. If you need each player to spend $100 to make a profit you failed at your budget.
Bro, they somehow make the grass look worse. Doesn't even move in many modern games anymore. "The Finals "Destructive eviornments is one of the only FPS innovations I've seen recently.
@@yahiiia9269 the finals destruction isnt even innovative though. smaller games have done it and old battlefields did it to, it just looks more pretty. even red faction guerilla did this stuff back in the day for single player games.
Yeah, it it possible they are trying to decrease the number of "Sales" only buyers, by changing the game. They will see the game come down on black friday to the cost of 70$ just to psychologically break them down **This game will not get cheaper than this for years to come** Meanwhile they will also catch a lot of other people who don't usually wait for sales but know that this is their one shot to get it... And there is always they who will buy it at 100$. I don't know where this decision will lead, I am buying zero games at 100$ and 70$. I got the money, but I am not addicted to gaming.
Asmon has yet again missed a major point here... the gaming industry is absolutely huge in comparison to what it used to be. Game profits are massively higher than ever before because the amount of people buying and playing is higher. So yes game development cost has risen but that doesnt scale proportionality to the amount of copies sold. For AAA developers game development to profit is actually greater than its ever been so no, costs dont need to rise any further. If the industry thinks it can get away with it though then of course they will rise anyway.
People act like these companies still have to produce box art, cartridges, and thick manuals to distribute their games. Nowadays, all they have to do is generate a digital key at the cost of $0.
You still see company going in red despite selling millions of copies though. Back in the day game could sell 100k copies and that's already a huge success. I'm so sad my favorite franchise is dead without a word because it couldn't make anymore profit even with the high quality work they put out.
@@fallasleep9472 I'll spend $60 if the game franchise is known to be polished and complete like MH or dragons dogma. I will not spend $100 for trash games like that blizzard make or the buggy mess of bethesda games(I love fallout and the elder scrolls). Also I'm not spending $100 on a game with microtransactions.
My threshold has been about $40 for the last 10 years or so, and usually by the time a game reaches that point on the steam sale all the really bad bugs have been patched out. Much better product for a cheaper price, all it takes is waiting a year or two. I don't really play online much any more so missing the initial hype cycle doesn't affect me.
$100 USD for a video game isn't viable to me at all here in Canada, there's no way in hell I'd ever pay $130 for a video game, it's just so unaffordable. Everything's going up in price, meanwhile we are here making $50 a day in a part time role, left with hardly enough money to afford food after rent is due, I haven't personally bought a video game in a year, this just further blocks me out from the industry
The only game I bought all year that was full price was Baldur's gate. Probably one of the few games I would almost consider undervalued for how good it is.
@@Akakiryuushin its almost as if these companies are already extremely profitable and dont need to actually make more money, they only charge more because they want infinite growth, not because they are struggling to break even. same thing is literally happening in the food, oil, gas, and other industries except we cant just not buy these other things. video games are a luxury
@Akakiryuushin video games are a luxury, not a necessity, and for the price to rise alongside the rising price of necessities makes the video games less purchasable because more money will be going towards the actual necessities. Video games are already unaffordable to a lot of people, this will just further that gap unfortunately
Think after seeing Palworld, a $30 game see so much success. It kind of proves that a game that delivers to what a customer base desires, can see overwhelming support. As it is now, we can't really expect anything but prices to rise from the big companies, they're too bloated and leashed by the expectations of their investors more than customers
Lets not pretend Palworld isn't mainly a flash in a pan success because of how viral it is. It's far from being the worst early access survival crafting game on steam, but it is still _just another early access survival crafting game on steam,_ although with a memeable twist.
for a meme game, Palworld has more depth than expected. and it's basically the game most pokemon players have wanted gamefreak to make for a long time. It hit the zeitgeist right on the head. It could actually have legs if the small dev team can keep up. I'm rooting for it anyway. Besides, despite all the pearl clutching about it "just being ark and pokemon sandwich", it's fun even in solo mode.
@@SkeleTonHammer Palworld makes it really easy to play with friends and not alot of game breaking bugs either, less bugs than the games they're copying
@@disruptive_innovator Oh, I actually have a question about solo mode. I enjoyed Dragon Quest Builders 2 and was wondering if this is a similar game. I'm looking for something that has quests and rpg elements in addition to the base building and tower defense.
Piracy has become a moral obligation. The great industry boycott will begin. That isn't just because of the prices. It is also because of the half baked content we have been receiving in recent years paired with the fact we no longer get to own anything. It feels like the only way to tell them how we feel is to just stop giving them money all together.
@@ward6238 maybe if everyones wages and salaries were higher people would be more open to the idea of paying for games. Not to mention the quality drop of AAA games.
I bought Brotato for $5 last week, and I already have 60 hours in. That's more time than I've spent on a AAA game in probably 5 years. It also has less bugs, more replayability, and the devs put more heart into it than any of said AAA games.
You want to charge me $100 for a game? Fine. But you bet your ass it better be a polished product with no MTX or battle passes. No releasing a half baked game with performance issues filled to the brim with MTX while slowly patching it over the course of a year. Until i see these results i won't be paying anything near those prices for games, i'll just sail the seas.
You know that's never going to happen, they will try and experiment the response of the community and will make the games less finished in order to cut costs.
that's simply not what will happen. EA and Ubisoft gave that exact reasoning for the 70$ Pricepush. That they can get rid of the intense MTX if the upfront price is higher and we all know how that worked out.
Not even then. GTA6 will make billions of dollars at $70. Its pure greed and I personally wont be doing it. I will buy the games half off 2 years later or yolo in indie games. If people dont support these price hikes, they wont happen.
@@PaganMinn The original Legend of Zelda costed the equivalent of $134 adjusted for inflation. $100 genuinely wouldn't be unreasonable for a ultra high quality AAA game with no DLC or microtransactions. But we all know that the reality is that modern corporations will release garbage even worse than we have now and charge $100 for it.
I will not pay 100$ and will save 60$ that I would have spent on the game. Thank you companies and governments for this "good" situation in our economy.
No one cares what you will pay- you have no concept of inflation or the fact you've been getting it at CHEAPER every single year for 20 years straight (if you're even old enough to remember that). Everyone else will pay it and life will go on. Case closed.
One thing this is gunna do is make people way more conserving with their money and rely even more on impressions/reviews . If there’s a game you truly want you’ll get it no matter what but those have become extremely rare these days.
Do you guys can't just use torrent? Why do you need some vpn stuff? Idk, in Russia there was never penalty for that. I'll be thankful if you explain this to me.
I already ALMOST didn't buy D4. It was not a good game, either. I played it through on normal with one character, tried out another 2 different classes a little bit, I haven't played D4 since summer. There's absolutely NO WAY that Blizzard has the desire to produce a video game that I would pay $100 for. They don't to make that kind of game anymore.
Honestly $100 for a new game is more than fair. For decades the price has been $60 for new games all the while inflation has been going crazy. Honestly the price for new games should have been closer to $100 a decade ago. These companies have a legal obligation according to federal law to make share holders more money that's why loot boxes and other micro transactions have become so rampant. Me personally though I buy games on sale almost exclusively or I go to g2a. In the past decade I have paid full price for like 3 games because I was so excited that's it. Also games are easier to get on sale on PC so people are going to be moving away from consoles even more than ever.
I think the jump from 2 to 3 figures is inevitably going to be the largest factor in what will cause a downturn in game sales when this happens. For me 100 bucks passes the threshold of the perceived value of a finished AAA game.
the one thing i fear the most at this situation is that some fans are OKAY with buying a 3 figure game. But for some people that's not appropriate, and the worst thing is that those greedy bastards might up to 150 or 200 in the near future.
70 bucks is fine if the quality is increasing with leaps. Games have been 60 bucks for a long time already, 10 bucks increase in this economy isn't much. The game just has to be good and not just a cash grab...
@@Olixer109 Games sell a ton more than they did back then and they are also charging you full price for digital versions. They are increasing the price just because they can not because they need it.
@@Olixer109 What do you mean this economy? What does the economy have to do with video game development? It's just an excuse for companies to make more money. Wake up!
The inflation argument completely falls apart when you rub two brain cells together and take supply and demand into account. Back when I had a Nintendo 64 I was happy spending $50 on a videogame because that’s all we had. Now that we have steam sales and phones in our pockets with free games $50 is way too much to ask for. Sorry but there’s competition now and nobody should care that your budgets are hundreds of millions of dollars.
Also profit Keeping profits maximized billions a year, by increasing the price for the end user, and saying it's for "inflation" only to still not pay increase the devs pay, but so bobby can buy another yacht. yeaaahhhh no.
I think your take on the market realities is misguided. Its not that you are way off the mark on how it could work, just that you're misjudging demand significantly
A 100$ price tag is absolutely insane. It's already stupidly high for the average US consumer, but for people like me, living in Canada, it's gonna come across as 125-130$. That's just not a price I'd ever pay. I'd rather wait a couple years until the price drops, or even pirate it.
@@chrisdiddell9641dont let them in your head. The implication is "i'll settle for less as long as it isn't (var). Dont. The brain worms have started already.
@@PortfolioPL I thought I was crazy. But over 23 years ago, Pokemon Blue was priced 100$ on game boy color and each game had this price tag. That is why I only got 1,2 and some happy years 3 games. Games became cheaper by a lot!
First they rise prices to 100$. After people stop buying them because they can’t afford a 100$ game they will give us a new option : you don’t own the game, you rent it with a month subscription (like WoW). Just like Ubisoft recently have said. And people will accept that more willingly because people will still like playing games, so they will prefer to spend a small monthly amount they can afford instead paying 100$ on the spot… I really hope all this big companies will fail sooner or later
One difference is I have gamepass and I know I don't own the games I play. Where as the games I buy outright, I expect to own those however that might not be true.
Games have been 100$ or more for many years now. You buy an incomplete game for 60$ and then have to spend 40-60$ or more to buy the actually finished game. Thats the ones that are being generous, a lot of games require several hundreds or even several thousands of dollars to get all the content. That said I don't engage with any of this. I buy my games for 25-30$ max. Always on sale 1-2 years after release minimum. I'm not interested in bug testing more AAA releases or wasting money on them, done enough of that in my life. I know by now most of it is shit, especially on release. Better wait out the hype and pay what the game is actually worth, once most of the bugs are fixed too.
They are greedy. That is all. The big companies routinely pull in over €300 0000 per game that goes well. Nothing expense wise, comes close to this amount. Add onto that "micro" transactions(normally €20) its allllll profit.
Considering more than anything , they pour more and more cash into advertisement and getting hollywood actors for roles. It feels like upper members are just mishanding money and giving less to devs which is why so many games come out halfbaked
I’ve got 5 games on my list to buy only when they hit $20 this past year alone just because the publishers decided to charge $70 instead of $60. These are games I would’ve normally paid the full retail price of $60 for. They might want to control their greed or they are gonna find themselves losing profits. I did the inverse with remnant 2. Saw they were only charging $50, figured I would put hundreds of hours into it just like the first one, and bought the $80 version of it. Difference is I wanted to give them my money because they weren’t trying to rip me off
Yeah, but that's not fair to to the game developers either. Inflation has affected alot of different things which limits the type of game they can create. I think the hard part is knowing how much work went into making the game so you can justify the price. There should be a 3rd party that js responsible for reviewing what a fair price for a every game is. The company can then choose to lower the price if that's what they want to do. I'd gladly pay $100 if I knew that the game was worth it, but I'm not gonna pay $100 for the same game that they only spent a year in development to make.
@@felix7720 that isn’t true. They’ve broken down the profits a game studio makes on a $60 game. It costs on average $25-$28 on a digital game to put it out for sale meaning the studio makes at least $32 profit per sale, which means if they sell 5 million copies (which is low nowadays) they make of profit of $160 million dollars. A physical release costs a studio slightly more, around $30 per copy. That means with 5 million sold copies, they still make $150 million in profits. This doesn’t include dlc of any type. Believe me, they make enough money. They have just managed to convince the younger and more impressionable among us they don’t. If they didn’t make enough money, gaming wouldn’t be one of the fastest growing and most profitable industries around. They have unfortunately gotten greedy
@BlekP Yes it is bud because the production cost has been evaporated. They no longer have to make disc and distribute them around the world. That saves them money. Dude literally just broke it down yet you’re so excited to lick corporate boot
This is going to backfire, especially nowadays when many players have a MASSIVE backlog of games they bought and haven’t played yet, I have like 100 games on my ps4 that I haven’t played yet and that will keep me busy for a long time.
