$70 for next gen games is just greed

It must be tough out there to be a Triple A game publisher. Making games has gotten soooo much more expensive in the past decade. Everything else has gone up with inflation, so why shouldn’t they get an increase? They need to charge $70 now just to make ends meet. Allow me to whip out the worlds smallest violin.

Publishers have been crying poor, for a while now, over how $60 is just too low for games given the big budgets they now demand. That’s why they crammed microtransactions into everything. Now, despite being a multi-billion dollar business in and of themselves, the microtransactions are not enough. They need to raise the price by $10 in order to keep being profitable. Which is all true if you completely ignore the fact that the games business keeps making record profits year over year, and now makes more money than any other sector of the entertainment industry.

While I disagree with Jim Stirling on a lot of things, he’s 100% correct when he says that the games business doesn’t just want some of the money, they want all of the money. None of these publishers are losing from these big budget tiles. They’re making more than ever. Yet its still not enough to appease investor expectations. So they have to find more ways to increase monetization. Be it price hikes or more “surprise mechanics”. This business has become so greedy and bloated to the point where it seems overdue for the same type of correction now facing film and comic books. Maybe Sony should force some more heavy handed politics in so they can speed up the process.

Analysts seem to think that gamers will swallow the price hike though. I mean, they did latch on to the microtransactions with sheer glee, despite continuing to complain about them. Proof is in the numbers, and already we’re seeing members of the gaming community making up excuses for the price hike.

There is this argument that’s circulating around the net that games offer much more value than other forms of entertainment. Therefore, the price hike doesn’t make much of an impact just based on the sheer value per hour you’re getting. Problem is, this tries to quantify value based on amount of content versus quality. Using that logic, cable must be the single biggest steal on the planet. It offers hundreds of channels with content around the clock, every day of the week. Except most of that content is rubbish. There’s far more Game of Thrones Season 8s on TV nowadays than there are Game of Thrones Seasons 1-7s.

Bigger budgets also don’t necessarily equate to quality. Consider something like Battlefield V vs Stardew Valley. One was made by a huge team, with a lot of money to pack in all sorts of cutting edge goodies like ray tracing. The other was made by one guy, on a shoestring budget, with 16-bit graphics. Guess which one has a higher audience rating. Or a better example; Sonic Forces versus Sonic Mania.

Not to say that big budget games can’t be good, or that low budget indie titles are always better. However, neither one nor the other is a guarantee of a good game. It’s what you do with those resources. Frankly, a lot of those big budget, Triple A releases that have come out recently haven’t been worth $60, let alone $70.

And, well, typically I don’t pay the full $60 for most games these days anyway just on principle. There are rare exceptions, if its something I know is going to pack in a lot of quality. However, even though I can afford it, $60 USD, or $80 CAD, is not a trivial amount of money. So I usually wait and grab them on sale. Which I’ll continue doing even if the prices rise. Seems like I’ll just be waiting longer.

I do really hate to see this industry abusing its fans. What’s more frustrating is seeing the fans sit there and take it, while defending them, like some sort of sadomasochistic fetish. There’s an awful lot of people out there who don’t seem to grasp the concept of delayed gratification. Which is probably something a lot of our society’s problems can be attributed to. Personally I think I’ll skip out on this console gen if that’s their game, and stick to those sweet, sweet Steam sales.