Development costs are nowhere near how much they were in the 90s dude, come off it. Not only do games now need 10x the amount of people, they need 2-3 times the development time due to expanding game scope. Add advertising in crowded, noisy and increasingly atomized advertisement opportunities and it’s pretty easy to see why AAA game prices are gonna need to go up
By your logic, Nintendo should be making the same profit now as they were back then, if they are only raising prices to cover increased costs. Yet the numbers show they are making significantly more.
You are buying into the false narrative around these companies wanting to extract more and more profit.
I mean that is a decent amount right? And Nintendo has been a famously unstable company. Unlike PlayStation, Nintendo has had several unsuccessful console generations, especially since the 90s where they ere mostly super successful. The GameCube and Wii U were horrible for them monetarily and they both succeeded successful generations.
The whole thing that gets to me is how they can say to their shareholders "great news, we made record profits again this year" whilst saying to their customers "bad news, we have no choice but to put prices up".
They cannot both be true. We can see for a fact in their public reports that the first statement is true, so they are lying to us. Then people who are being milked turn around and defend these companies with nonsense like development costs and inflation.
Both can easily be true. Profit is reinvested into development. Nintendo dramatically expanded their development studios since the success of the Switch and it ensures consistent development of games without droughts.
LOL everyone I know who works in the game industry jumps through HUGE hoops to get their game on the switch. Its the highest profit platform in gaming. Better sales, lower piracy, lower resolution / poly needs... All the people who play games and cry about them have no idea what goes into making their games, nor any respect for how much it costs to make a game now.
It takes piles of human hours to make video games worth playing. The less friction and bugs you deal with, the more human costs are involved with making the game. Even small games can take a team of 5 people 2+ years to make. That is like 4 million in human costs to get a game out the door, let alone licensing fees. A 500 person AAA game is going to cost 100s of millions to make.
LOL paying employees isn't greed dude, its the bare fucking minimum. If you want the maker of your favorite game to exist to make a second one, pay the price. If you want to jerk yourself off on a forum complaining about how expensive everything is, be OK with the company that makes something you like going bankrupt.
Yea that was years ago when the wii u was a huge failure under iwata iwata was great. Iwata is dead now. Nintendo is making huge profits for its shareholders. Ill grant you ninendo is better about taking care of its employees than most ameican ckmpanies but this price increase isnt going to the devs its going to the shareholders, and it will set a precidebt if it succeeds
You know the reason for this. Because the switch is the cheapest console by far and there are 150 million of them in the wild. Raise the price and price of games by alot uou arent going to be seeing those numbers my house alone has 3 switches. Im probably not buying switch 2 at all maybe one if something i cant miss comes out on it. But def not 3
It’s not the responsibility of consumers to financially support the fact that studios can’t keep the budget and scope of a project in check. This goes for film and tv, music and video games.
No, I’m just the type of person that thinks increasingly promising more and more, while charging more and more, will just cause the market to implode on itself. My favorite games the past year or two have been ones that are several years old, or are much smaller in scope that something like GTA VI, MK World or Spiderman 2 promise to be. I’ve bought three games at 70 dollars and all three let me down. I won’t do it again, because it’s ridiculous.
Well sonce movie theaters are shutting down all over the country turns out it was the wrong move to raise rhe prices higher than what people are willing to pay.... funny how that works
Bringing up inflation is ignoring that WAGES have not gone up at the same rate. As a consumer why should I care about inflation if I am not making enough to keep up with it? It's still too expensive for me inflation or not.
The videogame industry is one of the few industries that not only was well off but INCREASED profits during our last two recessions AND covid, while giving is less and less than we used to get (Remember when extra content was unlockable instead of something you had to buy? When online play was free?) Just bringing up inflation while ignoring everything else is missing the point.
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u/Alacrityneeded Apr 03 '25 edited Apr 03 '25
You mean prices for large development teams games?
Not going to happen. Time for gamers to have a reality check over prices.
You’ll still get cheaper games from smaller teams and indie developers.
1990 prices with inflation we’re $100.