games

I want shorter games with worse graphics and I'm not kidding

The video game industry is bigger than Hollywood. Imagine if they were charging $90 for a BluRay.

Also the fuck you mean 90? We just jumped up from 60 to 70 a couple years ago. You can try 80 in 2030.

The audience is bigger and the per unit cost is lower. You can make more money releasing the exact same game now than you could 20 years ago. They should cost less.

How're those poor executives gonna buy a third yacht? Gotta buy back stock with that excess capital to drive up prices for ~~their own stock options~~ shareholders, did you ever think of that

“Oh but ClimateChangeAnxiety, games cost more to make now!” No they don’t. You’re choosing to spend more to make them. You’re choosing to hire larger teams to make larger games with better graphics. Don’t do that. Make them the same way you did in 2010.

You have better tools now, you can make the same products you made in 2010 with less labor today. Do that. And charge less.

Outside of niche games and genres, those would sell poorly. Mainstream consumers will absolutely not accept stagnation. This argument always comes up with regards to game franchises that had their heyday 10-20 years ago, and the answer is the same. A lot of those games had mechanics, progression skips, and glitches that would be considered unacceptable in the modern market. That was fine back then as the internet and YouTube were no where no where near as big as they are today, so the knowledge of game breaking progress skips, extremely overpowered builds, and glitches was contained through obscurity. You had to either phone a hotline (remember those) or go on a niche internet forum to find out about these things. That's not possible anymore, someone will post a YouTube video within 24 hours of the latest exploit and it would be all over the internet within a few days. I say this as someone who is a huge fan of those older games and still plays them today.

The only series I've seen revive itself by making the same kind of game it made 15 years ago was Ace Combat, a niche franchise that was in a poor situation in the first place, because it tried to enter the mainstream and failed with it's Call of Duty clone with airplanes game.

And besides that, the Switch and Switch 2 is already a constrained platform. Most flagship smartphones are more powerful than the Switch 2. Nintendo is the only party around making games under such hardware constraints. That's because ever since the GameCube, they failed to compete against PlayStation and Xbox on the processing power front. So Nintendo competes in hardware niches, motion control with the Wii, and the portable factor with the Switch. Nintendo is the company making games with the technical complexity of those made 5-10 years ago. So if they're charging more, that means the industry is in big trouble. GTA 6 $100?

And to be completely honest, this stuff (consumer electronics and video games) has always been that expensive outside of the western/first world sphere. Cheap consumer goods in the western world is possible because of globalised neoliberal capitalism, a system that is now dead. The 2009 financial crisis was the big blow, and afterwards Obama, Merkel, Macron, Cameron, Abe, they all tried to revive this system and failed. COVID and the resulting inflation was the death knell. The Trump administration in the USA is trying to lessen the blow (for the USA) by taking direct control of the world's oceans and key points, along with tarrifs. If consumer electronics are considered expensive now, just wait for what the next decade has in store. So many potential flashpoints.

but it costs server money to run our panopticon skynet skinchanging marketplace to sell your data

Wishing a very Dreamcast

Everyone made fun of horse armor. Everyone also bought horse armor.

Also worth remembering the time that Microsoft forced Valve to charge money for new Left for Dead maps that were free on PC.

How did we just get to a point where we collectively allowed even digital games to cost this much

Antipiracy policies and propaganda

Also adjusting for inflation, Atari games were $120.

just pirate it lol