CyborgSage00x0 posted...
Which is silly, since $70 games have already been a thing this year. Doom Eternal, Borderlands 4, etc. It's just the natural and inevitable price increase.
It's neither natural nor inevitable though.
There is absolutely an argument to be made that consumers shouldn't be expected to pay more for games when the games aren't necessarily better than previous iterations, and where most of the increased production costs are coming from terrible design decisions, corporate bloat, wasteful inefficiency, and paying hundreds of employees in any given studio when some of the best games developed recently have been made by teams of only a dozen or so members, or even in some cases, by only one or two.
Nearly every facet of game design has grown far beyond its ability to support itself. The solution isn't to just shrug and keep feeding the beast, the solution is to buckle down and demand more accountability.
Not helped by the fact that the "Games cost more to make now, publishers need more money to pay for it!" argument has never really been a valid one once publishers started cramming every game with microtransactions, DLC, season passes, "deluxe editions" and other forms of recurrent revenue (not to mention the increased profits from phasing out physical media in favor of digital downloads). Publishers tend to make
far
more on any given game than
just
the retail price. The "real cost" of any given "$40 game" or "$60 game" can soar into the hundreds.
If people want to draw the line in the sand at what they (rightly) see as unbridled corporate greed, it's a worthwhile stand to take. Especially in an increasingly poor economy and with a co-concomitant drop in quality across the board for most goods and services. Childhood nostalgia can only offset predatory business practices for so long before people start to balk.
The only real problem is people who complain about how much it costs, and then buy it anyway, because they have terrible impulse control and no real sense of principles.
Those
people aren't helping anything.
It's also worth noting that this isn't just a gaming issue. Media piracy as a whole has been hugely on the rise again after dying down to minimal levels for years. The harder companies attempt to bleed their potential customer base, the more that customer base starts to find ways to justify looking for free alternatives.