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A discussion on the price increase in the industry
- Thread starter jman1954goat
- Start date
Well said OP. Where I am in the U.K. the price increase & disparity between Sony's games and most of the rest of the industry is even more apparent and it has only gotten worse since launch. The hand waving at launch was that if we were just a little patient and waited a few months they will be 20/30/40% off in digital sales and well half a year later... that certainly hasn't happened. Not even close. Now with the recent confirmation that some of Sony's biggest games will be cross-gen, it will either mean that both PS4/5 versions will be £70, or that the PS5 version will be £70 and any 'upgrade' from the PS4 version will necessitate a fee (I think it'll be this one) unless Sony really surprises. We'll find out soon enough once Horizon is dated and available for preorder but I'm not optimistic...
Not when actual data pertaining to this specific topic is so readily available. The market gives two hoots about people's beliefs.
I'm obviously not who you are responding to, but I think I can address it - publishers will always have markup because they are the ones that can provide the greatest distribution. If I made an indie game tomorrow, I'd want a publicher to increase my sales across the board, and the price of the game would increase to support that.
Publishers and Developers aren't the problem here, per se - yes, an industry where devs can promote their game by themselves would be great, but without publichers there would be a lot of crap games messing up the works (imagine me making 27 match-3 games that got the same air time as Halo Infinite and Ratchet and Clank). There's a pipeline. There are costs involved. It's like writing a book - distribution is HARD, and there are costs involved with getting your book distributed.
Again, I can be mad about the $70 price tag from an individual standpoint. I want to be able to play every game that exists. But I can't. I won't be able to. The capitalistic society we live in won't allow it. So fuck it, I'll play what I can.
This is always forgotten in these discussions: when you buy a $70 game you can easily resell it $50. The resell price seems to be indexed to the original price, don't you think? A $60 game tends to be found in second hand at $40, etc.
No matter how hyped we are for a game, if we all can control ourselves and avoid buying games at launch, buying them later when they are on sale, then they will have no other option than to reduce the price again to 60 or even 50.
But as long as many people continue buying games for 70, there is nothing to do.
It's OK to criticize Sony and other publishers for this decision, but just writing here is not enough to solve the problem.
But as long as many people continue buying games for 70, there is nothing to do.
It's OK to criticize Sony and other publishers for this decision, but just writing here is not enough to solve the problem.
That's the other thing (to follow on to my other posts).
Someone is going to pay that price. Someone is so repulsed by the idea of FOMO that they will buy it. And devs/pubs know that. If I create enough hype for my game, I'm gonna charge more because I know people will buy it.
Yeah I see that the market proves that their business model works at those prices. But I think it dosen't help anyone to call out people without engaging with their arguments. This just ends up in a toxic discussion.
It's pretty shitty. I'm one of the lucky ones who could buy all games I might want to check at 80€ but it sure feels awful, like we are being milked. Luckily between gamepass (if applicable) and sony 1st party usually going down in price fast, you can somewhat participate.
Rigjt but pubs are posting record profits in the face of the 60 dollar price point
For people gaming on a budget I would suggest a good cheap PC. You get free games every week or less combining ESG with stuff like a borrowed Amazon Prime for Twitch Gaming free games and loot. There's also a ton of free to play games like Valorant. Then there's the crazy deals PC games get.
And most of all, no subscription fee to play games online.
And most of all, no subscription fee to play games online.
Very informative response… I guess you're here to just troll around.
I am sure some of the same people supporting these prices are the ones saying they don't get metacritic reviews and say we should just play all the games to know if we like them or not.
How the fuck am I gonna play everything if the game costs 70 euro?!
Seriously, fuck 70 euro games.
How the fuck am I gonna play everything if the game costs 70 euro?!
Seriously, fuck 70 euro games.
You can call me a troll but once again profits are still up in the face of the restrictive 60 dollar price point
I'm rich, but I'm also not buying games at €75. Games were already too expensive and pushing it at €60, I have no intention of paying more.
For €14 a month I'm getting tens of thousands of shows on Netflix, some of these like Jupiter's Legacy also costing in excess of $200M and then getting pushed out to die so the next thing can be released (I had to look up the name because I had completely forgotten about it). And then I'm supposed to pay €75 for a single game? There was an argument to be made that games were necessarily premium price back when it was a small niche hobby with expensive tooling. Now it's the biggest entertainment industry in the world. Prices should go down, not up. And Sony is pushing this because they can, not because they have to. Letting them know the price you're willing to pay is not trolling, it's market forces from the other direction.
