Unpopular Opinion

Are the game developers and artists wages now being increased by the same percentage though? You are correct overall, especially in places like the UK where wages have been stagnant since like 2008 it feels like. But letting a company off the hook for raises “due to inflation” if they themselves are not raising their workers salaries to meet that inflation is bullshit.

While wages are an issue, AAA gaming is more about C-suite satisfaction and the continued growth of the capitalist way of life.

Indie devs can make gold for $9.99.

The problem is throw-away game culture and generally low quality games. A good game can provide you with years of content and would be well worth a >$80 price tag.

But people keep paying the same prices for trash games they play for 2 weeks and then move on. And honestly, they deserve these prices.

Game prices are absolutely a problem still. The price of a game is just the entry fee. Then there's subscriptions, MTX, etc. If you add in everything you need to make a game a complete experience like they were pre-download era, games cost more even with inflation factored in.

This is really about late stage capitalism and chasing infinite growth. Every year profits must go up X percentage. There is never enough. So they have to find ways to make it to up, cutting wages and increasing prices is the obvious way.

I would also like to add that 30 years ago devs had to write the engine and devtools from scratch. Player hardware and optimizations were also massive pain points that needed attention.

I would argue that cost of development has gotten CHEAPER than it was 30 years ago, even when taking the scope of today's games into account. Not to mention the market is also orders of magnitude bigger.

Any schmuk today can take Unity/UE5/Godot and make something playable in a matter of days. Barrier to entry is practically non existent. Look at Palworld, Vampire Survivors, Among Us, Balatro, Terraria. For studios with AAA-level scope look at Larian studios, Warhorse studios, Eleventh hour games, Hello games.

Large studio execs with 0 substance who don't know what they're doing are spouting this inflation drivel as justification to raise prices of their already failing games as AA and indie teams run CIRCLES around them.

Wow this is incredible. I get to reuse my meme I just made a few days ago! Now that's what I call value

Yeah this is absolutely correct. When you look at prices and adjust for inflation $80 now is about right.

The value of money has gone down, and the value of pay cheques and salaries have not increased to keep up.

Unfortunately this often gets sidelined with "what aboutism" - like what about the dysfunctional AAA market, and predatory big publishers like EA that churn our crap, or all the publishers trying to build microtransactions into games. These are also ALL valid issues, but it doesn't change the fundamentals that video games cost around $80 in 2000 when adjusted for inflation.

The video game industry can be dysfunctional AND we're also being screwed over by dysfunctional unequal capitalism causing declining living standards at the same time.

I mean both are the problem, obviously. And they're both symptoms of tne larger problem, which is late stage capitalism slowly sucking every last drop of labor value out of everyone. Game companies are making more profits than they did 30 years ago, so you can't tell me they 'need' to raise prices. And their CEO salaries are higher than ever, and developer salaries have not risen accordingly to justify the price increase. If a game company said 'we're raising our prices from 60 to 90 dollars, but we're also giving every employee a 1/3 salary increase' people might not be happy still but it would be a different conversation. But why should people who are struggling have to pay more for nothing except an increase in 'shareholder value' and the c-suites salary package? Thats fucked.

The fact that they're moving more units doesn't matter, everything, including things for which the price followed inflation, sells more units than it did 40 years ago just because there's more people on the planet and globalism is a thing.

What matters is that that money goes to enrich billionaires and not the developers making the product people are buying.

Steam takes a 30% cut on the first $10m in sales (then 25% until $50m and then 20%) and they pay their employees a lot more than industry average and the owner is a multi billionaire with a yacht collection. Same shit for publishers, the c-suites are rich from "managing" the intermediary between the development studio and the retailers, they don't give a crap about the product as long as it sells.

Meanwhile the devs making the games have a hard time affording housing, need to deal with crunches and get laid off once the game they were working on is completed.

And what about us, the consumers? Well we're no better off than the developers and we're still enriching a bunch of billionaires while most of us struggle to afford basic needs.

Both publishers and retailers could afford to reduce their cut and lower prices OR to reduce their cut and leave more money to the people making the products they sell and the impact would only be felt by a handful of people (in Steam's case, by a single person).

The prices should go down to 40$(or stay 60$ based on inflation) if I dont actually own the game imo. If the company is going to be so bold as to sell "game keys" with no actual data on the cart, coupled with the fact that the EShop has been shut down on the WiiU and 3DS(you can redownload games still, but how long until that goes away?). To me is a huge middle finger, and basically planned obsolesence on the switch 2 since you will no longer be able to redownload your games once they stop supporting the consoles servers.

If i do the "smart" thing and get the switch 2 after a major price drop, every games lifespan will be even shorter. fuck nintendo, mod your switch & switch 2(when thats available) pirate everything from them and get your moneys worth for the overpriced hardware.

There are so many problems with the industry today, but the amount of venom in the discourse around $80 Mario Kart has felt bizarre to me. I do feel that there are much worse problems.

Like it's worth mentioning how a lot of games already are well above $80 after DLC anyway, but I guess those games get a pass? Or just how fucked up most F2P business models are, exploiting whales to subsidize everybody else. I'd rather play a game where everyone pays a fair price than one where addicts are taken advantage of and encouraged to financially ruin themselves.

I don't often buy games at full price myself. Only for a handful of IPs I really love, or multiplayer games I want to get in on the ground floor of, anything else I'll wait for a sale. But the way I see it, if Kirby Air Ride 2 costs $80, I'm willing to spend $80 on that game because I know I will get that much enjoyment out of it. I've waited 22 years for this sequel, it's worth it to me!

And I think ultimately, you gotta just buy the things that are worth it to you, skip the things that aren't, and then chill the fuck out.

Game price isn't a problem, just don't buy their games.

For £90 you could buy mario cart, or you would start a genocide in Rimworld and still have enough money left over for automated genocide in Factorio and if you are willing to go over by £3.48 you can also commit genocide from orbit in Stellaris.

I’ve considered this, especially after watching moistcritikal’s very sarcastic rant on the matter. Nowhere in it does he mention the living wages of the devs, artists, and creators of the games, just that the price increase seems insane. Fact is, I remember when a pack of unfiltered camels smokes would run you about 75 cents, and the prices now are near, if not double digits.

Gonna take a lot of work to shift the mindset from “games should never cost more than d dollars” to “we need to develop a financial system whereby inflation doesn’t matter to us”.

Jup, have had that thought before. And i think another Factor is that people now own more games than back then. Making their collection more expensive and equal to that what a few games cost in the past.

So we Always sortoff spend the same part of our budget for games, and only now when the price is rising it takes more out of our budget.

So we feel like the price is rising in an unfair manner .

35 years ago I didn't get a Super Nintendo or Sega because you could get 12 Commodore 64 games for the same price as a single Mario game. And a few years later my dad got hold of a 286 so we could play DOS games like Wolfenstein.

Wage stagnation is absolutely heartbreaking.

But even if I were making a livable wage, Nintendo's prices and other AAA are still ridiculous. The Steam wishlist sale life is the good life.