I’m not at all defending advertisements because, like every single person on earth, I hate them. However, the constant complaint that ~games are expensive~ is more and more becoming absolutely out of touch. Considering how complex modern games are from a software standpoint, they are fucking cheap as hell. $60 for (generally speaking) 40+ hours of entertainment is a goddamn bargain, not to mention they’ve mostly been priced the same for the better part of two decades. Y’all realize actual people make these things right? People who need to be paid for the work they do? Of all the absolute shit that happens behind the scenes and in plain daylight in the gaming industry, I think we can find better things to bitch about than the price of games.
What about DLCs? And micro-transactions? And lack of optimisations? Base games these days are more like beta versions of what used to be provided in the past… It kinda feels like shrinkflation, price is the same but you get a lot less, both in quality and quantity.
Considering how complex modern games are from a software standpoint, they are fucking cheap as hell
Frameworks, ready to use engines and less care for efficiency (see Ark Survival) make it less effort for more results.
Wasn’t there some asian guy who made a whole action level in Unity just for fun?
So because someone made something as a hobby that means other people shouldn’t be paid for work? Also, sure, tools exist to ease in the production of a game (and in every other creative media), doesn’t negate the fact that people’s talent and work are what make the product exist.
No, i only said it isn’t as expensive as you think anymore.
Where did you say that?
Between the lines.
And talent is in AAA overruled by sales people.
I’d agree with you if the devs were being treated better, games should cost more and be shorter. But the price hikes aren’t that. They’re pure greed.
That extra money isn’t going to pay the developers. EA just shut down multiple studios, including the studio responsible for the critically acclaimed AA game High-Fi Rush, and are already talking about shutting down more. EA has closed more studios than they’ve released games this year, and the past 3 years have seen record high layoffs - even worse than during the 2008 financial crash. All this while companies brag about record-breaking profits.
And with the rise of digital media, production costs saw a significant decrease. There was a short period of time where physical copies were $60 and digital were $40. Now digital are averaging $70 and execs are already talking about increasing the price to $80-100.
So… Like I said, there are plenty of things to complain about in the gaming industry aside from the price of AAA titles (which contrary to your claim) have remained priced at about $60 for the past 20+ years. These so-called price hikes are non-existent, and based on inflation, are actually price decreases. Yes, most profits for everything (not just games) go to the CEOs and investors, that is the root cause of the destruction of the western world.
Also there are myriad fantastic indie titles that only cost like $20 so, uh, go play them instead?
As for your claim of digital releases briefly being cheaper than physical copies—I don’t recall that ever being a thing. Granted, I was mostly a console gamer from the 90s through the early 2010s so maybe I missed that.
I guess some thing about it, like a game costs less than a big budget Hollywood movie to make, and Hollywood movie tickets don’t cost $80
but audience for movies like 100x times bigger, yk
Sounds like they’re screwing the loyal fans to make up the cash. Imagine if an independent movie or snap budget film charged $80 a ticket because they have a smaller audience?
You realize that it’s much easier now to make a game than it was two decades ago (see other comment)? That digital platforms make it more accessible for buyers to get your game? That the overall trend in the industry has been to get a game out as fast as possible then try to patch it after the fact, when that wasn’t even an option two decades ago (internet existed, sure, but not everyone had good internet)? Sure, the quality of graphics may have gone up, but everything else has been left behind.
Also, saying that people complaining about price is out-of-touch, is itself out-of-touch. Most people have even less purchasing power now than they did two decades ago and you want us to pay even more for a product inferior to what we would’ve gotten years ago?
Considering that most titles are cross platform I’d say it’s actually much more difficult to produce games these days than it was in the past (see Cyberpunk’s shaky release due to it trying to run on everything under the sun at launch—and being forced out too early due to investor demand). It’s not like game engines and other development tools make it so people press a button that says “make game” and the game pops into existence.
My main point is that games have not actually gone up in price for over two decades. And, as you have pointed out as well, there are an awful lot of actual things to complain about with the gaming industry. The out of pocket cost we pay to play the games is really not one of them.
that would be fair if these companies weren’t incredibly profitable, only increasing that profit, and only using that profit to pay the executive and shareholders.
it’s just greed. they don’t need the money.
its almost like the rate of profit is falling, forcing capitalists to find new ways to exploit everything and everyone around them…
fuck that, if it has ads and/or microtransactions it better be free
Hell, the game could go from 70$ to Free with Ads, I’d still not be interested. I despise ads and I absolutely refuse to see them.
Trying to learn a new language and my friends keep recomeneding duolingo. But my zero tolerance for ads makes Duolingo dead on arrival.
Do you use a private DNS like Adguard? I never see ads of any kind on my phone with this.
I feel you, friend
Ok but hear me out, devil’s advocate, gaming is and has been one of the cheapest forms of entertainment for a long time, and production costs have increased significantly.
Have production costs increased or has marketing/publishing costs gone up dramatically as gaming attempts to get a greater demographic and introduce predatory monetisation methods? Tools and techniques for game development surely improve over time making development easier and more cost effective.
I agree with the first part (not that it should mean they can just extract more money out of us), but the second part is something I simply don’t believe.
Don’t get me wrong, I know budgets have increased, but the dev cost definitely didn’t by remotely the same amount. Devs wages are pretty stagnant since the initial silicon Valley boom and new tools at our disposal have made it a lot easier to create games, be it for indi devs or the corporate giants. Sure, graphics got fancier, but so did the readily aviable stock assets. High end work stations cost maybe a bit more, but they are a drop in the bucket in the 100+ million budgets of today.
