While customers at a certain income level may not be bothered by the increase, others will be pushed out of new games at those prices. I don't believe the $70 is based on wise market analysis, I think it's based on short sighted greed.
If enough people had balked at paying $70, the price would have gone down.
They clearly feel that there are enough customers who are at that certain income level.
Yeah, but we're in a weird space right now. Every game has new and last gen console versions. I think the real test will be when the first next gen only games start hitting.
I'm not terribly broken up by this. The first game I ever bought back in the SNES days was $60 bucks. A hobby where prices stayed flat for decades is pretty unusual.
Sure but they also found other ways to get people to spend more money on a game.
I know everyone's following Sony to $70 but haven't Sony's own prestige games actually been pretty light on the post-purchase gouging?
Of course that's a bit easy for Sony when they can vacuum up 30% on everyone else's gouging...
I work in a service industry. We evaluate our charge out-rates annually, and bids that go to clients are based on those rates. If I am working on a project that takes multiple years to complete, we will go back to the customer and ask for a fee increased, even if we had already agreed to do the works for the older rates. Typically the client will agree. We call that "annual escalation" and it's pretty standard.
Welcome to the 21st century.
+1
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
I mean shit when I was a kid there were games that were *more* than the standard game price today.
And let me assure you they had a shit ton less content as well.
I paid $100au for Mortal Kombat for the Master System.
Pretty sure Mortal Kombat 11 was $90au.
Same era, I paid $100US each for Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI/III. It's a very distinct memory, as those were the first 2 games I bought wholly with my own money from my first summer job in 1995.
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Game development at that time also had a fraction of the experienced work force available that it does now, the tools to make it easier were effectively nonexistent, and the system power constraints were enormously limiting. Nowadays we have tiny teams taking freely-available (or very cheap) game development engines and producing unique experiences that AAA publishers don't manage to match.
So I still see no good reason to accept a $70 price point. If companies want to make more money selling a game, then make games on a decent budget instead of trying to resolve every issue with a pile of cash.
Yeah I'm not going to be buying any new games from here on. It's been an eventful year and I've got too much on my plate to be spending £60 on a game let alone 70.
+1
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
I'm still running on ancient backlogs, covered in dust, groaning under their weight.
But I buy some new things because I am a fool.
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
I have a backlog but it is not too huge. I do try and keep to only buying games under 10 which is pretty easy on consoles. The biggest issue is that I still try and get the platinum so some of these games are massive time sinks. Like I still have XCOM 2 and that one is going to be big boy time. Although I did still buy a few games in the latest sales. I am also tempted to try and clean up some of the games I only have a few trophies in just to get my percentage up. Saw a dude with 90% and man that sounds sweet.
"Both Judgement games are on sale! I should buy them!"
"Motherfucker you have four entire Yakuza games to play through still!"
"Yeah, but then I'll have 6!"
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
The only thing saving me from the Yakuza games is that I literally have no fucking clue where to start and I hate jumping into the middle of a story.
If you're not familiar with that style of city-treking minigame collection (not sure what else you'd call them besides Yakuza....Shenmue clones?), and you're going in the first time...it can be extremely rough. At least, it was for me. Even 0, which is widely cited as one of the best, most approach titles in the initial numbered franchise can be tedious and infuriating at worst, and apparently all of its issues are just much more pronounced in the older remakes of the first few titles. People have actively counseled me "If you're not enjoying 0 fairly frequently, skip the earlier titles and just watch the story narrative online." Or just rush forward to the ending as is.
Judgment is totally unconnected from the mainline Yakuza series, they just take place in the same cities. You're good to just play rhose.
Oh I know. But I probably shouldn't be eyeballing the prime rib when I still have 4 whole steaks sitting right there.
Yakuza 0 is the perfect starting point for the series. It's a prequel to the first game, first chronologically in the series and is a perfect starting point for going through the series. There were remakes of 1 and 2 (known as Yakuza Kiwami 1 and Yakuza Kiwami 2), too, that you can jump into after 0. It's also on sale pretty often for relatively cheap. It's also on Gamepass if you have that. Or Steam.
I still see game prices as great value for money compared to pretty much any other hobby. My wife will drop three times what a game costs on a Lego set, finish building it while I'm still in the tutorial section of the game and then it goes and sits somewhere. Going to watch a 3 hour movie with her and buying some snacks we'd be lucky to get out for half of what a 40 hour game will cost.
