CEO salary packages are way more expensive than 20-30 years ago. And shareholders keep wanting to see “line goes up”.

This is a fallacious argument. If you look at sales for games 30 years ago the numbers will be much lower with much higher manufacturing prices. Game sell many more units today with lower overhead manufacturing. While development costs are higher it of offset by number of sales and digital distribution. Many game companies can profit even selling at half the price from 30 years ago or less.

This is pure corporate greed and should not be defended.

That makes sense, until you realise the market for it is significantly bigger than 30 years ago, and you can sell infinite copy of the thing you made. When we talk about physical item being cheaper after entering massive market we justify it being economy of scale. But when come to videogame people suddenly forgot that phase exists.

Yeah the development costs are so high game companies are operating at a loss… Oh wait, they aren’t.

That‘s not even true, though. People will not like this, but most major console games used to be much more expensive 30 years ago, actually. They only became more affordable when the masses got into gaming and really dropped in price when they became fully digital. No idea where everyone got that morphed perspective from, maybe because most people borrowed games back then or bought them on flea markets. And I‘m really not trying to defend Nintendo here because what applied back then isn‘t the case anymore but people really have no idea just how expensive new N64 games used to be.

Whatever the case, I‘m happy to be a PC gamer right now. Let me tell you that.

Right it’s the development costs … Not the CEOs making more money than any point in history, with a pay gap that’s just insane, executive making dumb ass choices…

Can’t be that, must be ‘development costs’.

Never mind that today’s world, we have some of the best toolings available for software development. Making it easier and more approachable than ever before and it only keeps getting better. And you don’t need to hire people that know assembly to make a video game… You can do everything and high level languages.

Stop letting the PR machine from the corporations influence you.

Games are digital, much less production costs. Widely distributed, far greater than 20-30 years ago. Efficiency has gone up ten fold with modern tech. Nintendo still makes billions in profit each year, don’t play the “they deserve more money for their work” bullshit.

I agree that, on paper, that is a reason for game prices to go up. However, I also think that on paper, there are reasons for it to go down at the same time.

For one, game budgets really should be controlled. A great many indie developers have put out superior products using the better technologies available. This often coincides with longer development time using a smaller team. You even see a disjointedness in AAA games now where it very much feels like 8 teams lumping their portions together.

Two, minimum wage has not gone up in the USA; and the reach of these games has expanded to many countries that (in part due to import laws) can’t even pay what were considered normal prices elsewhere. Many of these games they’re selling only hit viral growth when a lot of people are playing and talking about them, and we’re in real danger of big, expensive productions being completely out of people’s reach and thus dropping entirely off the radar.

How many video games were sold annually 20 to 30 years ago vs today?

Reach and sales are also drastically higher now, and distribution costs down due to digital games.

The Common SNES game price in the UK in 1990-s was £59.99. that would be way over £100 in today’s money. Games today are the cheapest they’ve ever been.

40$ for the longest time, but switch they became greedy and made it 60$, i refused to buy a swsh and a switch over it.

There are more people buying games now than ever before. 20-30 years ago, games would set sales records selling over 500k copies in a year or two. Nowadays that number is like 13 million in a month. Gaming companys report record profits year over year (except Ubisoft lol) and they monetize games even harder now with microtransactions.

Prices should be going down. Its not my problem development costs are bloated because dev teams are too big and the marketing team wants to play Beatles music in every trailer. But they’re making it my problem by making me pay for it.

So I just don’t pay for it. Problem solved. If they go out of business, its their own fault. Not mine. Unfortunately, Nintendo is too big to fail.

Those companies are usually being closed down optionally by their owning corporations, they aren’t going out of business. Sunset Overdrive’s company was shuttered despite their success, for example.

If we’re also going by games 20 to 30 years ago, $50 was the whole game, without stuff being chopped out for day one DLC, or micro transactions, or battle passes.

If we’re upping the price - do we need monthly $30 battle passes? Do we need $20 micro transactions?

When these games are pulling so much MONTHLY in revenue, how can we then turn around and say games aren’t profitable and the price needs to go up?

Also, wasnt buying digital meant to save me money? What happened to that?

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenues-by-platform/

Console are making 30 billion a year nowadays and studios are selling so many more copies of games than than thirty years ago and making money hand over fist with scummy microtransactions and fomo tactics.

And while AAA development costs have gone up, but again billions in profits, you’re actually going to defend that a cart racing game’s development is on par with Baldur’s Gate 3 that still sold for 60 bucks or monster Hunter wild for the new average of 70 bucks?

Please, here’s my variable rate call of bullshit. This is nothing more than Nintendo being greedy jackasses that know Nintendo fans will pay the extra 10 bucks more and allowing themselves to being gouged along with giving the other greedy publishes permission to do the same and exploit their fans, not that most aren’t doing so already, looking at you Rockstar.

As for your, look at all these studios going under, that’s not due to prices of games being too low, that’s a lot to do with over expansion due to COVID 19, AAA publishes continuing to chase the trend of live services and making dumbass moves, and back to publishers again, over playing their hands with acquisition after acquisition or just publishers being absolute jackasses, like Microsoft and Tango Studios where they praised Hi-Fi Rush being a breakout hit and then closed the studio because it didn’t make all the money and they did no marketing and released it on game pass.

Yeah, feel free to think Nintendo just doing gamers a solid here but I’m not variable rate dumb enough to buy it.

Given modern platforms and tooling, development should be cheaper and faster than ever. You have a huge talent pool, you can cobble together something in Unreal or other Switch-compatible engine, and run automated builds and tests before shipping right to the online store.