For €14 a month I'm getting tens of thousands of shows on Netflix, some of these like Jupiter's Legacy also costing in excess of $200M and then getting pushed out to die so the next thing can be released (I had to look up the name because I had completely forgotten about it). And then I'm supposed to pay €75 for a single game? There was an argument to be made that games were necessarily premium price back when it was a small niche hobby with expensive tooling. Now it's the biggest entertainment industry in the world. Prices should go down, not up. And Sony is pushing this because they can, not because they have to. Letting them know the price you're willing to pay is not trolling, it's market forces from the other direction.
The idea of being able to play everything is something people really need to let go of. There's not enough time and money for a vast majority of people to meet this goal.
Again, you don't seem to want to read. So keep going on your one note. Have fun!
Your point being incoherent is not my fault, don't blame me for it
Oh, I agree, but there are a couple things there. Neither of which gamers don't want to confront:
1 - developers are not paid enough to keep up with inflation
2 - games are not sold at a high enough price to justify paying devs more
To be perfectly honest, we should all be paying more for games. I don't want to do that, but given how inflation is adjusted, we're seeing a lot more work for a product that is sold for the same price as it was 15 years ago. Publishers margins are insane, but they do address the distribution issue for a lot of developers.
Oh god, stop this bullshit. This whole "you probably can't afford X" argument is so fucking stupid. Games having a price increase overall without anything to justify the increase is always defended here with stupid ass arguments that are naive at best and corporate boot licking at worst. Games being priced at $70 while at the same time being literred with micro transactions and all sorts of ways to monetize fucking EVERYTHING, is only being done because of greed. People saying they have an issue with it shouldn't be met with this utterly moronic argument or response.
People are price sensitive and they have every right to be.
That's the beauty of subscription model. Also, netflix is a loss leader. They are still in growth mode. They will keep increasing the prices and user base or they have to make a switch at some point to sustain this model as they don't have ad based revenue.
That's why gamepass is always an interesting thing to watch for me. Have to see how they keep building that model.
more people will buy it at $20 than $70, but since apparently a non-insignificant number of people are willing to pay $70, they'll make way more money in the long run by launching at $70 and then gradually decreasing the price over time, picking up sales at each price point, than they would by pricing at $20 out the gate. With income inequality it's not really the worst thing in the world, since people who make more money can then pay more for games and in essence subsidize the hobby for people like me who pick the game up down the line at a deep discount. Early adopters get the "bonus" of participating in the hype cycle while getting to play the most broken version of the game, while latecomers get to enjoy the games after the bugs have been ironed out, maybe the DLCs bundled in, all for a fraction of the cost of the initial offer.
Demanding to play every game you want, when you want it, and at the exact price you say it should be based on BLANK is TO ME the definition of greedy.
Over here I can still get the physical copies at launch for the same price as PS4 games, even first party titles.
You just need to look at the right stores.
NL
If you want digital, yea you pay a premium. Personally with the quality of games they release I don't mind. I either buy them straight away andnif not worth it I'll wait a bit or buy second hand.
You just need to look at the right stores.
NL
If you want digital, yea you pay a premium. Personally with the quality of games they release I don't mind. I either buy them straight away andnif not worth it I'll wait a bit or buy second hand.
I mean, both of these things can be true. Prices for AAA releases and most non-remaster console games released through major publishers have not gone up to account for inflation.
I see it not as "it's time," but a legitimate issue... because the cost of creating the bigger titles has also gone up. This article is a few years old by now, but it's pretty clear that the big releases are more expensive to make, and a lot of the smaller titles that have any sort of budget barely break even. As games become more technologically advanced, as people want to have more features and bigger scope in their games, the costs go up.
If the big-ticket games (not just AAA, but other big games too) cost more to make, but the prices stay the same... where does that lead us? It's part of why microtransactions are such a thing, why we're seeing major titles have Games as a Service elements. They have to recoup costs somehow, and if a game doesn't sell well initially and doesn't get a lucky bump in popularity, franchises or potential series could get cut short and dev companies can go under (in the case of smaller teams/subsidiaries/contractors).
$70 is a lot, though. It definitely is. I won't be able to afford buying all big releases at launch or even for a bit after. We could talk FOMO or the problems with preordering (or buying on hype rather than reviews), but that's not really the point here: $70 is a lot for a lot of us.
And maybe the bigwigs *should* take a pay cut to help make things better for the industry they helped create.
but if that's not gonna happen, what do we do? We can't expect things to stay the same as they were, and even microtransactions don't guarantee success (though they might be able to help recoup costs). Knowing that there's no way the industry will suddenly have CEOs and investors and other execs essentially subsidize the cost of games, we can't expect game prices to stay the same forever. Without figuring out another method of monetization, it's raise prices or have microtransactions.