Really it'd just be nice to see more of the money going to the people doing the work, not the executives.
Switch Friend Code: SW-3944-9431-0318
PSN / Xbox / NNID: Fodder185
+5
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
The only thing saving me from the Yakuza games is that I literally have no fucking clue where to start and I hate jumping into the middle of a story.
If you're not familiar with that style of city-treking minigame collection (not sure what else you'd call them besides Yakuza....Shenmue clones?), and you're going in the first time...it can be extremely rough. At least, it was for me. Even 0, which is widely cited as one of the best, most approach titles in the initial numbered franchise can be tedious and infuriating at worst, and apparently all of its issues are just much more pronounced in the older remakes of the first few titles. People have actively counseled me "If you're not enjoying 0 fairly frequently, skip the earlier titles and just watch the story narrative online." Or just rush forward to the ending as is.
Sounds to me like a case of Deadly Premonition, which I have found that people laboriously stitched together all the relevant cutscenes into one long (seven hour) video so you can enjoy the charming weirdness of the game without having to suffer through the extremely painful gameplay.
The only thing saving me from the Yakuza games is that I literally have no fucking clue where to start and I hate jumping into the middle of a story.
If you're not familiar with that style of city-treking minigame collection (not sure what else you'd call them besides Yakuza....Shenmue clones?), and you're going in the first time...it can be extremely rough. At least, it was for me. Even 0, which is widely cited as one of the best, most approach titles in the initial numbered franchise can be tedious and infuriating at worst, and apparently all of its issues are just much more pronounced in the older remakes of the first few titles. People have actively counseled me "If you're not enjoying 0 fairly frequently, skip the earlier titles and just watch the story narrative online." Or just rush forward to the ending as is.
Sounds to me like a case of Deadly Premonition, which I have found that people laboriously stitched together all the relevant cutscenes into one long (seven hour) video so you can enjoy the charming weirdness of the game without having to suffer through the extremely painful gameplay.
Except Yakuza's gameplay is fun (I have 12 platinums in the series, so I'm a little invested in it).
The only thing saving me from the Yakuza games is that I literally have no fucking clue where to start and I hate jumping into the middle of a story.
If you're not familiar with that style of city-treking minigame collection (not sure what else you'd call them besides Yakuza....Shenmue clones?), and you're going in the first time...it can be extremely rough. At least, it was for me. Even 0, which is widely cited as one of the best, most approach titles in the initial numbered franchise can be tedious and infuriating at worst, and apparently all of its issues are just much more pronounced in the older remakes of the first few titles. People have actively counseled me "If you're not enjoying 0 fairly frequently, skip the earlier titles and just watch the story narrative online." Or just rush forward to the ending as is.
Sounds to me like a case of Deadly Premonition, which I have found that people laboriously stitched together all the relevant cutscenes into one long (seven hour) video so you can enjoy the charming weirdness of the game without having to suffer through the extremely painful gameplay.
The gameplay is fine, and the core plot of 0 is extremely compelling(something major happens in almost every cutscene), so it's very easy to just focus on the main story if you're not into the side stuff.
The only thing saving me from the Yakuza games is that I literally have no fucking clue where to start and I hate jumping into the middle of a story.
If you're not familiar with that style of city-treking minigame collection (not sure what else you'd call them besides Yakuza....Shenmue clones?), and you're going in the first time...it can be extremely rough. At least, it was for me. Even 0, which is widely cited as one of the best, most approach titles in the initial numbered franchise can be tedious and infuriating at worst, and apparently all of its issues are just much more pronounced in the older remakes of the first few titles. People have actively counseled me "If you're not enjoying 0 fairly frequently, skip the earlier titles and just watch the story narrative online." Or just rush forward to the ending as is.
Sounds to me like a case of Deadly Premonition, which I have found that people laboriously stitched together all the relevant cutscenes into one long (seven hour) video so you can enjoy the charming weirdness of the game without having to suffer through the extremely painful gameplay.
Well, somewhere out there, someone enjoys Deadly Premonition. They're not even that hard to find*. So there's an argument for not skipping DP, just as there is one for not skipping 0 (except there aren't five narrative sequels to Deadly Premonition just to start). But fortunately, it's possible go experience 0's narrative, as a video observer, if you don't want to play the game for whatever reason. And should that be true, you're almost certainly going to have more exacerbated issues in the titles that follow it in the narrative because of when their remasters were issued. I don't think people on these forums would've said "After you finish 0, don't bother with the next 3 titles," when I asked for advice otherwise.
