Stealing from the consumer
Skunk@jlai.lu 6 days ago
80$ is a steal, yeah right…
(Screenshot from isthereanydeal just for simplicity, avoid grey market when possible)
altima_neo@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
vithigar@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
isthereanydeal isn’t grey market and only shows prices from resellers that operate “above board”.
You can find "way* cheaper than the prices listed there if you’re willing to go grey market.
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
There is an argument to be made that Expedition 33 was essentially created by a studio with 30 people (though once you add everyone that worked on it the credits do balloon to over 400) with a rather small budget, and meanwhile companies like Rockstar, Sony and Activision have thousands working for years and spending hundreds of millions creating games like GTA 6, CoD and Concord, so naturally they should be a lot more expensive to buy too.
They just shouldn’t be surprised if people don’t buy all the $500 Waguy steak on offer and are perfectly happy with way cheaper options.
dormedas@lemmy.dormedas.com 6 days ago
Nobody rightfully complains when Lamborghini sells their luxury car for hundreds of thousands. Gamers have been conditioned for far too long that indie games cost less than 60 and everything else costs 60. This was the fault of the industry to be sure, but it’s clear the barrier is being broken by necessity and expensive-to-make games are going to climb the price ladder and prices for games overall will stratify like many other markets.
Interestingly, that’s all Shuhei is saying here. Pay for the games you think are worth it. Games still provide a significant amount of value for their cost, even at higher price points. This is obviously true as we’ve had a decade of base game $60 and ultimate edition $90-100 with people purchasing ultimate editions and such.
Mondez@lemdro.id 4 days ago
Are you suggesting that AAA games are such premium, high quality products they should only be experienced by a few wealthy individuals who can afford the budget to buy them? Because that is what your analogy suggests.
dormedas@lemmy.dormedas.com 4 days ago
That is what my analogy suggests and I suppose how you define wealthy matters, but that’s not strictly what I mean. I just mean prices are starting to striate.
AAA game devs are spending more on games every year and then suddenly finding out their market isn’t as wide as they hoped. High upfront cost + low demand sounds like a luxury product then, no? In the before times, they would release for $60 and squeeze hard for money. They can still do that, but now - since the price dam has broken - they can release for $80-100 and get more cash per super fan and then drop price aggressively to catch others who balked at the initial price.
I’ll be clear that the problem is the AAA industry spending too much on games when they don’t need to.
Skunk@jlai.lu 6 days ago
Over 400 seems a bit high to me but the size vs cost argument remains. Those external voice actors, animators, QA testers etc were all paid. Kepler Interactive even gave them money to have known actors for VA (they probably aren’t cheap).
So that’s very probably a several million budget (rumored to be between 5 and 25 mil according to non reliable source, thanks to Kepler and the early Gamepass contract).
Ok that’s not a 500 million budget, rather a 50 mil one (to be very large), but it’s definitely not a 500k budget.
And yet they sell it 45$.
Anyway, it just prove that you can build a Waguy steak alternative for cheaper while keeping the taste.
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
“412 people (403 professional roles, 9 thanks) with 502 credits.” www.mobygames.com/game/241065/…/windows/?autoplat…
As for those compared budgets, CoD Black Ops Cold War cost $700 million and GTA 6 has already surpassed a billion.
kurcatovium@lemm.ee 6 days ago
It’s really absurd where budget of those games went to… Big corpo gaming is wasteful as fuck.
Skunk@jlai.lu 6 days ago
Ah thanks for the link! I was looking for that information but could not find it.