thrsher
\m/-_-\m/
games today have micro transactions, paid DLC and other additional revenue streams im not thinking of to add on to the cost of a game i think is being overlooked here making comparisions to cost of games in the 90s
Mick Gordon makes lengthy statement regarding working with id Software on DOOM Eternal
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wankerness
SS.org Regular
The thing was back then the bulk of the cost of games was due to the expense of the actual physical production of them. Nowadays most stuff is digitally distributed and discs are infinitely cheaper to mass-produce than cartridges. So in effect, the cost SHOULD have gone down massively since the cost of production has gone through the floor in comparison.
Increasing costs of games is purely capitalism on display. Companies have to keep increasing profits, forever, or their company dies, cause end-stage capitalism makes no sense and is awful. So basically they have to keep coming up with more and more ways to squeeze customers and rip-off the people that actually do work (aka, everyone's salaries get kept low apart from people like Bobby Kotick who have nothing to do with the production of the games, and they farm everything out to contractors that they can pay less money), or else the shareholders get mad. DLC, battlepasses, lootboxes, all that crap is already tacking on big costs, and now they've hoodwinked many people into thinking that games themselves should have their base costs increased too.
TedEH
Cromulent
I like how people keep saying "late-stage" and "end-stage" as if they expect capitalism as a whole is going away any time soon. I can appreciate the optimism, but we have no way to know we're not in a relatively-early stage of something that's going to stay basically the same for a long time, or potentially get worse. It seems more likely to me it'll evolve into some kind of capitalism-lite.
wankerness
SS.org Regular
It is called late stage cause there's basically nowhere else for it to go, we're already in basically in Robocop. They can continue squeezing customers more and more money can keep getting funneled from people to shareholders, but other than that it's late-stage cause the vast majority of small businesses and whatnot have already been squished and have a hard time surviving without being bought out or run out of business in short order.
Early and midstage were back when there was like, actual competition and the companies hadn't all merged and formed mega corps, and the corps hadn't also been declared to have rights as if they were private citizens by the supreme court, allowing them to totally take over the government. I'm not thinking it's going away, just that at this point we're in the end stage of it. We probably will be indefinitely. The way I see it the most likely "positive" outcome is a cataclysmic depression which might reset things back to mid-stage when the voting population finally takes note of just how much the likes of Amazon, MS, Koch Bros, Disney, etc are stomping on everyone and demands action, and the most likely negative outcome is "things will continue this way."
Pretty sure I saw that, it's been around a while, right?
I saw another deep-dive on the Doom (1993) sound effects library. Someone managed to find the public domain sound library from which 99% of the game's sounds were sourced - some were sped up or slowed down, pitch shifted, or blended with others, but very very few were done from scratch for the game. I know that every once in a while, I'll be watching some low-budget horror film or dumb television programme and I'll hear a demon sound or a barrel explosion, and now I know that it's because those sounds are all public domain from 1980's sound libraries people could copy and share.
Nowadays, there seem to be tons of free sound libraries online, so I'm sure the same sort of thing happens, just with those sounds instead of the 80's ones. Years ago, I messed around with doing the same sort of thing myself, recording sound clips of doors slamming and different crunches and slaps and squishes and stuff, but the cost of hosting them, at the time, was pretty steep, and it would have been something that would have ultimately netted me nothing. So I gave up on it.
It is called late stage cause there's basically nowhere else for it to go, we're already in basically in Robocop. They can continue squeezing customers more and more money can keep getting funneled from people to shareholders, but other than that it's late-stage cause the vast majority of small businesses and whatnot have already been squished and have a hard time surviving without being bought out or run out of business in short order.
Early and midstage were back when there was like, actual competition and the companies hadn't all merged and formed mega corps, and the corps hadn't also been declared to have rights as if they were private citizens by the supreme court, allowing them to totally take over the government. I'm not thinking it's going away, just that at this point we're in the end stage of it. We probably will be indefinitely. The way I see it the most likely "positive" outcome is a cataclysmic depression which might reset things back to mid-stage when the voting population finally takes note of just how much the likes of Amazon, MS, Koch Bros, Disney, etc are stomping on everyone and demands action, and the most likely negative outcome is "things will continue this way."