Fr lmao. I have at least 10 games for each of my consoles (xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo) that i need to play and finish. Im not to worried about it. Only buying games when they go on sale🤷
LOL! I have way too many games I haven't played much. Maybe it's time to actually playing them. Chances are they are better than the games I wanted to buy.
There's a limit. Game Cost x Sales is what matters most. You have to optimize for that entire equation, not just one part. If the initial price is too high, then people will simply wait for the game to go on sale. Also, inflation is what greases the wheels of an economy. If you are in a deflationary economy, anything you spend today you're better off spending tomorrow. Ask Japan how awesome deflation has been for them.
My parents got me my first PC in 1996. The first game they bought me was Age of Empires. They paid 18000dr for it, which translates in about 53 euro or 57 dollars. This was a lot of money back then, compared to today's worth. In comparison we could buy 1kg of steaks (2.2lb) for 650dr (1.9 euro/2.06 dollars). Now it costs 12 euro/13 dollars. A gamer back then used to but 2, maybe 3 games per year. We were peaky with our purchases. We would play demos and trials, watch a friend play, rent or even go to an internet cafe and try a game before actually committing to buy it. My point is, it's not that games back then were stupid expensive. It's that the industry changed. Most games now are consumables, keeping you for 10-20 hours and then forgetting about them. Such games ARE NOT worth having their prices compared to 25 years ago, because back then they would get their companies bankrupt. With those standards in mind, I would pay 100$ for BG3 without a problem, but I would not even pay 15$ for a pirated copy of Diablo 4 (this was actually how much a pirated copy would cost, internet piracy was not a thing yet). So please, don't just compare prices. It's two practically different worlds.
And this is exaclty why AAA companies are actually dying and indie companies are taking center stage and putting the AAA out of busines , am i personally am delighted to see it . Let all these AAA companies dig thier graves , no matter what it works for us , either they fuck up and have to drop prices or they dont and we get to play amazing indie games for a fraction of the price and multiple times the satisfaction and enjoyment.
The biggest complaint those companies have is that they're not hitting profit growth projections set by analysts. Indies aren't on the stock market so they don't have the same concerns.
@@mattandrews2594 bankrupt and dying are two different things. AAA companies outside of big multi studio corporations that act as their own publisher are rarer and rarer as time goes on
@@mattandrews2594Black Isle Studios, 38 Studios, The Looking Glass, BioWare, Origin, TellTale, Volition, Visceral Games, and a ton of others. It's very common, especially now.
as well as any game studios that jst maintain more acceptable prices. Like Nintendo I don't see going along with this as they've always made staying relatively affordable one of their main points. If anything I see them using their lower prices as a selling point. A few other companies and studios I also see probably goign with lower budgets and prices to stay competative. We need to remember, the way the market is meant to work is the one with the best service for the best price get the buisness. If some companies are over charging don't be a pushover and pay anyway. Buy other games from those not over charging. People need to break out of the FOMO with franchises. No you DO NOT need to pay $100 for the latest GTA6. You'll live even if you never play it or wait for a good enough sale. Just don't be a pushover.
@@metazoxan2 I mean I know damn well I'll bite the bullet and regret buying GTA 6 for $100 but fucking hell, paying that much for a fucking game that takes the same amount of time as current games to make and during this current gen of gaming that will last a lot longer is insane to me. Keep in mind everyone says they'll pay for it cause its X game made by X company but were still in the era of dogshit games where it could be good or ass most of the time for that price to be acceptable to an "degree".
@@TheChaosAnimations Then don't bite the damn bullet! Frankly if you seriously pay that much for a game while also crying about "dogshit games" then you are exactly the real cause of the problem. Again break out of the FOMO! Companies are blatantly exploiting that for profit and we need to say enough is enough. But just to be clear that doesn't mean we should be overly cheap either. Companies won't survive without profits and so we need to pay fairly for the games we want to play.
If paying around $100 for a game in the US is already annoying, imagine in Brazil where many companies don't regionalize game prices, resulting in them being 4 or 5 times more expensive (currently $1 costs R$4.96). Edit: I just saw that the minimum wage is R$1,412, which makes things even worse.
@@Microphunktv-jb3kj not at all minimum wage in USA is 1.218 (I don't know hot accurate this is I searched on google) a full price game in USA is 60 dolars the minimum wage here is 1.450 BRL (1600 in São Paulo) a full price game in Brazil is 250BRL due to taxes is even worse for consoles and PCs
@@NearynHub that’s not the point I didn’t mined the price on the Ps5 I waited till it was easily accessible. And I can wait for a game to go to 30$ sale on Christmas
Gaming industry is in the same state as the films industry. Studios producing products with an exaggerated budget needing to make an unreasonable amount sales to break even but delivering dogshit quality.
Rise up indie game devs. Feel like there is massive opportunity for smaller company game creators at the moment. I'm biased because I generally prefer indie games over most AAA titles in the last few years.
we are in an age where "free" youtube content is more entertaining than a lot multi. million hollywood productions. so if the conclusion is to support more affordable indie games that are produced and supported with higher care and love then i am all for it
@@RichieBennonah... most indie games are mid at best. We just think they are great because the AAA suck so much. The only ones that didn't screw me over at this point were Fromsoft games. EA, Ubisoft, Activision, CDPR, Bethesda, Square Enix and many more keep delivering wastes of money.
I forgot about the movie theaters in my post! 15+$ movie tickets is one of the biggest driving factors why movie theaters don't constantly fill up anymore.
Asmongold has been a very wealthy person for a long time and is very out of touch with reality if he thinks most people will be fine with games going up to $80. Ever since games went to up $70 a lot of my gamer friends have been playing more indies, and have been buying AAA games only during sales. GTA is a different story because it's a game you play for years and hundreds if not thousands of hours.
I'd say you're the one out of touch with reality, the majority of gamers are on console (not counting mobile) and have been paying their games $70 or $80 for years now. PC gaming is still considered niche
$80 for AAA for GoW 2018 but not Ragnarok. I'd pay $80 for bg3. Everything else? No. I just know what I would buy, but I'm more price conscious. Most people are idiots and will pay way too much. Especially considering game companies chase addiction now - the same force responsible for heroin and meth addicts deciding they'd rather have heroin or meth instead of a house. I buy the majority of my games at 50% off or more. 80% of my game purchases are under $50. $1 per hour of gameplay is my rubrik.
I live in South Africa and our currency is shockingly weak. Steam used to do some good regional prices so things were still pretty affordable, but now, holy shit, I think they just gave up on regional pricing and now I have to pay these insane prices with my shitty African income LOL. If they really up the prices it’s over
R1500 for a game and they want to make it R2000+ thats a third of the new min salary. Only the well off will be able to pay for AAA games maybe a certain man in a red fedora was right about nationalizing the mines so that our economy can actually benefit from it. the rest of what is says is nonsense
Yeah, that happened in Argentina too. Went from "I can save to afford a couple games per year" to "I have to sacrifice eating for six months to afford a game"
imo the biggest issue is, you went from owning your games to renting them. And the price never changed for that. You went from paying $60 and owning your game, to paying $60 and renting your game until the publisher says you can't have it no more. The security of your transaction is gone. That and you have game studios thinking their game is the next Baldur's Gate 3 when players beg to differ. Perfect example of this is D3 wanting to charge $100 for literal trash.
The reason for games being 60 dollars was because of physical media. Shipping, storing, making the games cost money. Digital removes this (except for the store front taking a cut) so games increasing in price is just greed.
Not only that, but the gaming companies used to make absolutely nothing on used games. That was gamestop money. Now, with digital, when games eventually go on sale, they are eating the used market that they never had before. They should be making more money than ever.
It's why so many games go on sale on steam. Digital copies might as well cost $0 for the company,so a 60% discount isn't a bad sale for the company because it might as well be pure profit. The reason why they implemented microtransations is because they wanted more money, not because they needed it. Same thing for this proposed game price increase. They just want more money, and they think people will swallow their complaints and pay the increased price.
@@DOG-mm3sg "youre wrong because i said so. no im not gonna provide evidence that letting someone download a game through steam is somehow more expensive than literally manufacturing a physical disc, box, and shipping it across borders, and getting taxed along every step of that process" - a clown
I remember Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario RPG, and Chrono Trigger going for $80 at my local Sears store (which would be over $150 dollars today). Those games were expensive because the cartridges were manufactured with a lot of memory. So prices fell thanks to CD-ROMs, games on PS1 sold for $50 new, and most PC games were similar. Around the year 2000 I bought a collectors edition of Civilization III on PC for $60.
Yeah i remember games being way cheaper than 60 when I was younger. On top of that there was a huuuuuge second hand market which doesn’t really exist now as a lot of people buy digital. These companies have been making ever increasing profits without needing to raise prices more than to 60-70. However co,panties always want more profit so they will raise prices to make investors happy.
The average price of a AAA game 5 years ago was 60 dollars. The biggest cost in the creation of video games is paying the developers salaries. So the video game developers getting a 40 percent pay increase. is the only legitimate reason to justify such a gross increase in price and I guarantee that they have not. The inflation excuse only goes so far before it just sounds like a ceo needs a new yacht.
They've been $60 since 2005 though. You don't have to like it, but this is why microtransactions and DLCs have boomed since the mid-2000s: the cost of production increased but not per-unit revenue. Software dev wages have gone from about $50-60K in the 2000s to now just below six figures, and the amount of people employed in the industry has sky-rocketed. Again, you don't have to like it, but if you want a billion dollar game, they're going to want billions of dollars in revenue. Prices increase, and those who don't want to pay will seek substitute goods at cheaper prices.
Halo 3 was developed for $60 million. Halo Infinite was developed for $500 million & is a much lower quality game. There has been inflation since 2007 but not that much.
@@Monsuco Halo Infinite is also a live service game, the genre with the largest costs of the industry. It also had a complete redevelopment after announcement. Cost overrun was prevalent and is also not good for quality. You are comparing apples and oranges.
Sure I'll pay $100. If I can get a guaranteed refund if your game is unfinished at release. Yes they'll make more money but all that will do is ensure the moment I find a single glaring flaw, I'm refunding.
They simply make the game be good for the first 2 hours. Then copypaste the rest of the game. It's been like that for a while now. Over 2 hours of playtime and you can't refund...
They want to talk about "value", when they put half the content in the game in a bloody cash shop, and then want to charge $100. Tell you what. You want to charge me more? Then no more microtransactions. Actually put the game in the game, and stop trying to sell me chunks of it for 50 times the price of the base game.
You can pay that, I won't. They are already coming out with half-assed games that aren't even fully finished products by release date. They want to increase the price, I'll wait for bargain-bin ones. From PS1-5 I have over 500 physical games, add in digital probably around 615. I have over 100 physical games for the Nintendo Switch and somewhere around 100 digital. It won't hurt me to wait, LOL!
The sale numbers keep increasing, the install base has never been bigger, they keep inflating the budgets when they don't need to, and we are going to pay more for games even tho the revenue keeps going up year after year. 1337x is going on my bookmarks bois.
Okay, cool, but for information 1337x is no longer on the websites recommended by those accustomed to hacks since the admins were caught literally protecting an uploader putting malware in his torrents: they deleted the comments denouncing it rather than banning the culprit.
@@RmnGnzlzI know but that's not what I'm talking about. The thing is that a site recognized by the scene must kick out uploaders seeking to harm others, which 1337x does not do. Afterwards, yes, you can of course rely only on the source torrent or the repacks from FitGirl and Dodi.