If you enjoy 0, this becomes a nonissue probably. And obviously a lot of people really do actually enjoy playing through it, and I've never claimed otherwise. But if we don't take that as universally assumed, it can be an uphill battle. My "problem" is that I came into it not as someone not interested in the gameplay experience (because since playing the demo for Yakuza 3 on PS3, I personally haven't been), my priority was always consuming the narrative in a form beyond reading summaries online, and that's not a great way to approach the series. In my case, as with Shenmue, the emulated retro Sega arcade titles...might be my favorite part of the gameplay, without exaggeration. Even if that wasn't true, a six game series by itself can be very daunting.
Or, I could take the other, less common advice, and just go directly to Like a Dragon, which is one of those things that rekindled my interest in the first place. And just have the wiki open while I play. That's the dilemma.
*I'd say "No one likes playing Deadly Premonition 2, because it's technically a nigh-unplayable disaster," except I know that's not true either. Though even its defenders acknowledge that game is rough.
Synthesis on
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
tbf $70 for a product that, in some cases, provides me with entertainment for literally years is not only a fair price but a sound investment.
Like if you stay inside and play games instead of going out drinking, it literally pays for itself in one night.
My contention is less that $70 isn't reasonable and far far more that extremely few games are worth full retail price these days. The AAA publishers have just aggressively lowered the standards so much that it's now becoming the norm for mega-budget games to release with major issues, and virtually all of them feel like they're trying to hold back content to force you to get DLC passes and battlepasses and shit like that. Nothing has server support anymore. Nothing is made to hold interest more than a year or so before replacement. Even the likes of Halo has gotten stingy, pulling things like split-screen support despite being a cornerstone element of the franchise.
Take something like Horizon Forbidden West. I was expecting as much time on it as the original game, imagine my surprise when I spent near 80 hours on my first playthrough and I skipped a lot of sidequests. Not a perfect game, but I never felt like they were holding anything back or doing anything but trying to give me stuff to do the entire time. Then you have Miles Morales, which is fifty bucks retail despite being significantly shorter and less involved than the base Spider-Man game. Still a great game, but absurd that it has near-full-retail pricing on it for a game where much of the game assets were done before the game even started development.
Make me a game worth $70 and I'll gladly pay for it, but those are exceedingly rare games these days.
The only thing saving me from the Yakuza games is that I literally have no fucking clue where to start and I hate jumping into the middle of a story.
If you're not familiar with that style of city-treking minigame collection (not sure what else you'd call them besides Yakuza....Shenmue clones?), and you're going in the first time...it can be extremely rough. At least, it was for me. Even 0, which is widely cited as one of the best, most approach titles in the initial numbered franchise can be tedious and infuriating at worst, and apparently all of its issues are just much more pronounced in the older remakes of the first few titles. People have actively counseled me "If you're not enjoying 0 fairly frequently, skip the earlier titles and just watch the story narrative online." Or just rush forward to the ending as is.
Sounds to me like a case of Deadly Premonition, which I have found that people laboriously stitched together all the relevant cutscenes into one long (seven hour) video so you can enjoy the charming weirdness of the game without having to suffer through the extremely painful gameplay.
Except Yakuza's gameplay is fun (I have 12 platinums in the series, so I'm a little invested in it).
I just fear getting an interest in the Yakuza series as I know some people enjoy them a ton and that's a lot of game to have to catch up on.
Rarely is a game worth picking up at launch these days anyways. Single player games like say, Guardians of the Galaxy go on sale mere months after it drops, so no reason to buy immediately. And multiplayer games like Back4Blood live or die by how good they are and sadly, most multiplayer games these days die out if they don't launch in a good state. In the end services like Game Pass have changed how I buy games.
I rarely buy games at launch but when I go I almost always get some sort of collectors edition. Horizon and Elden Ring were the two most recent. I just got a new job so I am not sure if I will have the money for God of war so I skipped it but will still probably pick it up day 1. Just from PS+ free games and really good sales I still have a pretty sizeable backlog. I don't see the point in buying any game day 1 unless it is multiplayer only and I suck at games so I rarely get involved in those.
