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

"

鬼殺し wrote:

now the only problem is the crunch to release in six months is probably going to kill someone. I'd happily wait another year if they need it, but once they said June 2023, that was it. These poor devs are screwed no matter what.

I think crunch is a thing that can be minimized and managed, but it's just a byproduct of game development now. All the big studios deal with it, CDPR, TakeTwo, Bungie, to name a few... but to your point, Blizzard is their own publisher, so if they actually wanted, they could have delayed. That shipped has now sailed with that major reveal.

I do think June is interesting time as well. It's fully nostalgic as D2 launched in June 20+ years ago. It's also a few weeks before Exilecon, and if you listened to some of the D4 Dev interviews, they are for sure aware of PoE and it's impact. The contrast of a D4 launch to whatever the competitive beta that will be shown at Exilecon might be dramatic, and really push momentum one way or the other. I don't exactly know what the PoE 4.0 launch window is supposed to be, but likely it's in 1st quarter of 2024, which gives D4 PLENTY of time to set it's feet. Which leads to my next point.

D4 is being developed as a quarterly live-service game. They are going to be able to iron out and tweak as they go along. I'm sure they have a 10 year+ plan here, so while launch is a big deal, it's just the start of the story, and it doesn't have to be perfect. Not to mention a minimum 6-9 month head start on the biggest competitor in the arpg market.

I haven't seen anything to indicate D4 being a disaster or even remotely close to that. Even if it's just "good" and not "great" that should be a solid enough base to launch Diablo into a live-service Juggernaut. I'm very much looking forward to this summer.

Edit: also thanks for that feedback on Cyberpunk. I might get to that a bit over Xmas break here. I have around 12 days off from work so might spend a decent amount of hours with it.

Side note I also enjoyed Midnight Suns way more than I anticipated. The story & voice acting was far beyond anything I expected, as was a surprisingly decent narrative story (minus the somewhat annoying friendship / dating sim with the other Marvel characters)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/12/08/diablo-iv-release-date-crunch/

Decide for yourself. This definitely simmered down my rising hype, which is...great, because I have so much shit to play between now and June I am hoping against hope it's delayed. And by 'I' I mean my gaming group, who rarely agree on much taste-wise (Im the methodical one, another's the fps goon, yet another likes Soulslikes so you can imagine how much struggle to find games that leave us all happy to play rather than just going along to get along) but all agree that D3 was a lot more fun than it had any right to be.

Anyway, go play Cyberpunk. Shut out as much of the world as you can and give it the focus it deserves as a really good single player trip through the future...according to the 80s, back when Japan was THE FUTURE and everyone smoked so of course they'll still be doing that 90 years from now.

edit: I was vaguely interested in MS but then I watched SkillUp's take and yeah, no thanks. There's bad writing at a micro level, which I expect from Marvel and DC to be honest, but then there's bad writing that at a macro level reduces established complex characters to shallow dating sim pieces for an obvious Mary Sue protagonist. Life's too short for that. Besides, if I want that, I'll just go play Fate and watch Jeanne D'Arc cosplay as a swimsuit model while a genderswapped King Arthur runs the local casino in a bunny costume, and both of them call me Master.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

"

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)

I subscribe to Gamepass every now and then, that's how I'll get to play Starfield. Maybe Diablo 4 will work out the same way...

i'm going with greedy, they quality of the games has not improved, if anything it has gotten worse where they have shifted the focus from providing a good single player story to focusing more on the online portion where they try take more money out of you though MTX, that and tiers on collectors editions.

The worst part is, a lot of that money goes into advertising the game hard (like many millions)

...

shameless greed, and just because its normalised by the deification of completely unchecked psychopathic greed that is our current economic model across the board in society its not getting a pass from me. it shall all be damned.

"

zakalwe55 wrote:

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.

actibliz make something like $2,000,000,000 in profit per year. while paying their devs really low wages, over working them and leaving their games in a shit state with minimal updates etc because they dont wanna pay for more staff. look at the updates given to diablo 3, to overwatch etc, then look at the updates given to poe.

why does poe have more content added per year than overwatch and diablo have had in their entire existence while the company we paid for these games is putting 2 billion $ in their pocket in profit every year? why do they crunch their staff when the games these staff make bring in enough profit to easily double their work force? greed.

the people actually making the games that we buy are treated like garbage and many of them are on quite low wages at companies like blizzard while people who do nothing, who do absolutely nothing in terms of making the games that generate this money pocket 2 billion dollars a year while sitting on a beach. the staff have jobs, their job is making games and they have to show up every day and crunch and ruin their lives and health being overworked for poor returns. the share holders job is already being rich. im already rich so my job is i have money and i sit on a beach while my money entitles me to all the profits generated by a poor persons work.



greed, utter shameless disgusting greed from a total piece of shit company, fuck them and the whole economic system that allows for these parasites.

the culture disapproves of this.

well theyve been 60$ for like 30 years now so

"

Fauxxx_NL wrote:

well theyve been 60$ for like 30 years now so

So... what does that mean?

That a price jump is understandable, or that profits are wild at $60, so what's the rationale?

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

"

Fauxxx_NL wrote:

well theyve been 60$ for like 30 years now so

So... what does that mean?

That a price jump is understandable, or that profits are wild at $60, so what's the rationale?

They set the price. If you Won't Pay, you have to do without it. Nothing shocking or surprising if people can't afford to buy video games ...

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

"

Fauxxx_NL wrote:

well theyve been 60$ for like 30 years now so

So... what does that mean?

That a price jump is understandable, or that profits are wild at $60, so what's the rationale?

I say the former. A <20% price jump after 30 years of almost none is pretty much overdue by any other product's standards. Especially for entertainment media and/or 'extra' goods. Compare, say, price of legal drugs 30 years ago to now. I might be biased there because here in Australia we tax the everloving shit out of anything even vaguely addictive but socially acceptable because why not, but an overall increase of 16-17% over 30 years? That's fuck all. Gamers are just spoiled in so many ways. Steam sales, indie games, subscriptions like ps plus, xbox, epic...but a 10 dollar increase? OH NO.

Please. If anything, games costing $50-60 a few decades ago was far more outrageous given inflation. But then you have to take into account stuff like they HAD to be products (free to play was impossible without expecting everyone to have a solid net connection), physical (lack of relatively universal fast internet), fewer devs, and overall higher production costs per unit.

So in that light maybe a steady price for so long reflects changes in how games are made and distributed. But I still think $70 for a so-called AAA game is decent value. It's three or four trips to the movies, and that's what, 10-12 hours of high impact entertainment. It's a decent dinner out. Probably cheaper than dinner+drinks here. And it's a rare AAA game that doesn't offer at least 20-25 hours of core gameplay (not including side content and completionist tasks).

And if a person doesn't want to 'pay' that much, they can just rent it indefinitely with what are essentially gaming equivalents of Netflix.

Or wait for one of those many...many sales half a year later when its currency as a AAA title has waned.