I can see it now, another page to load on steam between check out and the successful purchase screen And the “skip” or “no tip” button is really small on the bottom left
I work at a local game store. people will overdraft their bank account to get that $15 game today because they dont want to wait until next friday to get paid. people will 100% get the $100 games. they will also go hungry to do so. nothing new
I’ve already stopped buying new games a few years ago. I only buy stuff when it’s on giant publisher sales like 50% or more. It’s just not worth it when there are so many titles coming out unfinished or are nothing like we expect.
Right? I could go back and play pokemon ruby and sapphire on my GBA, but for the life of me I don't want to play pokemon ORAS for more than 10 minutes. The quality of games are just not here anymore. Both in heart and soul.
It's not even development and production expenses that makes games costly. Executive pressure to make games bigger and the overfocus on realistic graphics to appease shareholders while making their salarys and benefits in the house of milions is the real issue.
If they raise the price to 100 dollars it will become literally impossible to buy some AAA game in launch here in Brazil. It will be 500 of our coin and this is a GIGANTIC amount of money here. For comparisson, a ps5 Day 1 was 500 dollars and 5000 in here
They should be $10 when they're making them licenses anyway. For 100 you should get a collector's edition. They will be out-competed by indie games who actually make FUN games instead of nickle and dime schemes like what Rockstar and Blizzard does.
@@cursedimageseveryday5559 Good games, but a lot of RDR2 and GTA 5 are padded with mediocre content. Cinematic clips are what they're known for now and it's decent entertainment, but it's also highly overrated. You can get just as much fun out of other games that cost far less and don't have shark cards and season passes.
"Normalize", wtf are these companies on? At some point, someone has to say enough. 70$ was already a controversial decision (yes, I know inflation is a big part) but still, it better be worth the 70 dollars. Though, 100? From Blizzard? Yeah...no.
100$ for a stupid game is ridiculous. They will lose me as a customer if they do that, there are much better things to spend 100$ on in life than a stupid game. They are not worth 100$
the only thing this will normalize is me buying the game at a discount 2 years later or not at all
thats what I do with Smartphones
Exactly, people fail to realise that there's a certain price point the majority won't buy at which point the price gets lowered because nobody is buying so the company isn't making money. It's the same logic where people say monopolies are bad because "then they can charge whatever they want" they can't because people won't buy it if it doesn't fit into their idea of what something cost.
EDIT: Before people want to continue replying to me about "What about this bad monopoly that society/people need and have no choice with"...We're on a gaming video talking about video games, use you're brain and get the very obvious understanding that we're talking about monopolies in things like the gaming industry.
u rite
More people need a similar mindset, if we keep buying all the shit, companies wont ever stop with the prices and microtransactions.
Yeah, I live in Eastern Europe and there is no damn way I can afford 100 euro games. I would just buy it down the line with discount.
I would also like to point out that even if the price has no increased for a very long time, other things have increased. The number of people has increased and we no longer buy games in a hardware store its all digital. So leaps and bounds more people + digital = insane profits for them. They can spare me the "its to cheap" bullshit.
Also the problem they are having is that gaming is not needed for day to day living. As prices go up, sales go down and piracy go up. Unless you are doing well with money like in the west (some people), you will not spent 100 euro on a game. That is like a huge part of your monthly income.
What they need to do is pull a Elon Musk and start getting rid of the people who are not really needed for making a game. How many people did Musk fire and X is doing perfectly fine?!
100$ game used to be collector edition with art book, figurine, ost, now you get an unfinished game that will ask you another 100$ for battle pass/ expansion stuff 😂
they'll keep delivering less and less for the same or higher price as long as people keep buying it.
@@blackcitadel37 People will keep buying it as these companies control the majority of the market.
Also it doesnt take many people to buy for these companies to be profitable. If only 10% of the player base buys battle passes and the occasional micro transaction, thats hundreds of millions of dollars.
You keep blaming the consumer when in reality most people dont support this stuff. Like in any free to play game, 90% of players never spend a dollar. Yet the game will make record profits.
I remember with New Vegas I got the aluminum case for $80 and some extras, the extra 20 was worth it. similar with halo wars. now I can buy a digital edition of the equivalent for $100 and get literally nothing i want. so sad
@@EggEnjoyer Yes but if price of entry for a game goes up by much higher than average inflation rate, people just aren't going to be able to justify purchasing it at a certain point.
We've come to a point where any game I see over $60, I expect to be disappointed after buying it, because AAA devs have gotten so lazy/out of touch with their player base that they consistently fail to deliver. Meanwhile, no game I've bought under $40 for the last five years has disappointed me. There are a few exceptions, like with Baldur's Gate 3, but they are a rare gem nowadays.
@@EggEnjoyer Life is life. No one is entitled to anything, and there are plenty other things to do than play videogames (also, we still have indie games; you can even play older games for free, if you must). We will be just fine. It's unfortunate that they will keep taking advantage of certain people out there, but that's bound to happen at any time, just due to the variability in wisdom, awareness, and consciencessness among people.
I put down my pirate hat back in 2013 and started buying games on discount for all these years. But if games start releasing at 100$...I'm afraid I hear the sirens calling me back to the seas I once abandoned.
Well, that or just waiting to buy a game a year or two later on a really good discount.
TPB
Come on in. The water’s fine, matey.
If buying isn't owning than 🏴☠️ isn't stealing
Tortuga is calling
if everyone did pirate than say bye to the company lol
My problem with paying $70 and up for games is that game quality is progressively getting WORSE. Plus I have a large enough backlog that I could never buy another videogame again and never run out of games.
Game quality getting worse for majority of games i can agree with. I believe gaming season has been dried up for few yrs with only few noteworthy ones worth buying. Single player being Elden Ring or God Of War, etc and these have a lot less replayability than multiplayer but defo passed the criteria for triple A game being worth the money. These gaming conglomerates raising prices on us and lowering quality, while they are using unreal engine 5 which lowers production cost/speed by a lot. So to just name an example the new Cods copy and paste the last few yrs minimal effort is fk'n blasphemy to us gamers an the franchise itself. Should be ashamed for charging their prices...no campaign or zombies either 💀
And dont get me started on Rockstar I must have paid 15-20 for tht San Andreas masterpiece and they askin for 5x the price 20yrs later. For a game tht will prob be ai generated and have the lowest production cost of all of em (excluding inflation obviously). Side note they released Gta 5 in 2013💀doubt any of the same developers tht put heart an soul into the game are still around or we'd have 6 alr lmao. There's been 16+ final fantasy in this time frame ffs 😂 thts a company tht actually deserves are money/admiration
Well, if that’s what the customer think, they will stop buying and the sale will drop. I stopped buying game on release because of that reason.
I will only pay top dollar for Rockstar games, other developers can go fun themselves.
minecraft is still like 25 bucks canadain
Why would I pay $100 for an unfinished AAA game when I can buy a fully finished and S-Tier Indie game for $15? Or just buy the AAA game a year later when it's on sale.
60$ + battlepasses + gatcha + store + fomo + whales
"weve" been surrounded by people paying 100$+ for "games" for years
I buy Monster Hunter games, its got a store now since its doing live service. 60$ game, 60$ expansion, and nothing in the store is EXP Boosts or meta equipment like mmos. MH is doing good live service compared to every other AAA company.
I buy Souls games and they get expansions too that are worth buying.
These two series of games, are worth playing for 100s of hours, hell even 1000s of hours. Not once are you expected to buy anything beyond the game you purchase.
Yes, and all those games aren't finished at release. It's always more intelligent to not buy any games (just pirate them, like Palworld) or to wait until they are really finished with all DLCs, no more updates and get the "Gold/GOTY Edition" whatever with everything for a fraction of the original price. Anything else would be an insult to my intelligence. There are way better things, real things, you should invest money, like the family etc. like things you really need for life.
Death Must Die is a great example
Or just... you know... go one piece mode.
@@m3Zz2012 Parents playing video games with their kids, and sharing in the experience is also a thing you can do.
Yes, there are more important things than video games, however, video games are art. Knowing what good art, is, is something that parents can pass onto their kids rather than just sitting them in front of the TV or a tablet with mobile games.
Bruh i dont buy games at 70$ now, werent buying at 60$ and they think i'll buy at 100$, they're mental.
I used to buy videogames full prices. Then after they raised their prices, i started to buy exclusively keys, for cheaper than i used to.
you prob dont buy games for full price because ur one of those cheap game pass users i bet XD
@@Platinumdose420 Well this bet of yours landed 2 light years away from me.
@@Platinumdose420I’m gonna make a gotcha game just because people like you have made me realize how bad I can rob people and get away with it.
@Platinumdose420 what's the problem with gamepass? It's a good value right now. I play games on it with my pc and if I like it I'll buy it on steam. Stop trying to flex. It just seems pathetic.
Palworld and lethal company raked in millions of sales. No doubt this is eating into the sales of AAA titles and I hope this trend continues.
Palworld isnt indie
@@mikhasanto2880I think his point is these ridiculous prices are going to hurt these AAA studios. Palworld costs 30 bucks, lethal costs 10.
wasn't it? who are they affiliated with? they published 3 games so far so its pretty small i guess?@@mikhasanto2880
@@mikhasanto2880 who cares? It isn't a AAA game either way, doesn't matter if it is an indie company.
@@zackarymadden7908 unless we have a palworld every month than no, this will have zero impact
The fact that they want us to pay $100 for the base game, that is probably incomplete to begin with. Then charge for DLC, microtransactions, and more content. It is ridiculous.
Then, you have to factor in people who do pre-orders to possibly get bonus physical items such as posters, artbooks, music, and other collectibles. They would be paying possibly DOUBLE if companies are to follow through with this financial shift.
they are humans too, they need to eat. and eat they will!
@@BG1435qdecrease executive salaries. Literally there are more games than ever and people spend more money on video games than ever, so they sure are eating well.
Meanwhile, Palworld at $30 is the third best-selling game on Steam. If these publishers want to raise their prices to $100 per game, they should only produce 10/10 games.
The problem is how many AAA games are 10/10 anymore? Even if they are I'm not going to pay $100.
yeah i'll just buy indie games or w/e lol
RDR2 even if it was completed in full would not be worth 100 dollars asking price,hell even Cyberpunk 2077 if it was released in perfect state with all promises fulfilled would not be worth 100 dollars.They removed all cost from manufacturing and shipping of physical copies and they still remained 60 dollars,no idea what makes them think 100 would be acceptable.Most games from AAA publisher these days are not worth even 60 dollars.
for real at 100$ im expecting a PERFECT game....NO bugs, no boring part,, a fantastic story, and graphics at the top of what is possible....fail even once at one of these and im burying the game as if they personally hurt my mom
imagine paying 100$ for a Ubisoft game, crashing when you enter the menu and the character entering the floor or passing through walls every now and then lmao
Considering these AAA companies can't even launch a complete game (with all of their promised features) upon release, I find it laughable that they think they can upcharge me even more for a half-baked product. No other industry, except software companies, could ever get away with this crap. If a clothing store attempted to make you pay full price for one sleeve and then "roadmap" their way to the rest of the sweater in the years to come, people would freaking LAUGH at them and they would go out of business.
including charging ''100'' dollars for an intro that isn't a gameplay. 😂''Intro'' ''Release Date''. lol
Best comment 😂😂😂
First they want to normalize not owning games we bought, now they want to normalize paying $100 for those same games we don't own 😂
in last two years I bought just BG3, nothing else... soo they can... PoE2 is comming xD
The funny thing all the way from the early Nintendo NES days the standard new price was 50$. That was also standard for many PC games, all the way up till PS3 days. The only real increase was with the console themselves or special editions. So within a decade they shot upward to 60$ standard. Then Blizzard tacked on a 70$ price tag. Now they just want to skip all the way to 100$ right off the bat?
You know what won’t matter when it’s WW3 and there’s no food or medicine?, games and gaming
The world is getting more dystopian
Hope you get drafted@@ScottyDoesntKnow69
I already don't pay full price for games nowadays and wait for it to go on sale months later. this ain't gonna help
These games arent worth 60 they certainly aint worth 100.