Games is the only product where the consumer defends a price increase, that's some good brainwashing.
Imagine any other industry.
"Gas prices have literally been this low for years, I'm happy that they finally increased their prices!"
"Man, my electricity rates have been stagnant for decades, I'm so happy they finally increased their prices!"
"Man, eggs were so cheap but I'm so glad they finally increased their prices!"
"Dude, cars have been sold for X for years, I'm so glad they finally increased their prices!"
You can choose whether to pay $70 for a game at launch. So some will justify that choice and others will simply wait for the price to drop without raising a fuss. Neither option is available when you need food or electricity.
Personally Steam sales have trained me to almost never pay full price anyway. On the rare occasion I can't wait, the difference between $60 and $70 is rarely going to be decisive.
pyromaniac221this just might bean interestin YTRegistered Userregular
Different people place different values on different games and different times, it's fine to be willing to pay $70 or whatever for lavish productions and it's fine to think that's way too much for gloss laid over a design targeted at the lowest common denominator and instead prefer mid-budget titles that serve a niche audience.
Games is the only product where the consumer defends a price increase, that's some good brainwashing.
Imagine any other industry.
"Gas prices have literally been this low for years, I'm happy that they finally increased their prices!"
"Man, my electricity rates have been stagnant for decades, I'm so happy they finally increased their prices!"
"Man, eggs were so cheap but I'm so glad they finally increased their prices!"
"Dude, cars have been sold for X for years, I'm so glad they finally increased their prices!"
Price increases in entertainment is are pretty much expected and acknowledged. Two quick examples:
When I was in high school, going to the movies was $2 per person. Now a trip to the moves requires a reservation, and it's nearly $20 a seat. Add in buying a popcorn and a beer at the theatre, and you're looking at $75 to $100 for two people to have a few hours out.
My first TV was a 19-inch CRT. I think I paid $500. That was replaced with a 50-inch plasma set in the early aughts. I paid nearly two grand for that one. That was replaced with a 65-inch OLED screen about a year before I moved, at a cost of $2500. (That TV is in storage in California right now.) I'm ordering a new QD-OLED today for a bit over AUD$4000.
Games is the only product where the consumer defends a price increase, that's some good brainwashing.
Imagine any other industry.
"Gas prices have literally been this low for years, I'm happy that they finally increased their prices!"
"Man, my electricity rates have been stagnant for decades, I'm so happy they finally increased their prices!"
"Man, eggs were so cheap but I'm so glad they finally increased their prices!"
"Dude, cars have been sold for X for years, I'm so glad they finally increased their prices!"
World of difference between understanding the pressures that increased the price of games (and kept them steady for so long) and being "happy" those pressures were no longer enough to keep prices stable.
One difference is that only one of these things have happened in this thread.
But other industries haven’t been aggressively pushing alternative methods of funding to the detriment of the core product.
Theaters aren’t charging you an extra $5 for an extended cut of a film. They aren’t making a film more difficult to watch and adding in optional purchases to improve your viewing experiences. The experience of buying ticket and maybe snacks is unchanged from past decades.
My gas station isn’t charging me extra for special gasoline that enables me to drive fast enough to go on highways.
Games going up in price would be acceptable if the actual price had been constant all these years, but we’ve had about two decades of alternative ways to get money from players beyond the original purchase. In many cases taking content that would have otherwise been free or just part of the core game, like a more reasonable experience curve altered to encourage the purchase of XP boosters. Even free games can’t just sell cosmetics at reasonable prices: it has to exploit human behavior via gambling or FOMO or even our poor grasp on numbers via ye olde funny money.
If they get rid of all the horseshit barring maybe expansion packs, then I’ll accept their $70 price hike.
But other industries haven’t been aggressively pushing alternative methods of funding to the detriment of the core product.
Theaters aren’t charging you an extra $5 for an extended cut of a film. They aren’t making a film more difficult to watch and adding in optional purchases to improve your viewing experiences. The experience of buying ticket and maybe snacks is unchanged from past decades.
My gas station isn’t charging me extra for special gasoline that enables me to drive fast enough to go on highways.
Games going up in price would be acceptable if the actual price had been constant all these years, but we’ve had about two decades of alternative ways to get money from players beyond the original purchase. In many cases taking content that would have otherwise been free or just part of the core game, like a more reasonable experience curve altered to encourage the purchase of XP boosters. Even free games can’t just sell cosmetics at reasonable prices: it has to exploit human behavior via gambling or FOMO or even our poor grasp on numbers via ye olde funny money.