It wouldn't be reasonable to decide the industry should just go back to making smaller games; creatives want to push their limits, tech can enable devs to follow through on ideas that they couldn't do before, and plenty of players want the big AAA highly-polished affairs (even if they also play the less expensive indie games and play big titles way after release). It can't be a thing where everyone just waits for price drops, either, because that can put studios (and therefore hundreds of peoples' jobs) at risk. Not huge-ass companies like Ubisoft or Activision or EA, I'm not caping for corporations, but the smaller teams they have, the second-party dev teams they use, and so on.
It's a shitty situation, and we shouldn't dismiss the issues that rising costs cause, but there's more to it than just prices rising.
I base it on the pricing we use for books. Stuff priced cheaper ends up selling a lot more than the expensive books--unless the author is a big-name must-buy writer (then the price doesn't really matter), and R & C isn't that. People like cheap stuff and they're more likely to try something that may not be what they're interested in if it's fairly cheap--it's universal, regardless of the industry. It's not rocket science. I don't know why people would even debate that.
Anyway, my original point wasn't about whether Sony gets as much money if they sell it cheaper, but about the strangeness of the fact that 10-hour games are priced like huge 100-hour games. It makes no sense to me.
Good point. I was going to write something like this earlier.
It's been 15 years since the last price hike, developer salaries have gone up, and thankfully will continue going up despite some people here thinking devs are living some posh, decadent lifestyle. You can't honestly have believed that game prices would never again increase.
People pretending that they thought an increase would mean an immediate huge bump in developer salaries are being dishonest. You want cheaper games, don't act like you give a shit about the artists who create them. They will go up, as they always have.
Stop with the lazy ass "bootlicker" and "defending a multimillion dollar corporation" bullshit. It's not a real argument, it's an attempt to shut down conversation and it's tired and fucking dorky. You don't need to be a "bootlicker" to understand inflation.
People pretending that they thought an increase would mean an immediate huge bump in developer salaries are being dishonest. You want cheaper games, don't act like you give a shit about the artists who create them. They will go up, as they always have.
Stop with the lazy ass "bootlicker" and "defending a multimillion dollar corporation" bullshit. It's not a real argument, it's an attempt to shut down conversation and it's tired and fucking dorky. You don't need to be a "bootlicker" to understand inflation.
Publishers not paying devs enough in the face of exec bonuses and record high profits isn't going to be fixed by the 70 dollar price point. You can bet your ass on that. In the face of record high profits, it's really hard to see that publishers are struggling on 60 dollar price points. Additionally, although inflation is a factor, it doesn't seem to be affecting profits too much. Which seem to be record high almost across the board
Activision had record high revenue in 2018 then laid off over 800 employees. This idea that the increase to $70 is going to transfer to devs getting paid more is quite frankly laughable.
I think it is bullocks as well that the price goes up. Nintendo did it silently with their Switch games. Where all of their games ended up €60 and honestly some of them weren't worth it.
That said the €70 tag is a reason I dont want a PS5 yet. I know those games are going down or be a select game at some point. So I just wait a few years and then see where we are at. I can also see that a reason why people notice the €70 price tag is because of GamePass. If you don't care about getting a game and just want to play it, you can on GamePass and arguably you can just be a member for a few months and turn it off. I do agree that nothing is stopping us to get games cheaper and not right away. But I do think it is fine we criticize these practices.
That said the €70 tag is a reason I dont want a PS5 yet. I know those games are going down or be a select game at some point. So I just wait a few years and then see where we are at. I can also see that a reason why people notice the €70 price tag is because of GamePass. If you don't care about getting a game and just want to play it, you can on GamePass and arguably you can just be a member for a few months and turn it off. I do agree that nothing is stopping us to get games cheaper and not right away. But I do think it is fine we criticize these practices.
I agree with basically everything you said.
I can afford the 70$ pricing just fine (even if locally the increase works out to more like 20$ instead of 10$), the question is whether I'm actually willing to part with that 70$. So many other games to play.
Your point regarding game pricing back in the day was excellent, it made sense to price games higher back then because the addressable market was so small/niche. In 2021, with gaming being as mainstream as it is, not so much.
Yeah maybe I'm a little cynical but the culture of corporations making as much money as possible while spending as little as possible is going to see this upped price manifested as heightened profit margins of publishers
"Bang for the buck" only applies up to a point, and the demand for games to have more of it is why we've ended up with such a deluge of games going "open-world" (or single-player MMORPG) even when it absolutely doesn't make them a better experience. More often than not, the extra hours that are required to "do everything" in a game comes down to absolute garbage "content" that no one would ever bother with if that content was the only thing you could find inside the game.