Bro these games aren’t worth $10 let alone 60 lmao
I agree I rarely buy games, and I dont care if they are $60 or $100 or $500
@@sten260 This ^ games have always been expensive.
Then dont buy shit games.
Try Monster Hunter or Soulsborne games.
@@g.r.o.g.u.1892 its alright. Ive bought probably a dozen games total in my lifetime.
The problem with raising triple A games to 100 dollars is the games we've been getting aren't even worth the $70 we're paying right now. Now I'll be waiting for 40% off sales at a minimum before purchasing any newer games at the $100 price point.
I stopped buying games on release due to the high price tag, like you i'll wait for it to be at least 40% off before buying a game these days
Or and hear me out on this: if you cant afford 100 on a game you shouldnt be playing video games, but applying more jobs
@@OggiOggiOggi I can afford to pay 100 for a game, doesn't mean I want to (which I don't, so I wont), I'm more than willing to wait a year or two to play a AAA game to go cheap enough on sale as not to offend my sense of worth when it comes to time/money spent
i'd pay $100 for a really good game. unfortunately, most games these days are garbage and dont deserve to be bought at all, let alone $100.
To be honest 60 dollar 15 years ago and now is a complete different proposition of worth. Every other product rises with inflation too, so why logically should games be different. It's just funny that Blizzard of all companies has to spearhead it.
I think a $100 price point for games will make people more discerning with their purchases. I may just be naive but I think $100 could actually backfire for gaming companies
Idk man. Madden and 2k players aren't smart enough to not spend money
would pricing it at 95 dollars work?
@@adigocrazy5314 you mean...99.99$ ?
2005 to now inflation makes it around 93 i think @@adigocrazy5314
No shit
don't forget this is still in USD, other countries with their exchanges, in UK it will go up to 80 and you're daily income is around 80 BEFORE tax, in Australia its $150 on your average wage that's 1/4 of a weekly pay, the increase in prices will if not mostly encourage piracy, i know a few years ago when i saw a game selling for 40 USD i would just pirate that shit, but if its 100 im 100% gonna pirate that shit, price increase is fine when leveled with wages and its value
i was legit stunned when i saw the price of ff7 remake on epic. 70 pounds means the game actually costed 90 dollars
It is even more funny at poorer countries. Here we have games that are 60-100 USD, and average salary is 500 USD per month. Before tax, before bills, before food and other costs of living.
@@rajder656yep Canada here and all the games after tax (big ones) cost 90$ of it will go up to 100$ US for us it will cost around ~145 ~155
Dont forget about Poland…
Can we guys talk about been a gamer in Brazil?
This would definitely normalize me waiting for big discounts or not purchasing AAA games anymore and just going full Indie.
Took you this long to come to that conclusion? No wonder we’re where we are now in gaming. But hey at least you finally started thinking
@@leftoverpizzza3337 99% of the videogame community love to shit on AAA games, whilst handing over money for the super mega deluxe pre-order super cool version. Every. Single. Time.
If they stopped being thick, we'd get good games, at good prices, but, man-children gunna man-child.
@@danielseaburg9763 I know, right. I haven’t bought a AAA game in well over 7 years now (minus ended ring but full satisfied with that purchase)
I think it’s the plan of the publisher to anchor a prize like €100 so people buy discounts at a higher price point.
Same, i'm already pretty much normalized after spending a lot for the latest cod and not enjoying it
The problem is wanting a standardized price for products that a majority of lack a standard of quality.
most games are released incomplete and super buggy these days. Imagine paying full price for a car that randomly shut itself off while driving and the manufacturer says you have to wait for the "engine stability patch" to be released...
@iviaverick52 that's a lemon car and why warranties are needed and info is about the car is required to be gone over before purchase. While most digital game fronts do their best on the other hand to get in the way of refunding garbage.
@@iviaverick52missing parts would be more accurate than random shut off
This hearkens back to his point in earlier years when certain games like halo were 60 bucks while others were 35
That can be solved with communism... But I am sure that you know that already.
Im rarely even paying 20$ for a game now a days. I almost always buy games at a 50%+ discount or I wait till they are discounted. I have too many games to play without a care to a game just coming out and being popular.
same but i buy physical version always
look on Ubisoft statement: gamers should be “comfortable with not owning” their games
Yeah, I may consider paying more if the quality of games matched the increase in price, but we all know that's not the case
same i can't remember the last time i bought a game on release XD i always wait for sales
If it's the game that I will spend a little time I pay 20$ for it cause it at that price range that I wouldn't care if i would play it or not, if it's the game that I know I will enjoy for countless hours I pay 40$, anything that is higher I just wait for discount till it's in price range. 60$-70$ is non an option, for that money i could eat 1-2weeks...
Nowadays games arent even completed until two plus years after release.
I have been through this so many times with friends. I have been a gamer for a long time. About 10-12yrs ago the game companies put out a probe to see customers reactions were to a possible AAA price hike to $70. Well it didn't sit well and the issue went away. Any product is going to have a real worth value to the majority. It doesn't matter how long the price has been stagnant. If your at the cap....then you are at the cap. Normally products get improvements over time and the price creeps up but this industry has not done themselves any favor in this department for about 12-15yrs. They haven't exactly shown they know how to make good/fun games anymore. Quality has gone down and bad business practices have expanded. That previous negative probe response came back in the worst possible form. We get basic bug-ridden skeleton games because they don't put effort into them and they carve them up and sell you the content they held out as DLC. They have 3-4 versions of games that you can give them more money for worthless additions. They still push pre-orders when its not even needed anymore while they promise to deliver on content/fixes etc....In many cases it never happens. They even fleece you with the infamous "Get early access". Is the game ready to release or not? Its just the release date but they wring you for more money thinking you have some special access when all they are doing is pushing the filthy standard version buyers back. So really they been scamming many of us way over $60 for many years already because we told them NO years ago. They created this bed......they can sleep in it.
🙄🙏 Preach. I 100% agree. If the quality of the product is there, the revenue from sales would reflect that, and developers wouldn't feel undervalued by their userbase only buying at sale prices. If the developers feel like they aren't getting an appropriate cut, that is between the devs and the publishers, and is not the consumers fault to cover their misappropriation of resources and funds. There are way too many cooks spoiling the broth. Mind you, console ports tend to make things even worse, and online service based games/ modern multiplayers change the dynamic a bit.. But that aside, not all of us can afford to support that toxic AAA preorder culture with our disposable income, only to receive disappointing and irritatingly subpar content riddled with gamebreaking bugs and glitches.
They price hike it and they'll have worse launch sales, and the smart majority will just wait 'till the holiday sales and such come around at 20-80% off, during autumn black-friday or winter X-mas Holiday etc, or even a year or so later when many titles might have GOTY editions with most if not all the microtransaction/ preorder goodies/ DLCs/ Season pass contents bundled in while on sale, when the creators try to get that last spurt of profit. Then it'll more than likely be in the updated and slightly less glitchy state it should have been released with in the first place, like what used to be required for cartridge/ disk game releases without updates to even be viable. If not, by then we will see via reviews/forums if it has been abandoned by the devs and online playerbase because they made a quick buck and never fixed any bugs after making hollow promises... [*Dirty glances toward Bethesda, Blizzard, etc..*] Assuming the woke culture doesn't allow them to censor us and report/hide negative reviews for "slander" and "review bombing" while the snowflakey devs and execs whine about their customers being cheapskates and mean old bullies.. They'll need to learn the hard way, through the wallet- "the customer is always right"..
Case and point though, over the last 14 years my steam account alone has over doubled to 18.5k in current market value according to steamdb, and I've probably spent FAR closer to the minimum, roughly 4.5K total, by being frugal with my practically non-existent recreation budget, and watching for sales on humblebundle etc. Granted I've been through a few $700-$1200 custom gaming PCs roughly 7 years apart with misc upgrades to each along the way, but that is still fair game with the price of recent consoles I didn't feel the need to fork out for, and that's not even mentioning my retro console collections which are only growing, and skyrocketing in value due to the resurgence of popularity due to modders and refurbishers kicking it up a notch during/following the lockdowns!
And even funnier is that lot of the time the indie game you bought for $20 actually has way more things to do and way more value than those AAA-games. Palworld is good recent example of this.
We're looking at the beginning of the fall of AAA Studios. The quality we're receiving hasn't been worth $70 much less $100.
Just look at what happened to CA the quality of their dlc has dropped and the quantity of content too for a higher price… result less sales and less money by a big ass margin and then they are obliged to cut people off. Additionally, the cost for a game is not the same everywhere for exemple here in Canada, a game after tax will cost around 90$ if it goes up to a 100$ in other county like the US the Canadian cost will go up tremendously. Not just by 10$ but like ~35 ~40$
You mean the downsizing of employees, the over reliance of AI and then an Ouroboros game design where we'll get less better games and less inovation
No matter. There will always be idiots that don't respect money, who will buy it
If I pay 100+ I want digital and hard copy with a 5 to 10 page manual and a folded poster in it.
and it to be finished :)
and free DLC, free battlepass, free skins, free shares ofcourse!
@@versia2565 > and it to be finished :)
Hahaha hope we're not asking too much
@@Nickerino617you either get free skins or free dlc, not both. That's never been the standard.
10 page manual? that's hardly a manual... look at the manuals that came with old games like EverQuest, Oblivian, Icewind Dale, Baldurs Gate etc. etc. they were BOOKS
I remember a time pre-internet where if you released an unfinished game, there were no patches and you would fail, plus if you bought a game, you owned it.
Now they want $100 for something you will never own, can be deleted and will prob be released half baked.
Dear consumer....you are partially at fault here.
Actually, no, the games never belonged to us. If you read a manual from the time what we bought was a license to play the game via cartridge/cd/etc.
Understand by this that once the support reached the end of its life, there was no plan to give you a new one because it was never a lifetime license.
That being said, the advantages were that we could still resell the said license, which is generally not allowed by dematerialization.
Wrong, consumer is at full fault here, stop buying.
You're speaking their language.
We aren't consumers we are customers.
If you see yourself as a consumer you might as well waste all your money "consuming" like an idiot.
@@Gonzora Oh yeah, I forgot when daddy Nintendo walked over to my house and took my game away when they decided to stop selling it.
@@Desu-Desu-Chan-San lol 😂
If people keep buying they can charge whatever they want. I do think though you will see many more people waiting for reviews or to see what their friends have to say about games over a $100 price point before they make the purchase. At some point the expense is high enough that nobody is really buying it on a whim anymore and only people who are seriously invested.
Another thing to note is that a lot of the most popular games are cheap or free: Fortnite, League of Legends, CSGO, PalWorld, Dota 2, Vampire Survivors, Among Us, etc.
The worst part is that they won't compromise and charge $100 upfront but have no micro-transactions.
We will have $100 games filled to the brim with $5 to $20 dollar micro transactions, $40 dollar expansions, etc. Then you're spending around $250 to $500 dollars for "the full experience".
All this will achieve is me pirating stuff again.
This is what Square Enix did with FF 16. I bought it day one for 100 EUR to support the devs given the fact we no longer see such big budget games and a few weeks later they announce DLC for 20 EUR so basically it will cost me 120 in total because I want to get the full experience. F*** Square Enix.
All that will happen is the big developers will die off... want to charge $100 for the next pokemon... OK Palworld exists for like $30... want to charge $100 for Diablo 5, that's cool poe 2 is free to play and surprisingly generous with its pay structure.
Tldr - all that will happen is new indies will capitalize on the failures of giants.
Exactly! The only game that I would pay $80+ for from this past year is bg3, other games I played were all let downs
Half the reason they're hell-bent on freemium live services is that it does you no good to crack it. It's pay-to-play no matter how you downloaded it.
ahoy me hearty
$100 is very steep for me (South East Asia), even with discount down the line, it will probably go back to $60 which is borderline.
For those who want to know, USD 1 = MYR 4.73 and our basic salary is set at RM1500 (in main cities).
So, a AAA game at $100 is basically 1/3 of average salary.
