$80 for Borderlands 4 too costly? Randy Pitchford says, "If you're a real fan, you'll find a way to make it happen"
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Idk. I think gamers are overly upset about $80 games. While I am sympathetic to not wanting the price to go up, the fact of the matter is that brand new video games cost pretty much the same as they did 30 years ago, while the cost of everything else has basically doubled in that time. I know it's probably not what is going to happen but if $80 video games are what it takes to get us away from shitty microtransactions in full price games, then I'm all for it. I know the crowd on Lemmy will just say they should make less profit and do neither but that's just not how the world works right now and nobody is going to do that.
Food for thought- here are some prices in 1996 and today
New video game: 1996- $67 (Super Mario 64), 2025- $70
McDonald's Big Mac meal: 1996- $2.45, 2025-$9.29
Base package Honda Civic: 1996- $10,360, 2025-$24,250
Average apartment - 1996- $550/mo, 2025- $1,540/mo
Median annual income- 1996- $20,109, 2025- $50,200
Doesn't one of these stand out?
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Idk. I think gamers are overly upset about $80 games. While I am sympathetic to not wanting the price to go up, the fact of the matter is that brand new video games cost pretty much the same as they did 30 years ago, while the cost of everything else has basically doubled in that time. I know it's probably not what is going to happen but if $80 video games are what it takes to get us away from shitty microtransactions in full price games, then I'm all for it. I know the crowd on Lemmy will just say they should make less profit and do neither but that's just not how the world works right now and nobody is going to do that.
Food for thought- here are some prices in 1996 and today
New video game: 1996- $67 (Super Mario 64), 2025- $70
McDonald's Big Mac meal: 1996- $2.45, 2025-$9.29
Base package Honda Civic: 1996- $10,360, 2025-$24,250
Average apartment - 1996- $550/mo, 2025- $1,540/mo
Median annual income- 1996- $20,109, 2025- $50,200
Doesn't one of these stand out?
And let's take this outside of the myopic view of only looking at inflation.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenues-by-platform/
Console gaming revenue: 1996 - 7 billion, 2022 - 30 billion
Let's look at specifically Nintendo here since we're talking about Super Mario 64
https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2001/011121e.pdf
2001, 664 million in profit, adjusted for inflation in 2022 dollars, 1 billion.
2022, 1.7 billion dollars in profit.
You forget that in 1996 the gaming pool was also magnitudes smaller compared to today and despite all of the whining about increased development costs, which I also think is bullshit but that's a different conversation, profits have increased to keep up.
So my opinion, no there's absolutely no justification for a 80 dollar price point when you look at the over all picture.
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Game development should not be a gig economy. It is often treated as such so studio execs can pocket more money by dropping staff at release to pad their own wallets. There are plenty of game companies, and millions of companies in other sectors, that reinvest that capital into the company.
But what about other forms of entertainment? Movies! Books! Music!
Royalties. This would be another solution.
Tagging @[email protected] because they might find the thought of royalties vs continued Dev interesting.
I do find it interesting...I don't think it addresses the problem, but it sounds like a great idea
Realistically, how much are companies going to pay out in royalties? As little as they can get away with
Let's say it's 2% of a game that made $100M - you're looking at tens of thousands each when it's all split up. Which is great, maybe even life changing for some of them, but it's not financial security kind of money
And then let's say the game flops or gets cancelled... Well that's not going to help much, so you can't really rely on it
So I think the idea is great, but it's still just fiddling with the knobs of capitalism
