Games Industry (The Absolute State Of)

Well, that's an argument for regulating the games industry because of a few people's addictive nature, but then why stop there? Many people have a tendency to spend silly amounts of money to satisfy some niche interest which manifests itself as borderline or outright obsession. See collectors of almost anything, audiophiles, 99% of people who attend Comic Con, etc. The list is endless.

What exactly has this got to do with anything? People are stupid and spend money on stupid shit all the time. The value and merit of that is in the eye of the beholder.

Are we, what, banning games now because some people grind achievements?

I mean this is semantics, but of course you're killing time.

No I didn't say that. I said a new game is worth £60. and never said you were wrong about that. whatever

To me, "passing time" is a different concept from "killing time" - the latter has pejorative connotations that the former doesn't.

I play games/watch rugby/listen to music/etc. to pass time (they're my pastimes!).

If I had 20 minutes before I needed to set off for an appointment, I might kill that time by washing the dishes.

It's all semantics.

Indeed.

The point I was making, before the little fun diversion to semantics town, was that I only have some much time to dedicate to 50 - 100 hour gaming experiences in my life, and I think that's probably true of most people. I think the industry would be healthier if there were fewer, shorter games, and the mega AAAA+++ releases were once a year or so, rather than every few weeks or months which it feels like at the moment.

I think the reason we're seeing massive redundancies and closures is because the larger publishers complete forgot that demand is finite. There's only so much money to be made.

(See also the state of streaming platforms. Another goldrush where everybody thought there were an infinite number of eyeballs that could watch multiple platforms simultaneously. Iirc it's only netflix and very recently Disney that aren't losing money hand over fist doing this)

The reason to compare it other industries is because they're competing for the same disposable income from consumers, and there are different approaches that each industry employs to maximise this. The multiple competing sources of things to spend you're money on is a recognised problem in the movie and music industry, which evolved at a time where this wasn't a problem.

Ofc it's reductionist to reduce things to one metric. I called it reductionist myself when I started going on about eh £/hr thing. Being reductionist isn't *wrong*. There are other factors.

Andy McNabb being shit is an opinion. Other people seem to like reading it. Their money is just as good as anybody else's. It's snobbery to deny that. There is also money to be made by indulging people's snobbery of course. Artistic merit is exploited for marketing value too.

If execs and multinationals are making lots of money I really don't care. So what? Am I not entertained? Are people being rewarded for their efforts?

Getting all uppity about cultural value is very ironic on a gaming forum. Us gamers have been looked down on since we've existed.

If you don't care about multinationals, why are you so readily defending a price increase and their profits? As a consumer, you should want the cheapest possible sustainable product

The book itself isn't the issue, it's the presentation. That's the issue with games- you can have a great game that's devalued through publisher monetisation. The product and experience is made worse due to how it's sold to you and that package is sold at a premium. You're paying more for a worse product

If they want to sell me a £70 game with no MTX, DLC, padding, complete and without bugs, OK. Set that as the top end of the scale. Now lower the cost for each addition element of monetisation added in and for any bugs. They don't do that though. It's just a blanket price increase because they felt like it. Nothing to do with value

I agree, would of enjoyed AC odyssey more if it didn't make you grind XP to do the next story mission. Shillup mentioned in his review for AC:V, the game would of been better if it was this 30/35 hour game. Same with Like a dragon RPG games, both games had level grinding at points which soured the experience, didn't want to grind levels because some arsehat wanted the game to be 60 to 80 hours

It does seem like it though. They're the ones setting an arbitrary price and you're saying it's great value. It's up to them to offer something of value. If the cost is too high, they should lower the cost of production. You can get great games that offer plenty of entertainment that cost far less to make and aren't as expensive to buy. It's publishers pushing graphics and production values up. It's not something we should be paying for

It terms of value, in my opinion, video games have got much worse over time. You get far less quality for your money and they use all manner of psychological practices to hook people and get them spending more. It's kind of gross and antagonistic. I'm not going to happily hand over £70 graciously. I love video games and appreciate game development and creativity. The publishing side of it is not that

With the addition of RPG levels, it was only then the AC games got grindy. AC:origins was ok-ish iirc but each game got worse and i refuse to play Valhalla and any future ones with their RPG grindy shite

Just my two cents then I'll probably drop out: I feel like Chopsen's point points to a wider problem of everything, including forms of entertainment, climbing up in price, so games are looking just as good if not better than they used to be when it comes to entertainment value for money, compared to other things you can do.

In a vacuum, many games do pack in more content (YMMV on if you enjoy that content obviously), higher technical quality, better soundtrack/graphics etc to justify the increase in price... However, there's also cases of games that used to sell for 40-50 quid a few years ago and now go for 50-60 or even 70, while being similar in content volume/quality even while factoring in hardware advancements... And IMO that is an issue regardless of whether people are still comfortable paying that price or not.

Tl;dr I think games creeping up in price is also a symptom of a general pricing inflation and not just about greedy companies wanting more bucks for the same effort. (and also that some games do try to keep the bang-for-your-buck ratio, as it were, the same even with the increasing prices)

For context if a game cost £35 back in 1998 (if anyone remembers n64 prices then you're in for a shock), adjusted for inflation that's £77 now. www.in2013dollars.com/uk/inflation/1998?amount=35

The economics don't work quite the same way on the micro level of games. As demand and production costs haven't all got up linearly in the same way as inflation. But anything that was £60 a few years ago considering we went through a year of 11-12% inflation plus the rest of it basically just is £70 now. Well unless you want to just freeze all the developer's salaries I guess.

And who the fuck pays for special editions or stupid cosmetic DLC etc? It's all worthless shit, so don't buy it. Don't factor it in to the standard price of gaming in 2024. It's for whales only.

Gaming has a much bigger market now. I think I read that video games is the largest entertainment industry currently, and again, we aren't just talking about a single upfront cost anymore

And ultimately, publishers are making more money than ever