The 7 seas look so good nowadays.
Same everywhere in South East Asia, even India after graduating salary is 400k at best & even after 8 years it's 1200k in major jobs. And 1USD = 83.11INR now. So 8.3k for a game without regional pricing at 400k a year? 33k a month means it's more than a forth & close to a third of salary
cyberspace shopee is the solution iykyk hahahahaha
Fitgirl repack welcomes you
Game prices are so dumb for poorer countries. Why is a game 1/30th of a salary in one country but 1/3rd in another? No wonder people pay $80 for new games, it's like $20 for a poorer country.
Fairly certain game companies does pricing based on what country you're from.
Any game with microtransactions should have a price tag of $0
I wish, but knowing companies, they would use this as an excuse to charge you 25 dollars for a skin cause it's free :P
I got a sim racing wheel and started with Forza Horizon 5. They want money for the Hot Wheels, Rally expansions. More money for car packs. You can easily spend hundreds. Then I found BeamNG and after buying the game I can just add cars. No need to grind for hours to get a new one.
LMAO like overwatch 2? That shit show is awful because its free to play
And a playerbase count of zero as well
@@slowowned51valorant did it better, they charge $100 for each skin 😂
If companies are expecting consumers to spend 100 bucks, then as a consumers I’m expecting games to be complete and not need day one patches in order for me to play.
Exactly. Then, if you can prove to steam that the marketing was misleading, you'll get a refund past the 2hr limit. I got refunded for Destiny 2 Lightfall after like 20hrs.
This will absolutely lead to less sales if games are gonna be $100. And the thing that hurts the most is that all the bullshit with microtransactions and all the shady underhanded monetizations practices will still be there on top of the heightened entry fee. They want their cake and eat it to. This is purely driven by greed and not a NEED.
I will wait 3 years and buy them for 19.99 but will never buy a new release again. I may not buy any more digital games which is all nowadays. I want control over my games.
It's purely driven by inflation, much of which was caused by the average American that doesn't understand that if you raise the minimum wage to 15 dollars an hour that the cost of everything will go up to compensate for it. Well, if you wanted that big minimum wage hike, you got it. Along with everything that comes along with it. Not only that, but video games have cost about 60 dollars for, at least, the last 20 years. Why is it that cost of everything else under the sun goes up due to inflation, but games are supposed to stay the same forever, and never go up? That just doesn't make sense. If you want all the crappy microtransaction to go away, then you have to be willing to pay a bit more for the actual game. These corporations are going to get the prophet margin they want one way or another. The only way to effectively protest that is to stop buying games from the companies that do it. But people wont stop. No one has any integrity these days. Instead, they'll resort to stealing, which just makes the problem bigger for everyone.
Nonono they want EVERYONES cake not just theirs😂
@@daemonthorn5888 Hows that koolaid taste?
Kaiser exposed asmon shits in a bag and leaves it under pc
For countries with weak currencies this is the end of gaming. $100 might be like 20% of someone's monthly income.
There is a lot of regional pricing in gaming. If you fake your region, you will be seeing a lot cheaper prices.
@@InnocentiusLacrimosa Used to be true...
Even myself making basiccaly the avrage pay for my area its rough. With how expensive everything hase gone up and a few medical things last year draining my bank account, im trying to save money. If Aaa makes games 100 anytime in the next few years then il be buying very few at launch, hell im already planning on holding off on gta6... and its not like iv not spent a ton over the years but ya up the price that much so quick then im gonna be far more choosie.
It's already like that for latin countries for YEARS. Triple A games are on average 1/5 of a minimum wage in Brazil since forever.
It actually is, here in brazil we even get cheaper prices on steam since the conversion on the prices are not 1-1, and still the minimum wage around here is a bit more than 1k (in our currency) and like $100 is R$496 currently so its pretty much half of the minimum wage, it is terrible and Brazil isnt that horrible with our economics but damn imagine how it goes on other places
I sure as shit wont be buying a game at $100 price point, especially when we're in the age of games being unfinished and still getting released.
Took the words right out of my mouth, even palworld is unplayable for me. Official servers are garbage.
All due respect, that is the reason why the product sucks, they cut corners because they don’t raise their prices. If they raise their prices, then they have the sources to service the product, make a profit, and not try to recoup money from whales. There are no free lunches. It is like how airlines charge $40 for a plain ticket but they the taxes and fees are $68, and then Biden went around talking about banning bs fees. I agree, no one wants to be price gouged and pay more for less, but there is truth to the fact that everyone needs to money to deliver products and services. It is up to us to consumers to signal what we want.
It is like when people live off their savings instead of working. Living off your savings doesn’t mean you don’t have to work anymore. All it means is that you can put off the activity of working for as long as it takes to burn through your cash reserves. Eventually you have to work if your burn rate exceeds what you have is savings.
It's pretty easy to pirate non-multiplayer games... Just sayen.
Transitioning to Digital distribution does not remove production costs entirely. You still have to consider the cut digital storefronts take, especially with how quickly discounts start rolling in. Those discounted sales numbers impact the end earnings, whereas most physical sales, the retailer acts as a middleman, buying the games from the distributor at wholesale, but then selling at MSRP. Those retail copies are sold at a discount when the retailer needs to clear old stock from inventory, and they're (usually) sacrificing a portion of their profit (based on original MSRP). They're probably not taking a loss, but they'd be making only a portion of the up-sell from wholesale to the MSRP.
Also, there's a good chance that more of that "production" money is instead being routed to advertising, not just set aside in the "money we didn't have to spend". Advertising gets more prolific every year, and I would argue, purely anecdotally, that advertising suffers from diminishing returns, and for some of us who are so goddam sick of ads being pushed into everything... we Adblock everything, we use PI-holes, and we generally ignore the rest of the bullshit ads that manage to break through to reach us.
Dude games aren't even worth the $70 we pay rn. Most AAA games come out in an unfinished glitchy/buggy mess nowadays it's already a crime that we are paying as much as we are, and now they want to raise the price even more, Why? It's not like we're getting well made polished fully finished games anymore, not to mention how companies nickel and dime us for (Most of the time) dogshit DLC's too. Look at BG3 for example an absolutely beautifully made AAA game fully realized in it's finished state, and it was only $60. It's criminal what these other studios are trying to pull and honestly this is looking like lawsuit material. In my experience when you buy something from the store you expect to get the full product, right? Now imagine if you had to keep going back to that store in order to get the next piece of whatever you bought, bit by bit you'll finally have what you actually bought MONTHS AGO, now apply that to these studios and that's exactly what they are trying to do.
'lawsuit material'? 'criminal'?
if it's overpriced then don't play it lol
Dude... what do you mean lawsuit material? Can you go to a luxury clothing store and sue them for selling at prices that you can't or don't want to afford? Everyone can have their own opinion about prices but this is peak entitlement. Game publishers and devs are free to charge as much as they want for the product. It's up to each person individually to either buy it or don't.
And a lot of these games they're not going to support the multiplayer for the entirety of the game. And they still want us to purchase DLC they are tripping.
@@sub-harmonikfalse advertising and not delivering the product promised should be lawsuit worthy and criminal in everyone’s eyes…
@@leftoverpizzza3337 Exactly!
"Thus Began the Great Pirating Era"
-Gold D. Roger
Gol D. Roger.. Baldy, you aren't the one he's waiting for.
@@freakydeaky1435 They had to make up the name Gol to make that work. Joel E Roger wouldve been worth fighting for.
Imagine paying $100 for unfinished games lmao
seriously, all these games release unfinished these days
60 for the game and 40 for the DLC to make it a complete game lol
Imagine paying *any* money for unfinished games.
Bro, I never thought the day would come when I might have to stop buying videogames. I thought I'd do it until I died and I still do but $100 for unfinished games? That's not it.
Honestly that hurts more gamers from developing countries, imagine kid in US contemplating of giving 100$ for a game, maybe his parents will grant him that or he will have to ride a bike to deliver newspapers and paddle for 10$ an hour, not a big deal really, now imagine a 3rd world country kid asking their parents to give him 1/6 of their monthly income so he can sit at PC playing his new video game? Gaming is really becoming a very expensive hobby...
Why this big companies cant selling games under 80 dollars, and the indie and more smaller companies can sell games for 30-50 dollars? This proves that the price is only a choise of the companies not a need.
To be honest, this is probably just a scare tactic to nudge people towards subscription based models, because their long-term goal is for "people to own nothing and be happy about it". They suggest something ludicrous at first, expecting it to get rejected, then settle for to a more "moderate" idea that people will begrudgingly accept as a compromise; the latter was the goal all along.
That's what I also believe. Best way to turn people to subscription is to keep rising your price. They want people to go towards monthly income instead of one time pay income. Not long until you see all these greedy publishers releasing their own subscription services.
They are idiots though. Right as they are doing this, AI is making indie game development orders of magnitude easier. They will be replaced by companies who have passion and make good games.
just pirate the game lol 🤣
Is there not a system where everyone can get what they want? Subscription based models work for me, have you seen Xbox game pass recently? It’s already saved me hundreds of dollars easily, since I’m the type of player to buy/play a new game fairly often.
I do think maybe one day when we are all converted to the subscription model they will start screwing us over with prices like Netflix and Hulu has been the past decade.
But to say that a 30$ Netflix subscription isn’t better than a 110$ directv package is a joke, even if when you subscribed it was only $6.99 and it’s been going up ever since.
Everyone can benefit from the subscription model. If it doesn’t work for you, don’t subscribe.
The problem is the vast majority of people will still buy games at $100.
The reason why games in the early days were so expensive because they were putting custom chips and more on the cartridges to actually make their games possible. It's different from asking for more money then giving you a broken game and asking for you to buy a battle pass day 1 and some cosmetics like today.
People also download their games now, so the cost for transportation or media is literally zero.
It seems like suits are looking at the cost of games back then and the cost of games now and trying to justify why we should be paying more now than before, despite all of the efforts to releasing a game being less expensive now (in terms of physically distributing it) than before, if they choose to only sell these games digitally.
They were also selling to an extremely small number of people compared to today, where gaming is mainstream. You were weird if you were a gamer 20 years ago
while media is cheaper now, games are way more complex to develop, dev teams for a game went from 20 people to 100's or 1,000's for just one game.
@StormaLorda You were not weird if you were a gamer in 2004.
The release of halo 2 was a mainstream cultural event for example
The only things this will normalize is people going back to playing older games, piracy and buying things at extreme discounts.
you right I think instant gaming or eneba will see their sales numbers increase.
Reject modernity
Embrace tradition
or game pass perhaps.
@Irken_Invader_Zim
Reject modernity
Embrace piracy
@@Zed-ch9fg Game pass will end up like Netflix eventually, now it's got all the games bc its new but what happens when each developer has their own subscription service?
People never discuss the global implications of this. Regional pricing is already dying if not dead in several countries. Average income in these countries are not increasing proportional to these price hikes. Publishers can't risk people using vpn to buy games for cheaper elsewhere so they'll try to reach global parity in their pricing.
We could very well have another game piracy boom on our hands in the near future and it'll be worse than before. To try and counteract that publishers will incorporate more invasive anti-piracy softwares and measures which, like their present day ancestors, will only serve to annoy the actual paying customers by ruining their gaming experiences.
Something needs to be done about game pricing before gacha takes an even larger market share as well with their freemium monetization model.
Since everything went digital I cannot justify spending $50+ on a digital purchase that can be voided at any time. I just wait for a Steam sale and get it for $20-$40max. I think the only full price release I would buy right now is probably the Eldenring DLC because they really put the work in and make an outstanding product and I want to support that.
Inflation. Games are harder to make. Games take longer to make. Games require more resources than years ago. These things actually matter and I am not a game dev.
Im not defending it, but games have always been pricey. When I got a game for the N64, it was a treat, but games were very simple back then. I would rather pay 100$ for a complete game, with no battle pass bullshit, no FOMO, no gatcha etc.... than pay 60$ for a time sink video game full of battlepasses and weekly challenges to force you to play the game for more time.
