In the future, when a burger will cost $30 and minimum wage will be $40 an hour, people will still feel like videogames aren’t allowed to cost more than $60. Silly.
So you think that Stellar Blade would have been developed, as-is, if it were priced at $39.99 in 2024? It’s not 1998 anymore. If it was okay for a game to be priced at $50 in 1998 (equivalent to over $90 in 2024), why isn’t it for a game that cost magnitudes more to produce to be priced at $70?
It’s all psychological. People can’t break through this psychological dollar threshold despite the fact that inflation has reduced a dollar’s buying power by half in two decades.
Pick your poison…. $70 in 2024 or half the time, money, effort, and risk put into game development.
Economics needs to become a core class for everyone.
The only “right” you had was to not purchase the license to rent the game in the first place. Once money changed hands and the agreement was made, you were at the whim of the fine print.
It’s not about rights. It’s about the legal fine print that you inadvertently (or perhaps knowingly) agreed to when you purchased your license to “rent” the game.
You only purchased a license, unfortunately. The attorneys have already worked their fine print and will have your lunch if you try to challenge it.
Agreed. The first remake was stylistically beautiful and a very noticeable improvement over the original in every regard. And it was reasonably priced and sustainably developed (i.e. not some mega big budget game that was do or die for the developer).
I played the first remake and absolutely loved it. The quality of life and control improvements were very noticeable. I tried playing the PS1 original and gave up halfway through at the janky controls.
Expect the same for part 2. The PS1 version is janky as heck, but I would gobble up an improved remake day one.
The beauty of this kind of stuff is that I find myself enjoying more retro gaming today, so a relatively low budget classic remake (call it a sin...
I feel like the writing is on the wall. The never-ending growth cycle of AAA game development and astronomical expectations are coming to an end. Konami and Microsoft saw it coming in that the risk/reward of increasing scope and budgets was a dead-end road. Why spend $100M on a three year game development project that has equal chances of tanking and losing money as it does barely squeezing a profit? Why not, as a company, just invest in something like pachinko machines that have a far great...
HiFi mode in GT1 was only a stripped down 60 fps mode for one track. Should have been called "Performance Mode" or "High Frame Rate" mode.
Good news is that Sony released a final update to Gran Turismo Sport to allow it to function offline. Expecting the same for GT7 at some point in the future.
You just answered your own question... they ARE tweaking dev costs, starting with the recent spate of layoffs across the industry. There will also be a concerted effort to tweak (raise) prices until the gain/loss of subscriptions goes south. Until people stop buying/subscribing at a rate that exceeds revenue gain, this will continue.
That's not how profit/loss statements work. A loss would be income minus expenses. What you're talking about is growth and/or the lack thereof.
Greed is inherent in all of us. Most individuals are self-serving and greedy; but few of us will admit as much.
The game industry is in a period of consolidation after publishers went all-in during (and even before) the pandemic. The reality is that the market hasn't grown significantly, and ROIs have actually eroded due to the declining dollar, inflation, and competing forms of entertainment and subscription models. Publishers can see that continuing to pump more and more money into their projects is futile, and there is a sense that a pullback, both in scale and quantity, needs to happen.
The fact that new big budget games are only $70 is one of the reasons that we have all these micro transactions. When you have diverging variables (one side = size of staff/overall game budgets, other side = price of games relative to historical buying power), market forces will be forced to pull the sides together. So that means either game prices OR game revenue increases, or game staffing and game budgets decrease. Since the latter has persisted, publishers must find ways to increase re...
Same thing happened with GTA. The first two games were 2D and found limited success. The third game brought things into the third dimension and connected with a MUCH larger audience. Based on basic fundamentals, but the execution is where it matters most.
Not sure if it's "spiteful", but it's in the interest of all publishers to move towards an all-digital landscape. The market is moving in that direction, and unless there is some sort of significant backlash that impacts their sales, there is no incentive for them to cater to a shrinking base.
This is from someone with a huge physical collection.
Yikes. I guess we can agree that we all have different expectations for the definition of "excellence".
Without going down a rabbit hole of analyzing semantics, the general point is that the overall volume of entertainment choices out there most certainly impacts that sales/success of individual offerings, and just being a great product doesn't guarantee that you won't be overlooked. This is a real problem in the entertainment industry... competition for...
It may not get “ignored” by critics and the general opinion, but that doesn’t mean this feeling will be commensurate with dollars pumped in. The CODs, Fortnites, Minecrafts, Assassin’s Creeds, and Maddens of the gaming world soak up a lot of the potential dollars in the market. Gaming dollars are finite, and we can all agree that the most of those titles aren’t exactly the definition of “excellence”.
Your are cherry picking and oversimplifying the issues. Helldivers 2 is a great game and a solid single-A or maybe even a AA experience. But it is a GAAS type game that is subsidized by micro transactions. It was a relatively low budget effort and the underneath the veneer, it is a fun game that is built on fairly simple development assets.
I’m a guy that is more interested in retro games now than I am in any of the big budget stuff coming out. I don’t have the time nor des...