That's mostly how it works for me. BG3, Elden Ring? Full price, and maybe more than one platform. Almost anything else? I'm waiting for 50%+ off.

Nintendo is an interesting example to use, as their games famously don't decrease in value and honestly often sell for more than original over time.

You would have to pay me to play half the AAA slop that comes out.

Publishers are kinda useless tbh.

They already sell you games that they can remotely disable after you've purchased them, so I'd call that past anything reasonable.

That is a good point.
On the flip side, they're not largely selling something that has any physical finiteness to it anymore, and the sales volumes have increased drastically, resulting in significantly higher profits despite a smaller inflation adjusted unit cost.

The cost of a good decreasing as an industry matures feels right. Jello cost 23¢ a box in 1940. Adjusted for inflation it should cost $5.17 a box now, but it's only $1.59.
When there's 2 games to buy, they can be justifiably more expensive than when there's a massive surplus.
The games are different, but it's not like consumers can't find a different one they'll also enjoy if the first one they look at is too expensive.

Inflation has made $60 less valuable, but they're not selling to the same market that they were 30 years ago either.
It's hard to use inflation to justify raising prices or adding exploitative features when you're already seeing higher inflation adjusted profits due to a larger more accessible market, lower risk due to reduced publishing overhead, and more options for consumers, which would be expected to bring prices down.

Games also sell at a much higher volume than they did back then.

Wages have also not kept up with inflation, which is why games at over 100$ would be out of reach as a casual hobby for most.

They sell more copies.

Fuck off with this zero-dimensional analysis.

To be honest, I have only bought one or two games at full price. Most of the games I buy are having deep discounts.

Ah yes the easy dev environment of the 1990s, too bad none of our game dev tooling, experts on the subject, cross platform porting difficulty, and physical delivery costs have all stayed EXACTLY the same.

BLUF: Agreed. Games don't need realism to be fun. They need fun to be fun.

Aside from obvious genres like simulators, horror, or other niche games, graphics don't, and shouldn't be, the main focus of a game.

It could just be plain fun. I'd prefer games with a bunch of sandbox niche mechanics than seeing a tree in 4k upscale. Like Noita or Terraria.

Or a deep story. The original Talos Principle was alright on its graphics at the time, but it prioritized the story and puzzles. It was a fundamental game that shaped many of the philosophies I hold still today.

Graphics can be important, but I'd also prefer stylized over realistic any day. That's why some of the older games still hold up today, graphically.

Wind Waker, the old 3d mario games, Bioshock, Oblivion (terrain, not people lol)

All had really really solid art. And it still looks good. Because it didn't try to push the limits on making the game look real.

Back when Modern Warfare 2 released on the 360, I saw little dust clouds, and thought that it was the greatest game for realism ever at the time. The graphics were so good. Going back? Dogwater.

The 2010 style graphics would also be cheaper today, as you could get away with less optimisations and tweaks.

Read the article. The publisher wants higher base costs so that we can get rid of deceptive pricing like subscriptions, micro transactions, and multi-tiered pricing on release.

In that sort of comparison, I also would choose higher base costs. Noones complaining that BG3 was 60$ are they? They follow this structure of one time purchase and most would argue it was worth it.

22M copies sounds like a very high estimate, and there are lower estimates out there, including those in line with the math you can run against their infographics and achievement data where they may have only sold under half of that.

I worked on a DS game back in the day, turns out the marketing budget was twice that of dev + art.

How are they not rolling in the dough by now? So much of the market has rolled over to digital, which means no secondary market.

Before you could pay $50 for a game, play it and sell it later for 10-$25 (depending on how quick you are), effectively making the price 25-$40.

Gaming prices should not be increasing. They should be decreasing. Supply is literally infinite thanks to digital distribution and gaming makes so much profit its like, more than the entire music and movie industries combined. The number of people that buy games now is huge, there is no justifiable reason for prices to go up other than corporate greed.

Back in the day, games were $80-$100 USD. But they didn't have a lot of the advancements that the gaming industry has today. Aside from the number of people buying games being smaller back then, the cost of manufacturing game cartridges and physical copies was a lot higher than today. Digital distribution was not realistically an option for the PC platform, and was literally not an option for consoles. Game development tools were non-existent. Most game development studios had to program their own game engines, or license one from someone that did. A lot of work was done manually, by human hand for quite some time. Compare that with today, where game engines are plentiful and very user-friendly, and other tools come with many automated or assisted features that would previously had to have been done by hand. I mean, game engines had a period where a good user interface was unheard of.

Then you look at other issues. Game studios are too big these days. 500 people is too many people working on a project. Bigger ships are slower to turn, lean out the teams to like less than half of that number. Development cycles are too long. Games used to be developed in a year or two, three at the absolute most. Games didn't used to be as big, but you know what? They don't need to. A 10 hour game that is paced well with a good story is infinitely better than an 80 hour game where you wander around a 95% empty world experiencing a disjointed barely existent story. Marketing costs are overinflated. There is no reason so much money should be spent on marketing a game. Games don't need some random pop song in the trailer to get people to buy it, have the composer/sond designer write the trailer music like in the old days, since that was part of their job.

And as you mention, most of the time there are few hits that sell big. This was always true, and will always be true forever. Games don't really compete with each other except for one resource: the customer's time. And people have a finite amount of time. Until people begin to have more free time, and infinite time, it doesnt matter how many games are made, they will still always compete for the customer's time. It is an immutable fact of the gaming industry.

I agree with all of this and it's nice to see some folks starting to accept that these cost more to make than movies and provide hundreds of hours more content than films, and perhaps its time to start adjusting pricing to match that. Especially with companies like Larian who are doing the right things with things like using Intimacy Coordinators, the lack of which in most of the industry was part of why voice actors went on strike. Larian was just using something Hollywood has used for decades, because there is a modicum of respect for the actors, but they didn't get to sell their game at a higher price despite doing more to treat their employees well.

I think that’s the nut Judas spent 10 years trying to crack

Do you think so? I kind of figured the ten years was them trying to get the "narrative legos" thing right.