Buy games that are worth playing for 100's of hours like Soulsborne games or Monster Hunter. These games have a grind of course, but they let you actually have fun. Baldurs Gate 3 is also something Im looking forward to playing
This and digital games are just licenses who knows if the platform drops or fails to provide a renewal for licenses the games just disappear lol
@@MikeSW This has happened to me with minecraft and Age of Empires 3. Pirate anything with Microsoft name on it. They are thieves and will take what you pay for at any time. It's only ethical to take everything from them. Every game you ever purchase has a clause in it that says they can end service or access to the game at any time without explanation. 99% Of game companies never make use of that clause, or very rarely. Microsoft uses it to rob you of legitimate purchases so they can milk money out of anyone dumb enough to pay for stuff twice+.
Absolute scumbag thieves. You can't steal from those assholes enough.
Had the same thoughts but about baldurs gate. Like bro i have not seen a game worth full price in a long time and baldurs gate was worth it
@dimitrilitovsk2372 see this is fair and that's what I was saying that games need to March the price baldurs gate guarantees a 100 hours like persona 5 those games are worth it. Call of duty for example doesn't
Company: We want you to pay 100 now
Me: Welp, guess I'll pay 0 then
My steam wishlist wouldn't be 200+ items long if I was okay with $100 games.
I always wait for summer sale, winter sale, and to keep track of upcoming games I think would be fun.
If the new games are priced too high, I'll simply not play them until they hit the 'bargain bin'-equivalent, which tends to be 5+ years later.
Same. Buying full priced games are like buying a new car. Some people like buying full priced new releases because it comes with its own experience, but for the financially motivated customer they will just wait until the price matches the perceived value.
Same
They already charge 100, they just slap "Special Edition" on it, give you some crappy map and some MP3 downloads ... Nowadays, If its a PC Game on steam, I always go to one of those discount software sites and get at minimum 10% off
I think more and more gamers are saying the extra budget is simply not making game better for the most part. If you want more money show us that you can spend the money you already get in a way that does more than make the grass look 3% better.
Nah, it only makes CEO's pockets 10% fatter with all undeserved money.
Extra budget does help to a point but once you get to $60 or $70 at the absolute max ... anything more is just bad money management.
If you need each player to spend $100 to make a profit you failed at your budget.
Bro, they somehow make the grass look worse. Doesn't even move in many modern games anymore. "The Finals "Destructive eviornments is one of the only FPS innovations I've seen recently.
It's not to make the game better, it's to reflect rising industry prices. You could not make the games of 10 years ago for the same price today.
@@yahiiia9269 the finals destruction isnt even innovative though. smaller games have done it and old battlefields did it to, it just looks more pretty. even red faction guerilla did this stuff back in the day for single player games.
my conspiracy theory is theyre banking on ppl buying shit on sale, so theyre anchoring at 100 so that 60-70 range will seem like a good deal
That's no sale. 30 is ok. Otherwise you failed to keep your patience. Like Dead Space... I loved that game back then... what... still 40€?
No thanks.
Makes sense to me
It's the oldest trick in the book I've allways been a wait a year guy
Yeah, it it possible they are trying to decrease the number of "Sales" only buyers, by changing the game.
They will see the game come down on black friday to the cost of 70$ just to psychologically break them down **This game will not get cheaper than this for years to come**
Meanwhile they will also catch a lot of other people who don't usually wait for sales but know that this is their one shot to get it...
And there is always they who will buy it at 100$.
I don't know where this decision will lead, I am buying zero games at 100$ and 70$. I got the money, but I am not addicted to gaming.
Falls flat when the marketplace stops selling the title in lieu of the annual remaster of $120.
Asmon has yet again missed a major point here... the gaming industry is absolutely huge in comparison to what it used to be. Game profits are massively higher than ever before because the amount of people buying and playing is higher.
So yes game development cost has risen but that doesnt scale proportionality to the amount of copies sold. For AAA developers game development to profit is actually greater than its ever been so no, costs dont need to rise any further. If the industry thinks it can get away with it though then of course they will rise anyway.
Completely agree
Here with popcorn waiting for the asmon defenders to not read what you wrote and tell you how your wrong 🎉
People act like these companies still have to produce box art, cartridges, and thick manuals to distribute their games. Nowadays, all they have to do is generate a digital key at the cost of $0.
You still see company going in red despite selling millions of copies though. Back in the day game could sell 100k copies and that's already a huge success.
I'm so sad my favorite franchise is dead without a word because it couldn't make anymore profit even with the high quality work they put out.
@@DuoMaxwellDS I understand but the red is from poor business decisions not the actual development cost against sale profit per unit.
I'm not spending $100 on games.
I'm not spending more than $25 on a game let alone $100, and the game should be at least more than 10 hours long for me to spend that much.
@@fallasleep9472 I'll spend $60 if the game franchise is known to be polished and complete like MH or dragons dogma. I will not spend $100 for trash games like that blizzard make or the buggy mess of bethesda games(I love fallout and the elder scrolls). Also I'm not spending $100 on a game with microtransactions.
@@MarineCARMINE Good to have people with common sense in this world 👍
My threshold has been about $40 for the last 10 years or so, and usually by the time a game reaches that point on the steam sale all the really bad bugs have been patched out. Much better product for a cheaper price, all it takes is waiting a year or two. I don't really play online much any more so missing the initial hype cycle doesn't affect me.
@@treelineresearch3387 Understandable
$100 USD for a video game isn't viable to me at all here in Canada, there's no way in hell I'd ever pay $130 for a video game, it's just so unaffordable. Everything's going up in price, meanwhile we are here making $50 a day in a part time role, left with hardly enough money to afford food after rent is due, I haven't personally bought a video game in a year, this just further blocks me out from the industry
Easy fix, lets tank the dollar, everything from videogames to electronics are bound by the dollar..
You said it yourself. Everything is going up in price. So why cant videogames?
The only game I bought all year that was full price was Baldur's gate. Probably one of the few games I would almost consider undervalued for how good it is.
@@Akakiryuushin its almost as if these companies are already extremely profitable and dont need to actually make more money, they only charge more because they want infinite growth, not because they are struggling to break even. same thing is literally happening in the food, oil, gas, and other industries except we cant just not buy these other things. video games are a luxury
@Akakiryuushin video games are a luxury, not a necessity, and for the price to rise alongside the rising price of necessities makes the video games less purchasable because more money will be going towards the actual necessities. Video games are already unaffordable to a lot of people, this will just further that gap unfortunately
Think after seeing Palworld, a $30 game see so much success. It kind of proves that a game that delivers to what a customer base desires, can see overwhelming support. As it is now, we can't really expect anything but prices to rise from the big companies, they're too bloated and leashed by the expectations of their investors more than customers
Lets not pretend Palworld isn't mainly a flash in a pan success because of how viral it is. It's far from being the worst early access survival crafting game on steam, but it is still _just another early access survival crafting game on steam,_ although with a memeable twist.
for a meme game, Palworld has more depth than expected. and it's basically the game most pokemon players have wanted gamefreak to make for a long time. It hit the zeitgeist right on the head. It could actually have legs if the small dev team can keep up. I'm rooting for it anyway. Besides, despite all the pearl clutching about it "just being ark and pokemon sandwich", it's fun even in solo mode.
PUBG was like that too, cheap but not free. As soon as you make a game that cheap it becomes much more of an afterthought spend.
@@SkeleTonHammer Palworld makes it really easy to play with friends and not alot of game breaking bugs either, less bugs than the games they're copying
@@disruptive_innovator
Oh, I actually have a question about solo mode. I enjoyed Dragon Quest Builders 2 and was wondering if this is a similar game. I'm looking for something that has quests and rpg elements in addition to the base building and tower defense.
Piracy has become a moral obligation. The great industry boycott will begin. That isn't just because of the prices. It is also because of the half baked content we have been receiving in recent years paired with the fact we no longer get to own anything. It feels like the only way to tell them how we feel is to just stop giving them money all together.
What are you talking about? "I don't like what they're doing, but I still want the product, so I'll just steal it." That's not ok.
@@ward6238 maybe if everyones wages and salaries were higher people would be more open to the idea of paying for games. Not to mention the quality drop of AAA games.
@@eddiesmith7867wages have skyrocketed since 2010 when games were 60 eur/usd already.
@@ward6238sure it is. I hope so many people pirate those companies go under
I bought Brotato for $5 last week, and I already have 60 hours in. That's more time than I've spent on a AAA game in probably 5 years. It also has less bugs, more replayability, and the devs put more heart into it than any of said AAA games.
You want to charge me $100 for a game? Fine. But you bet your ass it better be a polished product with no MTX or battle passes. No releasing a half baked game with performance issues filled to the brim with MTX while slowly patching it over the course of a year. Until i see these results i won't be paying anything near those prices for games, i'll just sail the seas.
Make it on a USB Stick or a SD card without the use of a server and its a deal
You know that's never going to happen, they will try and experiment the response of the community and will make the games less finished in order to cut costs.
@@ltyarv8071 They're already doing that. They've been milking us and pushing the limits for years.
This will greatly benefit many indie game companies that still is charging reasonable prices for often very great games
Living in Canada, I already pay $90.39CAD (including tax) for a triple-A game, so them raising the price to $100.00 USD is just Bullshit
If I buy a £100 game then I want no microtransactions and a complete game.
don't even give them that bud. 100 is bullshit even if its finished.
that's simply not what will happen. EA and Ubisoft gave that exact reasoning for the 70$ Pricepush. That they can get rid of the intense MTX if the upfront price is higher and we all know how that worked out.
Not even then. GTA6 will make billions of dollars at $70. Its pure greed and I personally wont be doing it. I will buy the games half off 2 years later or yolo in indie games. If people dont support these price hikes, they wont happen.
@@PaganMinn The original Legend of Zelda costed the equivalent of $134 adjusted for inflation. $100 genuinely wouldn't be unreasonable for a ultra high quality AAA game with no DLC or microtransactions.
But we all know that the reality is that modern corporations will release garbage even worse than we have now and charge $100 for it.
I don't know man. I don't think they'll do that despite the high price
I will not pay 100$ and will save 60$ that I would have spent on the game. Thank you companies and governments for this "good" situation in our economy.
The world will end, the great Catacalysm of irl is coming!!!
Indirectly protecting consumer wallets, good on them! :D
Lmao no you won't 😂
No one cares what you will pay- you have no concept of inflation or the fact you've been getting it at CHEAPER every single year for 20 years straight (if you're even old enough to remember that). Everyone else will pay it and life will go on. Case closed.
One thing this is gunna do is make people way more conserving with their money and rely even more on impressions/reviews . If there’s a game you truly want you’ll get it no matter what but those have become extremely rare these days.
Sailing the high seas has never been more justified
Arghhhh matey, dont get caught by Davey Jones and sent to the locker!
@@Cinnabonbungalow Arrr Use a Vpn Laddie
Do you guys can't just use torrent? Why do you need some vpn stuff? Idk, in Russia there was never penalty for that.
I'll be thankful if you explain this to me.
I already ALMOST didn't buy D4. It was not a good game, either. I played it through on normal with one character, tried out another 2 different classes a little bit, I haven't played D4 since summer.
There's absolutely NO WAY that Blizzard has the desire to produce a video game that I would pay $100 for. They don't to make that kind of game anymore.
Ah, looks like I'll be sailing the high seas once games go to $100
🚢🏴 Long Live TPB 🚢🏴
I'm already there
To Tortuga it is brothers and sisters
Yarr harr fiddle de dee ☠️☠️
Honestly $100 for a new game is more than fair. For decades the price has been $60 for new games all the while inflation has been going crazy. Honestly the price for new games should have been closer to $100 a decade ago. These companies have a legal obligation according to federal law to make share holders more money that's why loot boxes and other micro transactions have become so rampant. Me personally though I buy games on sale almost exclusively or I go to g2a. In the past decade I have paid full price for like 3 games because I was so excited that's it. Also games are easier to get on sale on PC so people are going to be moving away from consoles even more than ever.