No where else to go as opposed to what? You realize that folks were making this exact argument about the economy in the very late 19th and early 20th century, right? It's just that instead of Amazon, Microsoft, Coke, and Disney, it was Standard Oil, AT&T, US Steel, etc. But railways gave way to roads and the companies who made their fortunes off of the rail industry faded away and the automotive industry rose up in its place. Telegraphs became useless, but telephones took their place. The same shit had just happened again with department stores crumbling away whilst online retailers exploded. Phones are now almost all cellular. High sugar soft drinks are hanging on for dear life as people are now drinking more bottled water and kombucha. It's nothing new, but it never was anything new, fundamentally, but we keep getting a new coat of paint on it.
So yeah, capitalism sucks, but it's always sucked just the same. The only reason there is a perception that there is suddenly more of a problem with it is because we are coming off of an all-time high in economic prosperity. People'd be just as sour about it if our economic model was more socialist-leaning, because, either way, there is less prosperity to go around.
wankerness
SS.org Regular
I think it’s always sucked, it’s just there’s periods where it’s freer market with more smaller companies and actual social mobility, and periods where it’s worse. I think the period before the Great Depression was comparable to what we’re seeing now. And at that time it was late stage, and ended up getting reset when the mega corps screwed up the economy so badly that people voted in change and we got the new deal and all those antitrust laws and whatnot. Seems like a cycle.
Re: sound effects, yeah. I love/hate that I recognize things like that. The worst example for me was The Babadook, where it’s going along seeming like a really well-made legit movie, and all of a sudden the monster makes the exact sound used for the dragons in one of the old Warcraft games. Completely took me out of it! If my sound memory was worse I think I could enjoy more things. That’s pretty rare though. The other usual culprits for me are those platform and door noises used in old video games or doom monster sounds.
Was it the Warcraft dragon or was is the Heretic Sabreclaw?
wankerness
SS.org Regular
Probably both. I remembered hearing it somewhere else but couldn't remember what. I played heretic like three times when I was about 12.
sakeido
Contributor
Games haven't kept pace with inflation, not even close.. like the other guys said. Games should be well clear of $100, especially considering the hours of enjoyment one game can provide. I would much rather pay more up front to get an actually complete game than all this microtransaction, daily chore battle pass fucking nonsense that has taken over every multiplayer game. I would probably still be playing Destiny if I could just pay a monthly subscription and have a lot of dope stuff that was feasible to grind for, instead of having to blow 20 hours a week just to get to the minimum level to run a raid because their entire financial model depends on dangling things just out of my reach.
Sure big games make a ton of money but we're (imo) seeing the same thing happening with video games that's happened with movies. There's big budget, AAA games/tentpole Disney movies that depend on huge sales volumes to generate returns, and indie games/movies with fewer and fewer interesting mid-budget things in between. With a better financial model, maybe that wouldn't continue to happen.
TedEH
Cromulent
I generally agree with most of your post, I just disagree that inflation on it's own is any metric for what something "should be" priced and I don't think higher prices solve any of the things wrong with gaming. Predatory f2p / gacha / etc aren't going away because they work too well. Price doesn't fix anything about how we don't own any of the software we pay for. Turning games into more of a luxury item than they already are isn't suddenly going to stop people from equating the "value" of a game to "willingness to pay a full price". It's more likely to make piracy worse vs. better. Games have problems, and pricing models are a part of that - but I don't see how any of that is solved by just raising prices.
But consider also that we sort of do have games values at over $100 already - granted I'm used to CAD prices rather than USD, so I don't know how that compares - but pretty much every game now comes out with the "base game" at "full price", plus a season pass, and separate DLC, and definitive editions, collectors boxes, next-gen upgrade, and a cosmetics shop, and associated merch, and the expectation that you'll buy the re-make in 5 years after they've pulled the servers down to make the original unplayable, or extra copies that have been ported to every console and phones and smart fridges and whatever else. That $60 or whatever (it's $80 CAD standard here) doesn't actually buy you the whole product anymore.
Honestly, in business economics, the price is solely determined by what people are willing to pay for the thing.
Anyone who thinks that the overhead costs have anything to do directly with the selling price are thinking about it the wrong way. If the overhead/production price is too high compared to the selling price, then you just don't get into the business of selling the thing in the first place.
Anyone who thinks that the overhead costs have anything to do directly with the selling price are thinking about it the wrong way. If the overhead/production price is too high compared to the selling price, then you just don't get into the business of selling the thing in the first place.
wankerness
SS.org Regular
Considering game companies' profits have skyrocketed since the 90s when games cost radically more (relatively) than they do now, I don't think they have any excuse for "needing" to raise the price no matter how many excuses one wants to make for the poor rich companies that need to raise prices on all the kids and nerds buying their stuff so Bobby Kotick et al can continue adding to their yacht fleets.