What has increased on the other hand is the amount of executives/managers and their wages. In addition to that marketing has gone up a lot, probably over half of most budgets go there. The growing corporate overhead with its archaic structures also eats up a lot.
If we go purely by dev cost, prices should go down since the overall profit would increase with the greater amount of players. Everything else is corporate overlords throwing shitloads of money at a mediocre game to make it seem worth something.
Ubisoft gonna try beat them to it
I’m so glad I haven’t bought an EA game since Battlefield 1942.
Any paid softwares/games should never have ads even if it only 0.1$
I don’t mind having the choice at least, years ago Amazon did this with their Kindles (or maybe they still do, dunno). You were given a choice on their Kindle order page, save 40$ on an ad supported version or full price and ad-free. It even stacked (At least once anyways) with other sales they might have been running.
I chose the ad supported model… and then proceeded to root it and remove the ads LMAO
I went with the ad supported model, and now I’m thoroughly sick of ads and Amazon, but unfortunately you can no longer root their devices, they’ve really locked them down.
I’m considering buying another tablet just because I’m so sick of Amazon’s crap. I wonder if Free Geek has any decent tablets for sale?
Honestly, I can’t even remember the last time I bought an EA game. What do they even make these days besides sports games?
Only ea games I can think of that I’ve bought are jedi: fallen order and jedi: survivor. And I only bought them because they’re actually good games that aren’t monetized like a casino.
Yes, but also the star wars and sims franchise
Buying games online was supposed to be cheaper, too. Cuz no money spent on packaging and retail space…
It is cheaper. All the money saved just goes to the publishers.
So they can pay their devs more, right? 😀
So they can pay their devs more, right? 😟
Indie games, FromSoft, and larian ftw.
Noita, Hades, Factorio. Three insanely good games without ads or ingame purchases with very high replayability. Just don’t give EA more money, please.
Satisfactory for me personally, I enjoy factorio but I like the first person vibe more
I played it when it came out and while it was a fun playthrough and I’m glad I played, it’s nowhere near factorio on replayability. It also feels a lot more shallow, like they put more time into the visuals rather than actual game mechanics. And in the end what killed it for me was the performance. On factorio you can still have decent fps/ups in a 1k hour megabase, satisfactory in the other hand gives up pretty quickly. Mod support is great compared to most games, but doesn’t really come close to factorio.
Just waiting for it to leave early access
It’s their next update, it’s been a long road to 1.0 but the game is finally feeling complete. They’ve announced the next update will be 1.0, and it’s expected this year.
For me it’s the opposite haha
Electronic Arts started out so differently. The best, highest quality games, sold in album cases like vinyl records. They wanted to make their devs into rock stars. M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, Archon. Every game was innovative in every way.
Much later they’d changed, shifted toward the dark side, slipping way. But they still managed to bring us two of my favorite MMOs of all time: Motor City Online and Earth and Beyond.
MCO was online multiplayer Need For Speed with real classic American cars with real hot rod parts, the real engines, everything. I’ve not seen anything like it since. Hardly no one wants to pay to license real world cars any more. And you certainly don’t get the real engines with the real hot rod parts.
EAB was a crappy FPS but somehow 2D space game, but it had the best crafting and leveling system. You take things apart eventually learning how to build things. Player built stuff could possibly go was high as 200% quality so other players would want to buy your wares. The leveling system had three distinct lines: exploration, combat, and trade. Play the game how you wanted to having fun your way not how they think you should.
Anyway, EA killed them both, turned off the servers, refused to release the server code so player servers or single player modes were impossible. They sent me a coupon for their new Sims game, though.
So fuck EA. Haven’t bought a single one of their games since.
BG3
Billboard ads? Shitty but ehh not that bad overall. In game ads over radio or video? Nah miss me on that.
It’s the implementation that will probably annoy me the most. If the ingame radio station in GTA tried to sell me coke or Pepsi I probably wouldn’t even notice since it fits in with the world. But knowing EA they will probably put them in as additional loading screen that you can’t skip.
Fuck this.
There will be literally ads everywhere soon.
Ads in the street, on TV, on the radio, in magazines, on the internet, in games (including in VR)…
It’s a nightmare it will be completely impossible to go through one minute of your life without being sold something.
It’s not really something new but it saddens me because gaming was one of the few space that was mostly spared by advertisers. One of the last place you could get out of your reality for a little while.
Now this is over. Just like Netflix people will go up in arms against ads and then still get Free2Play games showing ads and normalize that practice.
I have removed alot of advertising on tv by self hosting my dvd/br content. Best decision i had in a while, its like netflix but content is there forever and always accessible from anywhere in the world (if my upload can keep up). Fair amount of work but no subscription chargers
and finally, ads inside your mind
Then this one should give you nightmares: https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/YJg02ivYzSs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I don’t know, I have removed close to 80% of ads in my life. None on my pc, none on my phone, none when I listen to music, none when I play games. Adblocking, Linux and a dash of the old yarr matey worked like a charm
I share your sadness, but also avoid games that do this. There are many many games out there that aren’t doing this and never would. Reward those developers with your time and money.
What are you talking about? There’s already ads everywhere and there has been since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
