AAA games moving to $70 base pricepoint? Reasonable or Greedy?

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Reinhart wrote:

If you followed the news a bit you would know central banks printed a lot of dollars/euros, making them less valuable, increasing production costs of pretty much anything.

Will I pay 70 bucks? Hell no, you can get games for way cheaper. Just need to know when and where.

Yes, no one is disputing inflation or economic issues over the last 30 years since prices saw the last sorta universal jump.

The argument here is the record profits being being posted because the gaming market is well north of 200+ million customers in the US alone. There were only 250 million people in the entire US in 1990, now that's basically the video game market. That's crazy. Not to mention the global reach, digital storefronts, and proliferating live service DLC, MTX, and so on.

How do you justify "needing" a price hike given the profitability data on current games?

$70, and another $30 for a paid dlc, and another $x for more content patches which should be already included in the $70 game.
But yep the gaming industry is just extremely these days. Hard to ask for such a high price for a unpolished and unfinished game in first place. Cause thats also a thing with most games these days.

I rarely buy $60 games if they're not from Nintendo. Last one was Elden Ring. If Nintendo also goes to $70 idk what I will do.

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Xavderion wrote:

I rarely buy $60 games if they're not from Nintendo. Last one was Elden Ring. If Nintendo also goes to $70 idk what I will do.

Pay $70 lol.

No Starfield in your future? (Which was called out specifically by MS)

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DarthSki44 wrote:

How do you justify "needing" a price hike given the profitability data on current games?

Because they earn more profit jacking up the prices on popular games. The same logic behind why gaming companies never listen to people whinning on P2W games.

If you want to play Diablo 4 you have to pay a minimum of $70. I think $70 base for a AAA title is reasonable. Software developers are not cheap these days.

GGG charged 42 bucks for an in-game armor or wing....500 bucks supporter packs....

It's like going to a Ferrari forum and complaining oil price have increase.

Its not JUST greed, AAA games nowadays are more expensive than ever to make, graphics are the biggest issue since its the most expensive part of any game(and sadly, also the biggest factor behind sales on the general public, actual gameplay is secondary)

Even mobile games nowadays have pretty graphics, it really pushes the cost of development. While its true you can make sucessfull games with so-so graphics, like rimworld or factorio, even those games still offer great art to make up for the simplistic graphics. Games with simple visuals tend to flop way more often than not

Basically, the average customer pays more for pretiness than actual quality, and pretiness is the single most expensive aspect behind a game, thus AAA games HAVE to carry a monster price tag, to make a proportional profit to the amount of time and cash spend(and the customers buy that garbage, so its hardly their fault and more on the back of customers, i would say...)

Its a weird time on the videogame industry, most "veteran" players are moving away from AAA and sticking more to indies and getting AAAs later on sales, but the bulk of the money is still on the people who buys based on video previews and screenshots
In a sense, its back to that point where "nerds" stick to "niches"(indies, previous videogames in general) and "cool kids" go for "cool stuff"(AAAs, former sports and "real" media), just like it was 30 years ago, but in a kinda weird way

Reasonable, games have been underpriced for ages IMO. No wonder everything's trying to move to multiplayer / GaaS.

If you think it's too much the slowpoke approach still works and indies still exist.

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KiadawP wrote:

GGG charged 42 bucks for an in-game armor or wing....500 bucks supporter packs....

It's like going to a Ferrari forum and complaining oil price have increase.

42 bucks? Try $100 for those superfluous 'merged' armor sets. And $500 supporter packs are mid-range really. A step down from the $800 and $1k+ of the earlier days. Even at the upper end, GGG are only interested in dolphins, not whales.


But to be fair, being a dolphin for PoE IS optional. You can play 100% of PoE's content (including engaging with the trade metagame) for under $200 total (which is minnow territory if divided over a number of months). Get the right stash tabs, a handful of 4xers. And that will last you indefinitely, with the proviso that you'll want to fork over a bit more whenever a new stash tab type pops (it's been a while). So, thousands of hours of comfortable play for a few hundred vs maybe, MAYBE 100 hours for a hundred with a AAA title.

Or, put even simpler: AAA games will cost you roughly $1 an hour and stop being of any real use after 100 hours. PoE (as a fairly unique F2PGAAS with no quantifiable p2w) will cost you roughly $2 an hour if you play it for the same amount of time (assuming you bought the aforementioned essentials), but only really starts to show its potential *after* 100 hours. Also, you can probably play it for that 100 hours for free as a taste test.

There's no comparison because AAA and F2PGAAS operate completely differently, even though some AAA dip their big toe into the MTX approach.