games

I don't know the solution

Public ownership of the means of production?

Yeah. How come all these guys come out of the woodwork defending company's "right" to keep up with inflation (games 60=>90) but get real fuggen quiet when ya point out those same companies don't raise pay and collude with other companies and the govt to suppress wage increases?

It's such a stupid argument on it's face i can only imagine it comes from people who

The problem with communism is you eventually run out of your turn on the Nintendo

Inflation is just an acceptable way to say "price gouging".

All of my hobbies and interests are getting priced out of my reach: video games, tabletop games, fursuits, 3D printing, photography, etc. The only thing I can do is get up, go to work, and try to survive.

Game dev pay is especially shitty too (comparatively) and we all know they won't see a cent of the increased prices.

The funny thing about this take is making and distributing a game has never been cheaper, just cos the cost of games hadn't gone up in price doesn't mean companies were doing this out of charity... Also games have gone up in price indirectly with dlc, season passes, battle passes, cosmetics, lootboxes.

Damb the game companies are so kind and nice to us that must be why they're raking in more cash than ever before!

By the looks of things nobody except ultimate goobers hold this take anymore fortunately

Subscription games like rs, suddenly jumped in price so much

Folk need to stop pretending like people have as much money as they did in the 90s. Rent costs, house prices are astronomical.

While searching through family records my partner found a lease renewal of her dad’s for his apt in like 93 for like 3-400 dollars a month and he was making 20 bucks an hour fresh out of college

When I left college in the early 10s I was paying like 900 for a small apt making 20 bucks an hour.

Today I can’t find a single bedroom apt for under 1400-1500 and I know people still making like 15-20 dollars (my partner makes like 17 I think)

I don't know the solution

Is this a reddit post?

Yeah, it's what anti-marxist and anti-intellectual society does. The most energy someone will put into an internet argument is repeating a fake stat they saw someone else say on social media. And the $90USD price people kept repeating incorrectly.

This is also an effect of proprietary capture of video games. If you work outside of the established industry and publishers you have far lesser support. People do not even own their games, you're simply just purchasing the right to run a compiled copy of a program and not guaranteed anything else.

Video games are such a disposable medium of entertainment in capitalism and it's such a waste of human talent.

Speaking of game prices, something that absolutely, desperately needs to change is the ludicrous 30% cut that Steam takes on every sale. Every single sale.

This might have been reasonable back in 2009 when the selection of games was limited to a few hundred AAA titles, but today the overwhelming market share of all PC game sales, Indie or otherwise, all goes over Steam.

Valve would still be making gigantic profits at just 15%. They can put the platform in maintenance mode and it would continue generating money indefinitely.

The rate has been grandfathered in from retailers. Today, with the absence of physical distribution and high degree of automation, there is zero legitimate reason for it to still be at this rate.

Also it's fucking Mario Kart. That should be like $50. Shovelware can produce ripoff of it for almost free.

The company defenders are dumb yeah. I don't really understand though why this is whats making people freak out. Like i wasnt gonna be able to afford a switch 2 regardless lol. Housing prices, food prices, etc are insane. Even if it was 300$ i wouldn't be buying one until maybe 3 years after it came out. I never bought a switch and got a switch lite for like 150$ a couple years ago.

I guess maybe im just used to not having many treats and pirating tons of stuff? Like i pirate all my media and never understood why people pay for streaming services. The few times ive used one the experience sucks. Like it doesnt have most shows. My pirate sites have all the shows easily searchable lol.

Edit: I made a bit of an effort post on lemmygrad about adblocking and being a pirate after posting this. If you want a how to on that stuff then check it out.

Counterarguments:

1. Piracy is easier than ever. You really shouldn't be paying for games in 2015, let alone 2025.

2. Most games that are resistant to piracy are AAA slop that's not worth playing in 2015, let alone 2025.

For almost everything else, I agree, people should be pissed that they're being priced out of their hobbies. But for games, all I can muster at this point is "you still pay for games?"

And there's another point to consider: games used to improve leaps and bounds relative to their predecessors. When you bought SM64 in 1996, you're not just buying a generic game, but you're buying one of the first 3d platformers, a paradigm-shattering game. It's $60 (or however it costs in 1996) to go from SMW to SM64. Can you name a single contemporary game that has the same leap in progress from SMW to SM64? You absolutely can't. You could make the same argument for the old classics like Doom 1 or Starcraft. Going from Warcraft II to Starcraft is worth the 60 bucks while another iteration of a long-running series where barely anything changed isn't. I would argue if you try to value games using genre-defining classics of the past as a guide, the vast majority of games aren't worth $5 since the vast majority of games aren't era-defining or genre-defining or even that good, which is why piracy is the way to go.

thing is, economics of scale should reduce the price of digital games (which are essentially unlimited supply) and even the physical games which are at least manufactured using ubiquitous SD card technologies (a 256GB card, more than any game on the NS2 will be, costs like £30 at retail). Of course, software incurs a labour cost that is factored into software prices.

The only part of the commodity in question that could conceivably increase in price across a generation is the console, due to new/modified factory lines, retraining of staff etc. and the R&D that went into it.

We know from experience that software for these consoles does not need to increase in price over generations. Development costs are independent of the target platform beyond the cost of purchasing devkits and licenses (which is zero for a first party studio).

Perhaps a new system means your assets can be higher quality so you spend more time making them or something, but even then most assets are compressed and simplified, so in that sense a new platform would save some effort since optimisation is less necessary.

Point being, I might know jack shit about LTV and economics in general but the choice of inflating software prices is exactly that: a choice. It's a simple accounting decision to try and exhaust extra revenue streams by inflating every aspect of your platform's costs until they impact your profits.

It sucks for many of us, but Nintendo is just doing what Zynga and EA and Ubisoft did long ago: they're sacrificing their reputation and overall sales numbers for the suckers who will dedicate their entire existences to funnelling money into these companies who have discovered the rent-seeking phase of capitalism.

im nearly convinced all these people saying that shit are bots meant to condition people into being okay with being screwed.

all the justifications are bs. like you pointed out, how pay hasnt kept up

in addition, im not sure how companies feeling the need to spend 300 million dollars on a video game somehow makes it our problem that we have to pay for. the top people at these companies are making bank. clearly they aren’t hurting for funds. why should we all have to pay for their lifestyle and then be gaslit with this “modern games are just so expensive to make” shit

Some people have bought in the chud cultural war and in mindless contrarianism defend multi million dollar companies. Like babe you aren’t owning anyone but yourself.

my hot take is gaming is not a hobby and never was... its a past-time. its semantics but whatever.

a hobby is something like painting, or fixing up an old car, or doing some amateur music production with a friend... something creative or something that develops a creative skill. sports also dont count as a hobby. past-times can be pretty cheap or free, like hiking.