Ok but hear me out, devil’s advocate, gaming is and has been one of the cheapest forms of entertainment for a long time, and production costs have increased significantly.
I agree with the first part (not that it should mean they can just extract more money out of us), but the second part is something I simply don’t believe.
Don’t get me wrong, I know budgets have increased, but the dev cost definitely didn’t by remotely the same amount. Devs wages are pretty stagnant since the initial silicon Valley boom and new tools at our disposal have made it a lot easier to create games, be it for indi devs or the corporate giants. Sure, graphics got fancier, but so did the readily aviable stock assets. High end work stations cost maybe a bit more, but they are a drop in the bucket in the 100+ million budgets of today.
What has increased on the other hand is the amount of executives/managers and their wages. In addition to that marketing has gone up a lot, probably over half of most budgets go there. The growing corporate overhead with its archaic structures also eats up a lot.
If we go purely by dev cost, prices should go down since the overall profit would increase with the greater amount of players. Everything else is corporate overlords throwing shitloads of money at a mediocre game to make it seem worth something.
Can’t wait for nobody to understand ads in old video games when they’re being played years later.
It also always reminds me of this: https://piped.video/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g
Bold of you to assume the games will even be available to play years later.
Buying games online was supposed to be cheaper, too. Cuz no money spent on packaging and retail space…
So they can pay their devs more, right? 😀
So they can pay their devs more, right? 😟
Hell, the game could go from 70$ to Free with Ads, I’d still not be interested. I despise ads and I absolutely refuse to see them.
Trying to learn a new language and my friends keep recomeneding duolingo. But my zero tolerance for ads makes Duolingo dead on arrival.
I’m not at all defending advertisements because, like every single person on earth, I hate them. However, the constant complaint that ~games are expensive~ is more and more becoming absolutely out of touch. Considering how complex modern games are from a software standpoint, they are fucking cheap as hell. $60 for (generally speaking) 40+ hours of entertainment is a goddamn bargain, not to mention they’ve mostly been priced the same for the better part of two decades. Y’all realize actual people make these things right? People who need to be paid for the work they do? Of all the absolute shit that happens behind the scenes and in plain daylight in the gaming industry, I think we can find better things to bitch about than the price of games.
Considering how complex modern games are from a software standpoint, they are fucking cheap as hell
Frameworks, ready to use engines and props and less care for efficiency (see Ark Survival) make it less effort for more results.
Wasn’t there some asian guy who made a whole action level in Unity just for fun?
So because someone made something as a hobby that means other people shouldn’t be paid for work? Also, sure, tools exist to ease in the production of a game (and in every other creative media), doesn’t negate the fact that people’s talent and work are what make the product exist.
