Game prices for the past 30 years haven’t kept pace with inflation.
I recognise the argument that publishers are shifting larger volumes of units now, which has been a factor that has allowed the industry to keep price increases below inflation for the last 30 years.
Wages not being even close to keeping up with inflation (especially housing inflation) is the real issue here, not the $70/$80 video game.
You should be angry at your reduced purchasing power in all of society, not just with the price of Nintendo games.
(Secondary less unpopular opinion, the best games out these days are multiplatform and released at least 5 years ago, buy them for << $80 and wait for sale the new releases, when they too are 5 years old)
An $80 game today is cheaper than $60 games decades ago. There are also a large category of free to play games which didn’t exist before the Internet.
They also don’t have to print games to discs and ship them around the world anymore.
They also don’t have to develop their own engines. Some dude with little to no experience can make a functional game in a few days now. Not to mention functions in UE5 like LOD control do a lot of the work that devs had to handle.
They also have Moore’s Law on their side: The average laptop can now develop what required a $10,000 workstation in 2000.
They also now pack games with microtransactions to make even more money.
They also now sell DLC for games to make more money.
They also now re-release games, which takes a fraction of the effort and still charge a disproportionate price.
Games, objectively, should be cheaper. This is just the hunger for more and more.
Yep, and truth be told if I had the option of paying 90 € for an actual physical copy without microtransactions, DLC instead of having all content in the game from launch, no online access required and no copy protection on the disc, I’d gladly pay that. 100 € even, if it’s a particularly good game.
But I have zero trust in that being the case with the increased prices, it’s just going to be the same thing we now have, more expensively.
Hell ya, I would, too, 100%. Imagine actually owning a game with all of the content on a disk you can share and resell.
I agree with you, though; there is no incentive for companies to do this; they would make less money and have less control over the content. They can’t stand that.