Depends greatly on the game

A great game I play for 80-120 hours, 100%, and enjoy? Sure, i guess, but it’s still unnecessary

A mediocre game that sucks shit and was overhyped? That sucks but fuck me for not having the time to sit on a billion game blogs I guess

I have posted about this before and will again though: they are fleecing you and you are drinking their poison.

Have budgets and inflation gone up? Yes

But has volume of game sales gone up tremendously as well? Also yes

GTA 3 sold 14.5 million copies at $60ish dollars GTA 5 sold a whopping 215 million copies at $60 dollars

Granted both weren’t flat $60, sales exist, the ps2 had the greatest hits edition at a lower cost, gta5 is regularly dropped to $20-30, etc.

But gta 3 earned somewhere around 500 million dollars on a development budget of roughly 5 million

GTA 5 revenue is harder to decipher because of the online component. However, it is estimated that it had cleared 800 million on its first fucking day, 1 billion in the first three days of sales (before online) and has cleared almost 10 billion in sales to date.

Development cost was much higher, 265 million

Now gta is a cherry picked example (though picked because it’s one of the most likely games to be released at 80-100 despite having no right to be doing so other than rockstar/take2 fucking over their fans)

But this dynamic isn’t limited to them:

Mario kart snes: 9 million copies sold Mario kart 8 switch: 68.2 million copies sold

Animal crossing GameCube: 2.71 million sold Animal crossing new horizon: 47.8 million copies sold

God of war ps2: 4.61 million God of war 2018: 23 million

Sometimes it’s misleading though: Doom 1993 (pc): 1.1 million copies sold, 3.5 if you count ultimate doom and doom 2, earning about 9 million dollars (20 million 2025 dollars). Doom eternal: 3 million copies sold but 450 million in revenue thanks to services like gamepass, widely considered a financial success

All of these games earned back their budgets. Some way more than others. Nintendo especially has a tendency to keep development budgets very lean (relative to western studios, at least). Where Nintendo might spend 20-30 million on a game Sony or rockstar might spend 200-300 million. And yet they still earn back their budget and make a profit.

80-100 game is just greed. The exception of course is for small independent studios who will never reach anywhere near this sales volume. Of course the way the system works they can’t charge this because it’s not about paying what someone needs to survive, it’s about paying what we deem someone is worth based on prestige.

TLDR: If 300 million people buy GTA 6 for $40 rockstar will make 12 billion dollars and it’s entirely reasonable to assume they may sell that many copies within the first 2-3 months based on historical data. They will also have an online component to fleece people even more. The need to charge 80-100 is bullshit

Nah, fight the FOMO and buy it when it's 75% off.

When I can buy something with infinite replayability like Minecraft or BeamNG or ETS2 for around $30 it's just hard to see anything that costs more than that as a reasonable deal

I’d get your money’s worth anyway

Uhhh…no thank you?

I agree. However while incresed pricing isn't that big of a deal, I feel it comes at the end of a long chain of other penny-pinching methods, like gacha, mtx, pay2win, always online for data mining and so on. If this raise would've happened first, then you'd just have to buy a more expensive game and that would've been it. As it stands you're getting shafted on price as well as all the other crap ideas they had in the meantime.

I don't even buy games at 50 €.