I understand the sentiment, but "value proposition" has become kind of a joke lately due to the effect of above. It actively wastes the player's time. Video games are already a time waster by being entertainment, but they don't need to be a time waster and offer nothing but chores.
As for the the price increase goes, while I don't really believe the "it's about time" sentiment, games were way more expensive in the '90s when you consider inflation. They were also generally much shorter. Nintendo's games have always remained more expensive than Sony's and Microsoft's too simply due to them essentially never going on sale and never depreciating in perpetuity. Microsoft raising their price doesn't really make any sense, other than to simply force more people to use Game Pass as an option, and while they do want more people to use that service, what they actually want is for people to subscribe, and never unsubscribe. Savvy spenders know how to easily exploit that though in its current iteration to essentially "rent" games.
Personally, due to the effect "value proposition" has on the bigger budget games, I find myself buying less and less annually anyway, so I was already pretty discerning before. While the price increase isn't great, spending $10 more two or three times a year won't really impact me all that much, especially since I primarily game on PC anyway, and even if they too were to get a price increase, you can still typically find them cheaper on day one somewhere. For other people that seem to think they need to buy a constant stream of games? I guess they will either have to buy one or two games less a year now, or sacrifice spending in other non-essential areas.
I'm not going to defend the pricing practices of the big publishers (Sony's $10+ price hike, Nintendo's refusal to reduce the base price of their games), I just don't see it as that big of an issue. From mobile, F2P, indie games and aggressive sales over to subscription services like Game Pass, PS Now or Humble Choice, gaming has become more affordable and accessible than it has ever been at any time in history. So the issue isn't really "I can't afford to play games anymore" but "I can't afford these specific games on this specific platform right now". I don't understand the people that see $70 or 70€ games as a deal breaker but got a PS5 when there's more affordable alternatives out there.
Video games are a bigger grossing industry than movies and music combined last I checked.
Love all the people in this thread defending price hikes. OP is 100% right. Also playing a game at launch is one of the best times to play it because 1. You can participate in the conversations around the game when the zeitgeist is in full swing 2. You are less likely to have the game spoiled for you. Game Pass might suit you OP if you are willing to give up Sony first party exclusives.
Ok so you are making the argument that by selling the game for $20 they will make more money? And furthermore you believe this is an insight that money-driven capitalistic overlords haven't realiazed?
Anybody buying a PS5 or Series X in first year basically has FOMO and will subsequently pick up release software to justify early purchase. The publishers know this.
Consequently no one is going to seriously discount in that first year but things will ease up as the generation establishes itself.
Consequently no one is going to seriously discount in that first year but things will ease up as the generation establishes itself.
I see very few people actually defending the price hikes though. It's clear a lot of yall are just in your feelings and seeing things you want to see here
Being an adult is budgeting and prioritizing for the things you want in life. Everyone isn't gonna throw down the gauntlet because of a price hike for games, they are simply gonna adapt by allocating more money to their hobby or finding alternatives like gamepass/psnow.
I totally get it. I am thankfully lucky enough that I can afford the price, but it hurts everytime.
To be honest all it does is make me want to finish it as quick as possible so I can trade it in at the maximum value, which if everyone does the same surely isn't what Sony intended.
But I also think this price means we don't have games riddled with microtransactions which is certainly the case with Sony, so that at least makes me feel like it's somewhat worth it. Problem is when the price becomes the norm for other publishers.
To be honest all it does is make me want to finish it as quick as possible so I can trade it in at the maximum value, which if everyone does the same surely isn't what Sony intended.
But I also think this price means we don't have games riddled with microtransactions which is certainly the case with Sony, so that at least makes me feel like it's somewhat worth it. Problem is when the price becomes the norm for other publishers.
I'm not saying Devs shouldn't negotiate better deals with publishers (and I would wager that larger studios have better incentives to do so), but your average AAA developer isn't incurring a lot of those costs (for instance, Sony acquired Insomniac, lowering the publishing costs since they are all under the same umbrella company). Indies are a whole 'nother category, and should price their games accordingly to offset the costs of publishing - there's a reason why you see so many articles about indie games not charging as much as they should - a lot of gamers have dumbass notions about the worth of a game: length, graphics, etc.
I'm not gonna fight the argument that publishers are making profits, but the devs have to front a lot of those costs with salaries and the like. I'd be happy to see pubs make less so that the devs can make more, but it's a complicated industry.
I can't imagine many here think that. Some people within the big companies are no doubt living that lifestyle but it's not the developers.
It's up to all the companies in the world to collude with each other to make sure they price all the products that you desire so that when you add them up, the total fits within your budget seems to be what some people want to expect.
We had one poster here earlier state that even some game developers are paid too much and it's not just the execs.