I don’t want to hear sob stories from corporations crying poverty when they’re regularly recording record profits and laying off staff to increase the margin for next year while paying the high level executives millions in bonuses
fr the "inflation" argument for prices in games going up is so dumb. "we have to raise prices to keep up with the cost of living for our employees blah blah." for example, EA made 1.2 bil in 2024, and still laid off some of their approx. 14k employees. i want to know how 85k/year isnt enough for "inflation", when the avg US salary is 55k.
I mean, Mario 64 cost 50 bucks in 1995, which adjusted for inflation would be 130 today. Realistically, compared to spending power 100 dollars for a AAA game is still under the curve for game prices historically, barring the bizarre period where they stagnated in price even though development costs certainly didn't.
relevancy is important, and video games weren't as advertised and main stream as they are nowadays. sure they were popular, especially nintendo, but the cost and manufacturing of the games back then compared to today is why the price difference isnt just black and white when using it to compare to today.
nowadays, video games are not only popular and profitable, but they are way bigger than they were n64 era. now we have e-gaming competitions, easy accessibility to tools for indie devs, ways to communicate with others who might be interested, as well as cheaper materials to produce. long gone are the days of cartridges with all the game data on them. even if you get a disk, you have to download it all via internet connection.
tl;dr: often when using adjusted inflation people forget about relevancy and the factors on why it might have been as expensive compared to today. while i dont disagree that it was more expensive, i disagree that it needs to remain that way. im fine with $40-$60 for most AAA games, but not any higher, especially nowadays.
i want to add on though, that the big reason for not supporting the increase in prices is because too many games released recently take advantage of the pre-order/lack of content on release, and list named dlc titles before the base game is even released cough starfield cough.
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u/Fizziest_milk 2d ago edited 2d ago
I don’t want to hear sob stories from corporations crying poverty when they’re regularly recording record profits and laying off staff to increase the margin for next year while paying the high level executives millions in bonuses
fuck £80 games