If they get rid of all the horseshit barring maybe expansion packs, then I’ll accept their $70 price hike.
I hate to be that guy, but Sony has recently dropped two movies re-released to theaters with yes, alternative cuts! And they didn't charge more but the idea was hey, go see Spider-Man again! So the analogy immediately falls apart. Entertainment is a luxury, and sometimes the prices go up. Especially when the dollar goes down.
Posts
I know everyone's following Sony to $70 but haven't Sony's own prestige games actually been pretty light on the post-purchase gouging?
Of course that's a bit easy for Sony when they can vacuum up 30% on everyone else's gouging...
Welcome to the 21st century.
I paid $100au for Mortal Kombat for the Master System.
Pretty sure Mortal Kombat 11 was $90au.
Same era, I paid $100US each for Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI/III. It's a very distinct memory, as those were the first 2 games I bought wholly with my own money from my first summer job in 1995.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
So I still see no good reason to accept a $70 price point. If companies want to make more money selling a game, then make games on a decent budget instead of trying to resolve every issue with a pile of cash.
But I buy some new things because I am a fool.
PSN:Furlion
PS - Local_H_Jay
Sub me on Youtube
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"Motherfucker you have four entire Yakuza games to play through still!"
"Yeah, but then I'll have 6!"
Oh I know. But I probably shouldn't be eyeballing the prime rib when I still have 4 whole steaks sitting right there.
If you're not familiar with that style of city-treking minigame collection (not sure what else you'd call them besides Yakuza....Shenmue clones?), and you're going in the first time...it can be extremely rough. At least, it was for me. Even 0, which is widely cited as one of the best, most approach titles in the initial numbered franchise can be tedious and infuriating at worst, and apparently all of its issues are just much more pronounced in the older remakes of the first few titles. People have actively counseled me "If you're not enjoying 0 fairly frequently, skip the earlier titles and just watch the story narrative online." Or just rush forward to the ending as is.
Yakuza 0 is the perfect starting point for the series. It's a prequel to the first game, first chronologically in the series and is a perfect starting point for going through the series. There were remakes of 1 and 2 (known as Yakuza Kiwami 1 and Yakuza Kiwami 2), too, that you can jump into after 0. It's also on sale pretty often for relatively cheap. It's also on Gamepass if you have that. Or Steam.
Really it'd just be nice to see more of the money going to the people doing the work, not the executives.
PSN / Xbox / NNID: Fodder185
This applies to every job everywhere, really
Sounds to me like a case of Deadly Premonition, which I have found that people laboriously stitched together all the relevant cutscenes into one long (seven hour) video so you can enjoy the charming weirdness of the game without having to suffer through the extremely painful gameplay.
Except Yakuza's gameplay is fun (I have 12 platinums in the series, so I'm a little invested in it).
Like if you stay inside and play games instead of going out drinking, it literally pays for itself in one night.
Steam: adamjnet
The gameplay is fine, and the core plot of 0 is extremely compelling(something major happens in almost every cutscene), so it's very easy to just focus on the main story if you're not into the side stuff.
Well, somewhere out there, someone enjoys Deadly Premonition. They're not even that hard to find*. So there's an argument for not skipping DP, just as there is one for not skipping 0 (except there aren't five narrative sequels to Deadly Premonition just to start). But fortunately, it's possible go experience 0's narrative, as a video observer, if you don't want to play the game for whatever reason. And should that be true, you're almost certainly going to have more exacerbated issues in the titles that follow it in the narrative because of when their remasters were issued. I don't think people on these forums would've said "After you finish 0, don't bother with the next 3 titles," when I asked for advice otherwise.
If you enjoy 0, this becomes a nonissue probably. And obviously a lot of people really do actually enjoy playing through it, and I've never claimed otherwise. But if we don't take that as universally assumed, it can be an uphill battle. My "problem" is that I came into it not as someone not interested in the gameplay experience (because since playing the demo for Yakuza 3 on PS3, I personally haven't been), my priority was always consuming the narrative in a form beyond reading summaries online, and that's not a great way to approach the series. In my case, as with Shenmue, the emulated retro Sega arcade titles...might be my favorite part of the gameplay, without exaggeration. Even if that wasn't true, a six game series by itself can be very daunting.
