Technology

Sadly that could actually happen at some point.

🏴‍☠️

Even past that, you can find sub-$10 quality games all over the various online platforms.

I'm old enough to remember a friend in college blowing $1200 on double-GeForce cards so he could max out specs on Oblivion. And from that perspective, gaming has always been unaffordable. But you don't have to game like this. Nobody needs to go four figures out of pocket to play Slay the Spire or Dwarf Fortress or even Counterstrike.

Not just indie games, every game. Every new game is in competition with every other game in existence. It’s a battle for recognition and attention, winners take all. Brutal situation.

Same goes for books, movies, TV, music.

And don't forget, everything is digital now, so that $80 game that you've completed in 2 weeks can't be traded for any secondary value.

Seriously. These CEOs need to get their heads out of their asses and open their eyes. My gaming PC is from 2019. My newest machine is lower power than that. A steam deck. And they've ruined the steam machine pricing too.

AAA games cost a lot, use basically all the same formulas from the past decade or two, and are expensive to make. They need to target less lofty graphics if they want to sell more copies. Less and less can afford bleeding edge hardware. Now is the time to double down in quality instead of fancy graphics. And this is why they're losing and indies are thriving.

Hehe “Gaming has become unaffordable”. Continues to buy ram and other component capacity for AI data centers, while actively enshittifying every single game with microtransactions and forced game as a service bullshit. driving customers to increasingly purchase cheaper indie titles that are actually fun.

“Whatever can we do to fix this problem? “ <lays off veteran team so the shareholders can make 5 more Pennie’s a share, causing talent to look at different industries where they aren’t laid off every 2 years, causing every game to be made by devs fresh out of college>.

“This industry isn’t profitable anymore!”

The CEO is a she, Asha Sharma.

they need to be like 60% off

I just buy the game when it gets under $30.

Use gg.deals or isthereanydeal sites. Both show sales from a kot of 3rd party (legit) sites that redeem on steam (and others but mostly steam).

Very worth using and don't have to wait for a steam sale.

Why can they keep up both output and quality?

A lot of games produced under the Capcom brand are merely financed by Capcom and developed by smaller studios. Like how GameFreak makes Pokemon games for Nintendo. Clover Studio produces a bunch of indie games under the Capcom banner. Ninja Theory produced several of the Devil May Cry releases. Inti Creates spun out of the old Megaman team to keep turning out new titles when the franchise lapsed. Pragmata was built by a fully independent development team inside Capcom.

And... idk about "quality". They're as prone to releasing a flop as anyone. They just turn out a lot of iterative and derivative materials. Why are there 18 different Ace Attorney games over 24 years? Because there's just not a lot going on between versions, mostly. Same reason the Megaman franchise could turn over so quickly. One basic engine could support a plethora of titles.

There was a stretch in the late 90s where squaresoft released a final fantasy nearly every year for 5 years. Now it's once every 7+ years. I don't believe it should be that hard to make games these days. There are more people working on the projects, more tools and pre-made engines/libraries available. It's purely a management/budgeting problem.

The amount of money the industry blows chasing PR with the tiniest minority of whiny "core gamers" is going to be the downfall of AAA.

The problem is that investors are brain-dead, so Forbes picking up on negative sentiment from 500 neckbeards can legitimately tank a publicly traded publishers stock.

The vast, vast, VAST majority of gamers don't identify as gamers, don't play 50 titles a year, and sure as hell don't engage with gaming media or online discourse about gaming. 95% of games industry revenue is coming from people who don't give a shit about gamer "hot button topics".

The problem, like with most industries, is the speculative commodification of the companies themselves instead of just their products.

I’m surprised they haven’t come up with a mandatory paid service where AI finishes your game for you. Just pay for the device. Pay for the game. Pay for online access. Pay for the mods. Pay AI to finish the game…Pay extra for a summary of your achievement's.

Bonus: A game you no longer play could still net something on the second-hand market, or maybe you'd trade it with someone. I know there was a group of people at my school that collectively had like two or three copies of the various Pokemon games they'd pass around, exchanging and loaning them on the fly.

Steam Family Sharing is a thing, but not quite so trivial to set up as handing them the cartridge. Never mind about reselling digital copies of games.

Problem is becoming a platform where you cant just buy the game anymore. You can obtain a digital licence that they can revoke at any time. So it’s more rent the game. And the price is up. And they have interfered with the studio and development. Plus you also have to pay for gamepass to even launch the game you ‘paid’ for.

Stylized games always age best