this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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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.
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.