Or, I could take the other, less common advice, and just go directly to Like a Dragon, which is one of those things that rekindled my interest in the first place. And just have the wiki open while I play. That's the dilemma.
*I'd say "No one likes playing Deadly Premonition 2, because it's technically a nigh-unplayable disaster," except I know that's not true either. Though even its defenders acknowledge that game is rough.
My contention is less that $70 isn't reasonable and far far more that extremely few games are worth full retail price these days. The AAA publishers have just aggressively lowered the standards so much that it's now becoming the norm for mega-budget games to release with major issues, and virtually all of them feel like they're trying to hold back content to force you to get DLC passes and battlepasses and shit like that. Nothing has server support anymore. Nothing is made to hold interest more than a year or so before replacement. Even the likes of Halo has gotten stingy, pulling things like split-screen support despite being a cornerstone element of the franchise.
Take something like Horizon Forbidden West. I was expecting as much time on it as the original game, imagine my surprise when I spent near 80 hours on my first playthrough and I skipped a lot of sidequests. Not a perfect game, but I never felt like they were holding anything back or doing anything but trying to give me stuff to do the entire time. Then you have Miles Morales, which is fifty bucks retail despite being significantly shorter and less involved than the base Spider-Man game. Still a great game, but absurd that it has near-full-retail pricing on it for a game where much of the game assets were done before the game even started development.
Make me a game worth $70 and I'll gladly pay for it, but those are exceedingly rare games these days.
I just fear getting an interest in the Yakuza series as I know some people enjoy them a ton and that's a lot of game to have to catch up on.
PS - Local_H_Jay
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PSN:Furlion
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
Frankly, it sounds like a comparison made by someone who has played neither title.
Imagine any other industry.
"Gas prices have literally been this low for years, I'm happy that they finally increased their prices!"
"Man, my electricity rates have been stagnant for decades, I'm so happy they finally increased their prices!"
"Man, eggs were so cheap but I'm so glad they finally increased their prices!"
"Dude, cars have been sold for X for years, I'm so glad they finally increased their prices!"
Personally Steam sales have trained me to almost never pay full price anyway. On the rare occasion I can't wait, the difference between $60 and $70 is rarely going to be decisive.
PS - Local_H_Jay
Sub me on Youtube
And Twitch
- When I was in high school, going to the movies was $2 per person. Now a trip to the moves requires a reservation, and it's nearly $20 a seat. Add in buying a popcorn and a beer at the theatre, and you're looking at $75 to $100 for two people to have a few hours out.
- My first TV was a 19-inch CRT. I think I paid $500. That was replaced with a 50-inch plasma set in the early aughts. I paid nearly two grand for that one. That was replaced with a 65-inch OLED screen about a year before I moved, at a cost of $2500. (That TV is in storage in California right now.) I'm ordering a new QD-OLED today for a bit over AUD$4000.
Cost escalation.World of difference between understanding the pressures that increased the price of games (and kept them steady for so long) and being "happy" those pressures were no longer enough to keep prices stable.
One difference is that only one of these things have happened in this thread.
Theaters aren’t charging you an extra $5 for an extended cut of a film. They aren’t making a film more difficult to watch and adding in optional purchases to improve your viewing experiences. The experience of buying ticket and maybe snacks is unchanged from past decades.
My gas station isn’t charging me extra for special gasoline that enables me to drive fast enough to go on highways.
Games going up in price would be acceptable if the actual price had been constant all these years, but we’ve had about two decades of alternative ways to get money from players beyond the original purchase. In many cases taking content that would have otherwise been free or just part of the core game, like a more reasonable experience curve altered to encourage the purchase of XP boosters. Even free games can’t just sell cosmetics at reasonable prices: it has to exploit human behavior via gambling or FOMO or even our poor grasp on numbers via ye olde funny money.
If they get rid of all the horseshit barring maybe expansion packs, then I’ll accept their $70 price hike.
I hate to be that guy, but Sony has recently dropped two movies re-released to theaters with yes, alternative cuts! And they didn't charge more but the idea was hey, go see Spider-Man again! So the analogy immediately falls apart. Entertainment is a luxury, and sometimes the prices go up. Especially when the dollar goes down.
PS - Local_H_Jay
Sub me on Youtube
And Twitch