When I paid 60 dollars for Ultima IV in 1985, it came with 4 disks, a manual, a spell guide, and a reference sheet (all printed on quality paper). There was also a thick cloth color map, and a little metal ankh. Today, I get none of that.
But you get a game made with probably 10x the labor (if not more).
Very true. And I miss those too. But today for less than $200 a year I have access to thousands of dollars worth of games that I don’t need to carry around, track, or keep safe. All via sub models offered by MS, EA, Ubisoft, etc. I also have access to a ridiculous amount of free premium games like CoD Warzone, Dynasty, and a crap ton of MMOs that can be played to varying degrees with never paying. And the sales are constant both on console and PC, except Nintendo’s 1st party stuff. And even it goes on sales once or twice a year. As much as I enjoyed have a collection of stuff and stumbling across a hard to find game in an out of the way store I think the overall cost of being a gamer is cheaper than ever before.
Ain’t that the truth. In the early 2000s you could get a PC RPG or RTS made for $3-5 million by a team of 30-40 people.
These days those games are made by a team of 75-300 people and cost $40-50 million at the lowest end and up to $150 million for the big open world games.
That has 2,000x the audience. Games are much more “world” centric now than they ever were before. Previous publishers could’ve only dreamed of having instant access to markets like all of Europe, the Pacific Island Nations, South America, India, and with some effort China.
I think the quarantine situation makes the demand for games arguably even greater than before, despite the economic downturn.
These are luxury goods—the creators can price them at whatever they want. Whether they make more or less money by raising prices is, of course, an issue of demand elasticity. I don’t get the arguments for “they don’t need more profit”—this isn’t a public good.
After the complete and utter shit show that NBA2k20 was, the last thing they should be doing is something that is bound to be a publicity disaster. This is as tone deaf as it comes. I bought that game in a very deep sale, and I’m still pissed. The notion that I would pay 70 bucks for one of their games right now is…so delusional. I can buy 10 quality games for that price, maybe they are a year or two old, but so what? I’ve been happily living in last years model for games for a long time now, I can’t be the only one.
/shrug. I guess the people that are going to buy these franchises at release no matter what, still will.
Yeah, it’s one of those things where if they don’t do it now, their next chance is like 7 years away.
I think the price raise could bite them in the ass due to the economic downturn. There will be cheaper alternatives.
That said , they can prob get away with it on next-gen consoles, as those folks will be spending money.
I just don’t think there will be that many of them for the next 2 years- this console gen is not going to sell well to start.
Maybe the AAA folks think getting next-gen on board now will lead to price tolerance later. It probably will, but there’s the chance of a crash- I could see this console generation failing due to the downturn,GaaS, and backlogs.
Oh the days when the name of a game alone was enough to make me want to buy it for approximately a year’s worth of allowance.
I’m not sure how much my copy of SimCity (MS-DOS) cost back in the day. It had already been released for possibly a year.
I also made some stupid NES game choices around that time that I still regret. TMNT, Afterburner, an Al Unser Jr. racing game, I can’t remember the rest.
Not sure where else to put this, maybe a good front page news ad for @Telefrog to dig into? But this seems worth talking about and being angry over. I’m glad I don’t play NBA (or really, any sports) games, but I still empathize with my friends that do, @Knightsaber for example has a lot of time invested in these NBA games.
This is beyond gross.
I’ve been watching this, and the only thing that comes to mind is wondering if a basketball, (american) football, or soccer video game can be successful without licensing teams and players.
At the end of the day, as long as only one company (for the most part) is making those games then nothing will ever change because if someone wants to play basketball, they have to go with 2k’s shit. And if they want to be play online they must upgrade every year.
With the Xbox Series and PS5 featuring really fast load times, where else are they going to put the commercials? /s
From the article:
2K pulled a similar trick with last year’s game - a move that was similarly criticised by fans.
They criticized it, but they still bought the next one so…
Yes, they have come “under fire” and that fire consisted of a barrage of lobbed nerf balls wrapped in twenty dollar bills.
Eh, @KallDrexx’s point stands even then. If you love [given single license sport X], and want to play a videogame about it, your tolerance for abusive practices ends up getting distorted in really weird and sad ways. The systems at play here warp the market and can basically mistreat their fans at will without risk of repercussions: it’s the perfect monopoly! Since it’s not an essential life requirement like, government isn’t going to bother with it most likely, and you’re welcome to freely take advantage of people’s passion to the maximum extent your evil little capitalist imagination can envision.
I don’t like applying the term victim blaming to the scenario since, you know, going back to a video game that treats you like a wallet to be emptied is on a wildly different tier of seriousness than hitting your wife, but it’s a useful comparison insofar as it serves as reminder that there’s only one entity responsible for how shitty these games are becoming: their developers.
Sure, but none of that really matters because nothing will change as long as their shitty practices are rewarded with money.
Changes like this should invalidate their ESRB rating and require it to be pulled off of the retail shelves like GTA San Andreas after the “hot coffee” scandal. Won’t change digital sales, though…
I’m not a big sports game fan, but I have dabbled in them over the years. I’ve found that my interest level is much higher when the teams are officially licensed, when you can pit the Bears against the Vikings, or the Yankees against the BoSox, rather than some faux versions. Even when games have players with the same stats as a famous person, but a fake name/appearance, it is not the same. The lure of having player X or Y is strong, even for people who aren’t that into the genre. Of course, for people like that (me) it’s very very easy to never buy these games.