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Comment on Is Hollow Knight Silksong's 'cheap' price a problem for other indie games? Devs and publishers weigh up its impact | Eurogamer

savvywolf@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

I think at a certain point we need to accept that this isn’t sustainable.

And by “this” I mean money flowing directly into the pockets of the rich. People would very much hedge £30 on a game if they didn’t need to budget so much of that money to pay off megacorps. And devs could easily live of £20 per sale if they didn’t need to pay part of their profits to those megacorps.

Sorry for going all Redditlemmy “grr capitalism”, but that’s the issue here and all this Silksong “drama” is just a smokescreen.

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theangriestbird@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I think you got the most level-headed take here. It really is about capitalism and the fact that gaming is now a mature market, which means it is now sufficiently saturated in the stink of capitalism and megacorps, just like other media industries. In a world where we weren’t all being squeezed from every direction, games would probably cost less and Silksong’s price wouldn’t seem like an outlier.

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GammaGames@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
You’re 100% right, but it’s also a problem of devs underpricing themselves. They’ll work for 2 years on a game and then set its regular price at $5, which actually limits its reach (shoppers see the price and skip over it, thinking it’s low quality) and helps make a race to the bottom that’s already destroyed the mobile market.

Silksong isn’t going to upend the market, the headline is silly, and it’s not underpriced since they were going to sell millions upon millions of copies anyway. But the wider discussion of pricing is important since lots of developers don’t seem to understand the larger picture.

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