It was never justifiable. I have never bought a single game over 60€, and I never will.
Is £70 becoming harder to justify? The rise of cheaper blockbuster games
Submitted 7 hours ago by Valnao@sh.itjust.works to games@lemmy.world
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg1nwwv1xyo
Comments
arcine@jlai.lu 31 minutes ago
Stern@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I’ve got 150 games in my backlog. I am happy to wait a year or longer until a hundred dollar buggy piece of shit game becomes a polished, discounted 25 dollar game.
Drasglaf@sopuli.xyz 5 hours ago
Or at least a discounted buggy piece of shit game that might be worth trying, they don’t fix most of those nowadays. Although sailing the high seas would probably the best course of action for such games.
rushmonke@ttrpg.network 1 hour ago
Products are priced according to what people are willing to pay, not what it costs to bring to market.
GreenBeanMachine@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
I can’t remember the last time I bought a game more expensive than $20. If you price it higher, I will just pirate it.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Pricing a game over $20 is hardly greed. If every game was $20, it would be extremely hard for most of them to break even.
Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 6 hours ago
Meanwhile speculation grew from a 2025 report by gaming industry advisory company Epyllion that the next Grand Theft Auto will be the first game to be priced at $100, paving the way for others to either follow suit or at least contemplate a price hike.
I guess I have to wait a few years till it gets down to 30€ or so. That’s manageable.
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
They’ve monetized GTAV so thoroughly via Online that in the past they’ve given the game (including single player) for free because they still made a profit off of it.
Charging $100 for a sequel they’ll definitely monetize even worse is the epitome of greed.
I_Jedi@lemmy.today 6 hours ago
I fully expect gacha mechanics in the sequel.
Pull for Niko Bellic! Only available for one month! 0.1% drop rate, but pity triggers at 150 pulls!
Hapankaali@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
$100 today is about $40 in 1990. In those days games were made by a handful of people or even a single individual in one of two years of development. Chris Sawyer started work on the 1994 classic Transport Tycoon in 1992 and wrote the entire codebase in x86 Assembly. The price isn’t really that crazy considering the comparatively massive undertaking that is GTA6 development.
Having said that, it’s rare nowadays for any AAA game to release anywhere near its best state, so it tends to be worth it to wait even if money isn’t the concern.
otacon239@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I get one full priced game maybe once every two or three years. Most of the time, Steam sales are my friend.
58008@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
My parents paid about that much for a SNES copy of Earthworm Jim back in the mid-90s. It was disgusting then and it’s disgusting now, despite the fact that, adjusted for inflation, that would be £140 today. I mean I don’t feel like we’re getting a 50% discount when a game costs 70 fuckin’ quid nowadays.
There’s really no reason to spend that anyway, not on PC at least. IsThereAnyDeal.com and the slightly questionable loaded.com (formerly cdkeys.com) give decent discounts even on day one (and Steam itself will eventually have it on sale, of course). Loaded isn’t like G2A, which is a credit card thief’s wonderland. It’s more like when your uncle Jim crosses the border with 40 cartons of cigarettes secreted in the wheel wells of his truck because they cost 400% less over there. I can live with that level of mischief when it comes to AAA games that take the absolute piss with their prices and their hostage DLCs. EA, Ubisoft and Rockstar have not caused me a millisecond of lost sleep when I get their games for £3 six months after release from a code that was originally bundled with a new GPU. With how extremely easy it is to pirate games (something I haven’t done in nearly 20 years), I don’t feel like those larger AAA companies are meeting us half way, to say the fucking least.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 6 hours ago
I never justified it. Cheaper indie games have always been here.
NihilsineNefas@slrpnk.net 4 hours ago
I will admit, I’ve only ever paid that amount for three games ever. Voices of the Void, EOD Tarkov and the Founders edition of Soulframe, and the only reason I did that was to support the devs.
Making $100 a baseline cost for a brand new game, where the AAA companies have decided “oh you can do patches to fix bugs in the first couple of weeks without losing too much money.” Is the standard (which came first, the chicken or the egg?) is absolutely ludicrous. I remember when Gran Turismo 4 was an expensive game because it was 40. But that worked right out of the box; you pay for it, put the CD in and bam. Fully working game. That you own. Forever.
hydrashok@sh.itjust.works 26 minutes ago
Only game I’m immediately paying full price for is HL3. Everything else gets added to a Steam wishlist, where it sits until the price drops enough. For example, the oldest game addition on my wishlist was added in July 2012.
I don’t buy anything that costs more than $5. Spending more than $10 is exceedingly rare. If that game never drops that far, so be it. I’ve got plenty of other games to play or revisit in the meantime.