I think the jump from 2 to 3 figures is inevitably going to be the largest factor in what will cause a downturn in game sales when this happens. For me 100 bucks passes the threshold of the perceived value of a finished AAA game.
the one thing i fear the most at this situation is that some fans are OKAY with buying a 3 figure game. But for some people that's not appropriate, and the worst thing is that those greedy bastards might up to 150 or 200 in the near future.
Imagine places where we don't pay in $. Games are almost half a gran right now.
That jump has already happened in other currencies, and it hasn't had much impact in those countries.
$99.99 will trick the consumer tho blessed be
Finished ? You ever played a finished game on the last years ?
I stopped buying new games even when they went to $70 😂
Same here
70 bucks is fine if the quality is increasing with leaps. Games have been 60 bucks for a long time already, 10 bucks increase in this economy isn't much. The game just has to be good and not just a cash grab...
@@Olixer109 Games sell a ton more than they did back then and they are also charging you full price for digital versions. They are increasing the price just because they can not because they need it.
@@Olixer109 "if the quality is increasing with leaps" 70 bucks are too much even for a 10/10 game
@@Olixer109 What do you mean this economy? What does the economy have to do with video game development? It's just an excuse for companies to make more money. Wake up!
Screw this, I’m a retro gamer. Currently playing on my Sega Saturn 🪐 SNES, N64, 360, PS2. Modern gaming SUCKS.
The inflation argument completely falls apart when you rub two brain cells together and take supply and demand into account. Back when I had a Nintendo 64 I was happy spending $50 on a videogame because that’s all we had. Now that we have steam sales and phones in our pockets with free games $50 is way too much to ask for. Sorry but there’s competition now and nobody should care that your budgets are hundreds of millions of dollars.
Also profit
Keeping profits maximized billions a year, by increasing the price for the end user, and saying it's for "inflation" only to still not pay increase the devs pay, but so bobby can buy another yacht.
yeaaahhhh no.
Add to that the increased audience of gamers. How many more millions play games now.
I think your take on the market realities is misguided. Its not that you are way off the mark on how it could work, just that you're misjudging demand significantly
@@Mrtwistedblacksure but game costs have more than tripled in the last 20 years and that's being conservative
@@michaelpurdon7032 ok and how do you know that audiences haven’t also tripled?
A 100$ price tag is absolutely insane. It's already stupidly high for the average US consumer, but for people like me, living in Canada, it's gonna come across as 125-130$.
That's just not a price I'd ever pay. I'd rather wait a couple years until the price drops, or even pirate it.
best part the game isnt even finished and they release it
@@chrisdiddell9641dont let them in your head. The implication is "i'll settle for less as long as it isn't (var).
Dont. The brain worms have started already.
Genesis and SNES games used to cost 60$-70$ which would be ~120$ today. Game prices did go down a lot!
@@PortfolioPL people love to conveniently skip over this part lmao.
@@PortfolioPL I thought I was crazy. But over 23 years ago, Pokemon Blue was priced 100$ on game boy color and each game had this price tag. That is why I only got 1,2 and some happy years 3 games. Games became cheaper by a lot!
First they rise prices to 100$. After people stop buying them because they can’t afford a 100$ game they will give us a new option : you don’t own the game, you rent it with a month subscription (like WoW). Just like Ubisoft recently have said. And people will accept that more willingly because people will still like playing games, so they will prefer to spend a small monthly amount they can afford instead paying 100$ on the spot…
I really hope all this big companies will fail sooner or later
Theyre already doing that with gamepass and PlayStation extra/premium. Except u can rent games for a whole year.
Games where $60 20 years ago. They could be 120 now and itd be cheaper now than it was then
One difference is I have gamepass and I know I don't own the games I play. Where as the games I buy outright, I expect to own those however that might not be true.
Games have been 100$ or more for many years now. You buy an incomplete game for 60$ and then have to spend 40-60$ or more to buy the actually finished game. Thats the ones that are being generous, a lot of games require several hundreds or even several thousands of dollars to get all the content. That said I don't engage with any of this. I buy my games for 25-30$ max. Always on sale 1-2 years after release minimum. I'm not interested in bug testing more AAA releases or wasting money on them, done enough of that in my life. I know by now most of it is shit, especially on release. Better wait out the hype and pay what the game is actually worth, once most of the bugs are fixed too.
Game companies could very easily reduce their budgets. They just decide not to.
They are greedy. That is all.
The big companies routinely pull in over €300 0000 per game that goes well.
Nothing expense wise, comes close to this amount.
Add onto that "micro" transactions(normally €20) its allllll profit.
Considering more than anything , they pour more and more cash into advertisement and getting hollywood actors for roles. It feels like upper members are just mishanding money and giving less to devs which is why so many games come out halfbaked
oh they reducing budget now
with removing employees and using AI instead
I think they do reduce budget.
Workforce budget
they do reduce the budget but that cost difference is not reflected in the cost or past to the customer
I’ve got 5 games on my list to buy only when they hit $20 this past year alone just because the publishers decided to charge $70 instead of $60. These are games I would’ve normally paid the full retail price of $60 for. They might want to control their greed or they are gonna find themselves losing profits. I did the inverse with remnant 2. Saw they were only charging $50, figured I would put hundreds of hours into it just like the first one, and bought the $80 version of it. Difference is I wanted to give them my money because they weren’t trying to rip me off
Yeah, but that's not fair to to the game developers either. Inflation has affected alot of different things which limits the type of game they can create. I think the hard part is knowing how much work went into making the game so you can justify the price. There should be a 3rd party that js responsible for reviewing what a fair price for a every game is. The company can then choose to lower the price if that's what they want to do.
I'd gladly pay $100 if I knew that the game was worth it, but I'm not gonna pay $100 for the same game that they only spent a year in development to make.
@@felix7720 that isn’t true. They’ve broken down the profits a game studio makes on a $60 game. It costs on average $25-$28 on a digital game to put it out for sale meaning the studio makes at least $32 profit per sale, which means if they sell 5 million copies (which is low nowadays) they make of profit of $160 million dollars. A physical release costs a studio slightly more, around $30 per copy. That means with 5 million sold copies, they still make $150 million in profits. This doesn’t include dlc of any type. Believe me, they make enough money. They have just managed to convince the younger and more impressionable among us they don’t. If they didn’t make enough money, gaming wouldn’t be one of the fastest growing and most profitable industries around. They have unfortunately gotten greedy
@@Socherbal games costing 10 more dollars after 20 years isn't ripping you off.
@@BlekP I already broke it down about how it is. Refer to the above comment
@BlekP Yes it is bud because the production cost has been evaporated. They no longer have to make disc and distribute them around the world.
That saves them money. Dude literally just broke it down yet you’re so excited to lick corporate boot
This is going to backfire, especially nowadays when many players have a MASSIVE backlog of games they bought and haven’t played yet, I have like 100 games on my ps4 that I haven’t played yet and that will keep me busy for a long time.
Fr lmao. I have at least 10 games for each of my consoles (xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo) that i need to play and finish. Im not to worried about it. Only buying games when they go on sale🤷
assassin's creed Brotherhood on ps3...still has the plastic on it BUT i lost the whole ps3 box when i moved in 2021....got stolen probably
LOL! I have way too many games I haven't played much. Maybe it's time to actually playing them. Chances are they are better than the games I wanted to buy.
Wait so yopu buy a game that you like and want to play but don't even start it ? you might have a problem
@@xinlou6707 All of them were on sale and majority of them are JRPGS.
There's a limit. Game Cost x Sales is what matters most. You have to optimize for that entire equation, not just one part. If the initial price is too high, then people will simply wait for the game to go on sale.
Also, inflation is what greases the wheels of an economy. If you are in a deflationary economy, anything you spend today you're better off spending tomorrow.
Ask Japan how awesome deflation has been for them.
My parents got me my first PC in 1996. The first game they bought me was Age of Empires. They paid 18000dr for it, which translates in about 53 euro or 57 dollars. This was a lot of money back then, compared to today's worth. In comparison we could buy 1kg of steaks (2.2lb) for 650dr (1.9 euro/2.06 dollars). Now it costs 12 euro/13 dollars.
A gamer back then used to but 2, maybe 3 games per year. We were peaky with our purchases. We would play demos and trials, watch a friend play, rent or even go to an internet cafe and try a game before actually committing to buy it.
My point is, it's not that games back then were stupid expensive. It's that the industry changed. Most games now are consumables, keeping you for 10-20 hours and then forgetting about them. Such games ARE NOT worth having their prices compared to 25 years ago, because back then they would get their companies bankrupt. With those standards in mind, I would pay 100$ for BG3 without a problem, but I would not even pay 15$ for a pirated copy of Diablo 4 (this was actually how much a pirated copy would cost, internet piracy was not a thing yet).
So please, don't just compare prices. It's two practically different worlds.
And this is exaclty why AAA companies are actually dying and indie companies are taking center stage and putting the AAA out of busines , am i personally am delighted to see it . Let all these AAA companies dig thier graves , no matter what it works for us , either they fuck up and have to drop prices or they dont and we get to play amazing indie games for a fraction of the price and multiple times the satisfaction and enjoyment.
Give me ONE example of an AAA company that went bankrupt. Just one. And no, being acquired by a bigger company doesn't count.
The biggest complaint those companies have is that they're not hitting profit growth projections set by analysts. Indies aren't on the stock market so they don't have the same concerns.
@@mattandrews2594 bankrupt and dying are two different things. AAA companies outside of big multi studio corporations that act as their own publisher are rarer and rarer as time goes on
How are AAA games dying lmao get real
@@mattandrews2594Black Isle Studios, 38 Studios, The Looking Glass, BioWare, Origin, TellTale, Volition, Visceral Games, and a ton of others. It's very common, especially now.
Damn the indie scene is going to explode in revenue if this happens. Support indie devs 👍
as well as any game studios that jst maintain more acceptable prices.
Like Nintendo I don't see going along with this as they've always made staying relatively affordable one of their main points. If anything I see them using their lower prices as a selling point.
A few other companies and studios I also see probably goign with lower budgets and prices to stay competative.
We need to remember, the way the market is meant to work is the one with the best service for the best price get the buisness. If some companies are over charging don't be a pushover and pay anyway. Buy other games from those not over charging.
People need to break out of the FOMO with franchises. No you DO NOT need to pay $100 for the latest GTA6. You'll live even if you never play it or wait for a good enough sale. Just don't be a pushover.
Nahm, the first thing that gonna happen is piracy is going to be a lot easier
@@metazoxan2 I mean I know damn well I'll bite the bullet and regret buying GTA 6 for $100 but fucking hell, paying that much for a fucking game that takes the same amount of time as current games to make and during this current gen of gaming that will last a lot longer is insane to me.
Keep in mind everyone says they'll pay for it cause its X game made by X company but were still in the era of dogshit games where it could be good or ass most of the time for that price to be acceptable to an "degree".
@@TheChaosAnimationsimagine spending a hundred dollars on release version of cyberpunk
@@TheChaosAnimations Then don't bite the damn bullet!
Frankly if you seriously pay that much for a game while also crying about "dogshit games" then you are exactly the real cause of the problem.
Again break out of the FOMO! Companies are blatantly exploiting that for profit and we need to say enough is enough.
But just to be clear that doesn't mean we should be overly cheap either. Companies won't survive without profits and so we need to pay fairly for the games we want to play.
If paying around $100 for a game in the US is already annoying, imagine in Brazil where many companies don't regionalize game prices, resulting in them being 4 or 5 times more expensive (currently $1 costs R$4.96).
Edit: I just saw that the minimum wage is R$1,412, which makes things even worse.
Now imagine being an Argentino😂 . Steam take out the price on pesos and put all at full price.
Is that per hour ? if that is per hour that would be 284.67 in USD an hour .
