https://ma.fellr.net/@fell/111504811722666890
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You won't like hearing this, but video games must become more expensive. When I was little, my dad got me a PlayStation 2 for christmas, but without any games. My mum was very generous and took me out to pick two games for it. They were 60€ each. Nowadays you would call those full-price games. But now, 20 years later, a full-price game is still about 60€. If you correct that for inflation, it should really be 86€ now. And that's not even covering the fact that games have massively increased in visual fidelity, which is much more expensive to produce. If you don't want games to be littered with microtransactions or ads, then you have to accept that a regular video game must be at least 90€. (98 USD, 77 GBP, 149 AUD, 134 CAD) #Gaming #GameDev #GameDevelopment #Steam #Inflation #Economy #PlayStation
Can't wait to buy the next installment of insert sports game here/call of duty for 100 USD base, 200 for the dlc, maybe even 300 for the ultimate deluxe extreme version.
That part is just not true under capitalism. You always have to make more profit than last year.
But yeah it is true that they absolutely have been making plenty more money than they did in the PS2 days.
I’ll be honest I still haven’t seen an explanation even under capitalism on why that has to be true outside of rich people throwing temper tantrums when number no go up. I see no reason why you couldn’t run an “ethical capitalism” where high profits are forbidden. There’s no law of economics that says if you make a consistent amount of profit year over year your head spontaneously explodes.
Obviously this would only be marginally less shitty than the system we live under now, I’m not saying this is the goal or anything, but I see no reason why we couldn’t do “capitalism but let’s make sure we can keep the lights on”
Because company valuations--and thus stock prices--are based on totally imaginary bullshit like "investor confidence," which is linked to "growth potential." If you as an investor don't think that a company is going to grow (and thus do better and better) year after year, you'll take your money elsewhere to find a place where you can get a bigger return (i.e. somewhere that convinces you that they'll make an even bigger profit next year). This is why, for instance, stock prices for companies tend to fall when it's revealed that they "only" had a 1% increase in profit from the year before, even if that profit was in the tens of billions of dollars: seeing a small growth number undermines "investor confidence" that their money will continue compounding toward infinity year after year. The real value of the profit--how many billions of dollars in profit the company raked in that year--actually doesn't matter that much to the price; it's all about how much more you expect to make in the future compared to right now. This is a big part of why totally unprofitable companies (e.g. Uber, Tesla) have sky-high stock prices: it's all aspirational vibes about what might happen sometime in the future. Unbounded growth is one of the nonsensical cornerstones of capitalism.
Is that not just “rich people throwing temper tantrums”?
Yes, and the candy that they're rolling around on the ground screaming for is your healthcare.