Pretty sure it's per month@@ssShockRyder
lol... whatever... all game selling platforms have pricing parity
@@Microphunktv-jb3kj not at all
minimum wage in USA is 1.218 (I don't know hot accurate this is I searched on google)
a full price game in USA is 60 dolars
the minimum wage here is 1.450 BRL (1600 in São Paulo)
a full price game in Brazil is 250BRL
due to taxes is even worse for consoles and PCs
Companies underestimate my patience and my willingness to wait years to buy a game for a discounted price
you will wait, but others won't. and that's the problem
Yup took me 3 years to pick up a ps5 I had no problem with waiting
They don't care about what you, a single human being, do. As long as the majority is buying, then it's fine for them
@@deweybewey how much did you end up paying? In Europe it's still around the same price... Instead of 8000 (with tax) it's ~+7000
@@NearynHub that’s not the point I didn’t mined the price on the Ps5 I waited till it was easily accessible.
And I can wait for a game to go to 30$ sale on Christmas
Gaming industry is in the same state as the films industry. Studios producing products with an exaggerated budget needing to make an unreasonable amount sales to break even but delivering dogshit quality.
Rise up indie game devs. Feel like there is massive opportunity for smaller company game creators at the moment. I'm biased because I generally prefer indie games over most AAA titles in the last few years.
we are in an age where "free" youtube content is more entertaining than a lot multi. million hollywood productions. so if the conclusion is to support more affordable indie games that are produced and supported with higher care and love then i am all for it
@@RichieBennonah... most indie games are mid at best.
We just think they are great because the AAA suck so much. The only ones that didn't screw me over at this point were Fromsoft games. EA, Ubisoft, Activision, CDPR, Bethesda, Square Enix and many more keep delivering wastes of money.
I forgot about the movie theaters in my post! 15+$ movie tickets is one of the biggest driving factors why movie theaters don't constantly fill up anymore.
@@Alex-K94square enix only good for final fantasy tbh.
Asmongold has been a very wealthy person for a long time and is very out of touch with reality if he thinks most people will be fine with games going up to $80. Ever since games went to up $70 a lot of my gamer friends have been playing more indies, and have been buying AAA games only during sales.
GTA is a different story because it's a game you play for years and hundreds if not thousands of hours.
Even 70 is egregious
Dude people are idiots most people will spend $80 some won't but the majority will.
The only game I ever payed that much for was Red Dead Redemption 2.
Also, games have been $100 for a while already, because Studios have been charging $30 for the DLC pass instead of releasing a complete game.
I'd say you're the one out of touch with reality, the majority of gamers are on console (not counting mobile) and have been paying their games $70 or $80 for years now.
PC gaming is still considered niche
$80 for AAA for GoW 2018 but not Ragnarok. I'd pay $80 for bg3. Everything else? No.
I just know what I would buy, but I'm more price conscious. Most people are idiots and will pay way too much. Especially considering game companies chase addiction now - the same force responsible for heroin and meth addicts deciding they'd rather have heroin or meth instead of a house.
I buy the majority of my games at 50% off or more. 80% of my game purchases are under $50. $1 per hour of gameplay is my rubrik.
I live in South Africa and our currency is shockingly weak. Steam used to do some good regional prices so things were still pretty affordable, but now, holy shit, I think they just gave up on regional pricing and now I have to pay these insane prices with my shitty African income LOL. If they really up the prices it’s over
Thats the thing. People from other countries were using VPNs to get the regional priced games instead of their own country overpriced ones
This is why I only pirate games.
R1500 for a game and they want to make it R2000+ thats a third of the new min salary. Only the well off will be able to pay for AAA games
maybe a certain man in a red fedora was right about nationalizing the mines so that our economy can actually benefit from it. the rest of what is says is nonsense
Yeah, that happened in Argentina too. Went from "I can save to afford a couple games per year" to "I have to sacrifice eating for six months to afford a game"
imo the biggest issue is, you went from owning your games to renting them. And the price never changed for that. You went from paying $60 and owning your game, to paying $60 and renting your game until the publisher says you can't have it no more. The security of your transaction is gone. That and you have game studios thinking their game is the next Baldur's Gate 3 when players beg to differ. Perfect example of this is D3 wanting to charge $100 for literal trash.
The reason for games being 60 dollars was because of physical media. Shipping, storing, making the games cost money. Digital removes this (except for the store front taking a cut) so games increasing in price is just greed.
I remember when Total Biscuit told us games will be cheaper when going digital. And since then they only got more expensive.
Not only that, but the gaming companies used to make absolutely nothing on used games. That was gamestop money. Now, with digital, when games eventually go on sale, they are eating the used market that they never had before. They should be making more money than ever.
It's why so many games go on sale on steam. Digital copies might as well cost $0 for the company,so a 60% discount isn't a bad sale for the company because it might as well be pure profit. The reason why they implemented microtransations is because they wanted more money, not because they needed it. Same thing for this proposed game price increase. They just want more money, and they think people will swallow their complaints and pay the increased price.
Sorry this is simply not true. Digital games are far more expensive than physical.
@@DOG-mm3sg "youre wrong because i said so. no im not gonna provide evidence that letting someone download a game through steam is somehow more expensive than literally manufacturing a physical disc, box, and shipping it across borders, and getting taxed along every step of that process" - a clown
I remember Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario RPG, and Chrono Trigger going for $80 at my local Sears store (which would be over $150 dollars today). Those games were expensive because the cartridges were manufactured with a lot of memory. So prices fell thanks to CD-ROMs, games on PS1 sold for $50 new, and most PC games were similar. Around the year 2000 I bought a collectors edition of Civilization III on PC for $60.
Yeah i remember games being way cheaper than 60 when I was younger. On top of that there was a huuuuuge second hand market which doesn’t really exist now as a lot of people buy digital. These companies have been making ever increasing profits without needing to raise prices more than to 60-70. However co,panties always want more profit so they will raise prices to make investors happy.
The average price of a AAA game 5 years ago was 60 dollars. The biggest cost in the creation of video games is paying the developers salaries. So the video game developers getting a 40 percent pay increase. is the only legitimate reason to justify such a gross increase in price and I guarantee that they have not. The inflation excuse only goes so far before it just sounds like a ceo needs a new yacht.
They've been $60 since 2005 though. You don't have to like it, but this is why microtransactions and DLCs have boomed since the mid-2000s: the cost of production increased but not per-unit revenue.
Software dev wages have gone from about $50-60K in the 2000s to now just below six figures, and the amount of people employed in the industry has sky-rocketed.
Again, you don't have to like it, but if you want a billion dollar game, they're going to want billions of dollars in revenue. Prices increase, and those who don't want to pay will seek substitute goods at cheaper prices.
Halo 3 was developed for $60 million. Halo Infinite was developed for $500 million & is a much lower quality game. There has been inflation since 2007 but not that much.
@@Monsuco Halo Infinite is also a live service game, the genre with the largest costs of the industry. It also had a complete redevelopment after announcement.
Cost overrun was prevalent and is also not good for quality. You are comparing apples and oranges.
Sure I'll pay $100. If I can get a guaranteed refund if your game is unfinished at release.
Yes they'll make more money but all that will do is ensure the moment I find a single glaring flaw, I'm refunding.
1000000000000000000% what i was thinking
They simply make the game be good for the first 2 hours. Then copypaste the rest of the game. It's been like that for a while now. Over 2 hours of playtime and you can't refund...
They want to talk about "value", when they put half the content in the game in a bloody cash shop, and then want to charge $100. Tell you what. You want to charge me more? Then no more microtransactions. Actually put the game in the game, and stop trying to sell me chunks of it for 50 times the price of the base game.
gaming companies need to be reminded of efficiency and "making every dollar count" they have become huge titans of bureaucracy
The price will increase and people will pay it. The only lesson AAA will learn is they were leaving money on the table.
That’s because they emulated the tech industry when they honestly shouldn’t have
You can pay that, I won't. They are already coming out with half-assed games that aren't even fully finished products by release date. They want to increase the price, I'll wait for bargain-bin ones. From PS1-5 I have over 500 physical games, add in digital probably around 615. I have over 100 physical games for the Nintendo Switch and somewhere around 100 digital. It won't hurt me to wait, LOL!
The sale numbers keep increasing, the install base has never been bigger, they keep inflating the budgets when they don't need to, and we are going to pay more for games even tho the revenue keeps going up year after year.
1337x is going on my bookmarks bois.
Okay, cool, but for information 1337x is no longer on the websites recommended by those accustomed to hacks since the admins were caught literally protecting an uploader putting malware in his torrents: they deleted the comments denouncing it rather than banning the culprit.
@@Gonzora 1337x is the hub not the source. You should have a list of trusted uploaders.
@@RmnGnzlzI know but that's not what I'm talking about. The thing is that a site recognized by the scene must kick out uploaders seeking to harm others, which 1337x does not do.
Afterwards, yes, you can of course rely only on the source torrent or the repacks from FitGirl and Dodi.
But executive needs new yacht, why you no give more money?
@@Gonzora it's fine as long as you download from trusted uploaders like fitgirl/dodi etc.
Here's an idea for the publishers: "ask the customer for a tip at the end credits" ...I'll see myself out
😂
I can see it now, another page to load on steam between check out and the successful purchase screen
And the “skip” or “no tip” button is really small on the bottom left
they will
brooo don't give them this idea they will legit implement it
Hackers and Pirates: _"We're about to end their whole career."_
I work at a local game store. people will overdraft their bank account to get that $15 game today because they dont want to wait until next friday to get paid. people will 100% get the $100 games. they will also go hungry to do so. nothing new
I remember when they said digital games would be cheaper than disc games because they wouldn't have to pay for discs and ship out discs.
They like to say a lot of things. Experience has taught me that the opposite is usually true.
I’ve already stopped buying new games a few years ago. I only buy stuff when it’s on giant publisher sales like 50% or more. It’s just not worth it when there are so many titles coming out unfinished or are nothing like we expect.
Right? I could go back and play pokemon ruby and sapphire on my GBA, but for the life of me I don't want to play pokemon ORAS for more than 10 minutes. The quality of games are just not here anymore. Both in heart and soul.
Gaming is the only industry that says "we are over budget, charge the customer more then" instead of cutting back on expenses.
Sadly over half of AAA gaming budgets is in marketing not real development costs (wages/hardware).
Nah they will still budget for a $70 dollar sell at first to test the waters. If they don't whoever is at marketing are total morons.
It's not even development and production expenses that makes games costly. Executive pressure to make games bigger and the overfocus on realistic graphics to appease shareholders while making their salarys and benefits in the house of milions is the real issue.
uses budget for grass textures and voice acting that doesn't add to gameplay
Sounds like the government 😂😂
If they raise the price to 100 dollars it will become literally impossible to buy some AAA game in launch here in Brazil. It will be 500 of our coin and this is a GIGANTIC amount of money here. For comparisson, a ps5 Day 1 was 500 dollars and 5000 in here
i’ll pay a fare price if they start delivering a fair product
Yep, if games prices go up so should the quality
60$ is already a fair price if not overpriced
They should be $10 when they're making them licenses anyway. For 100 you should get a collector's edition.
They will be out-competed by indie games who actually make FUN games instead of nickle and dime schemes like what Rockstar and Blizzard does.
But Rockstar at the very least can make a good game when they put effort in it and it really shows when they put effort in it...
@@cursedimageseveryday5559 Good games, but a lot of RDR2 and GTA 5 are padded with mediocre content.
Cinematic clips are what they're known for now and it's decent entertainment, but it's also highly overrated.
You can get just as much fun out of other games that cost far less and don't have shark cards and season passes.
@cursedimageseveryday5559 Rockstar tend to put the effort in all the wrong things, the attention to detail is nice but it doesn't make things fun.
Imagine paying 70$ for a sports game when you can play it for free with ur friends outside 😂
"Normalize", wtf are these companies on? At some point, someone has to say enough. 70$ was already a controversial decision (yes, I know inflation is a big part) but still, it better be worth the 70 dollars. Though, 100? From Blizzard? Yeah...no.
their sales are way up so that more than counteracts the "inflation."
@@Zed-ch9fg they are driving the inflation train with decisions like that.
100$ for a stupid game is ridiculous. They will lose me as a customer if they do that, there are much better things to spend 100$ on in life than a stupid game. They are not worth 100$