Soystation 5 General

[Guest]

Those chink emulation handhelds can probably do Piss1 better than a Vita, and of course with emulator perks a Vita wouldnt have and no hacking involved. Wait a couple years and if the world dosen't go to hell we can probably have one with proper PissPee dimensions and those games running well.
AFAIK the Vita can't even do SNES emulation, so in what I'd consider a key area it isnt any better than the PSP.

[Poonoo]

The part that burns my ass is they want $70 for a 10-hour game. Maybe only six. With microtransactions and always-online drm and all that bullshit. And they know. THEY KNOW... That the game will be $5 on a steam sale inside two years. They already know their game's value. I'd say that value is somewhere between $40 and $20 (on day one, depreciating over time of course) depending on the game.

The dirty secret of the AAA games industry is that for the past two decades it has been run by morons who have had other people hide how shit their decisions have been. Let's go all the way back to the cartridge days.

Back then, Nintendo would charge a flat rate of $20 a cartridge. Because of this, the only price you could set for games was $60 since the retailer needed their cut and you needed to make some money too, and when you factor in shit like shipping you really couldn't go much lower unless you made bootleg cartridges that weren't official.

Even then though, the cost of manufacturing those cartridges was way higher than a disc which is a grand total of fuck all. Here's the thing though, did the games industry drop it's prices after CDs became standard since the cost of production plummeted? Fuck no, the slimy cunts had a higher profit margin and gouged the consumer big time, especially the console manufacturers who still charged the $20 flat rate instead of a percentage. Don't let any game journo shill cunt lecture you on how "games used to be cheaper back then, you fucking entitled gamer" when the industry was in fact fucking you over big time back then.

Now post 90s the Fair Play campaign happened where they pointed out that games cost too damn much. Even the damn devs were saying in 2002 that the industry was putting all of it's eggs in one basket and one flop could end your studio.

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Even Guru Larry's best friend Peter Molyneux was sounding the alarm and no one listened.

And a few years later they would be proven right when studios like Free Radical and Factor 5 shutting down after only one flop (Haze and Lair respectively) along with others I can't remember off the top of my head. Around this time period AAA hype bullshit was in full swing and a lot of those old devs from the 80s and 90s that came back recently were lost to the industry because of all this high risk bullshit.

So what in the ever loving fuck kept them all afloat during this time period if Fair Play proved people were not willing to pay that much for games if they still sold well? Trade ins. Mom and Pop stores started to die out during this boom period in the industry as Gamestop took over due to their aggressive used games push. Gamestop made most of their money off of used games and trade ins drastically reduced the price of games for people who couldn't afford the full retail price. No way in hell could I afford to pay 100 aussie dollarydoos for a game back then, but through waiting until January or June to buy games and trading in games I could afford them as a teen. The only way young teens and college kids could afford games was to trade in their old ones to reduce the price.

Gamestop offset the high price of games with trade ins which would effectively drop the price of them down to what they were worth. The industry was charging way too much for games and would have crashed if Gamestop, despite being a shitty and dodgy company, and others like it didn't push used games to keep the bubble going. Remember what I said about how the industry has "had other people hide how shit their decisions have been"? This is one example.

And how did the industry react to used games? They acted like it was piracy. The evil Gamestop (ok, they actually are evil) was robbing then of precious sales in their eyes, when in reality the only way games retail could have stuck around this long is because of used games offsetting the fuck all money retailers would make off of games. And those used games that were traded in were the only reason game launches made so much damn money, no where near as many people would have bought them if they had to pay full price.

Let's move on to the 2010s. PC gaming in the previous decade was declared dead and a haven of evil pirates, but Lord Gaben proved all the retards in the industry wrong and is now worth $4 billion. The industry was ready to move onto digital distribution but like the greedy idiots they are wanted to charge the full price for games with no way to get them cheaper like you could before with trade ins. Along with them not having to give retailers a cut with zero shipping costs they were going to increase their profit margins again and try to gouge the consumers more. This would have been a fucking disaster as they would have realised fuck all people were going to pay full price. Again, the industry "had other people hide how shit their decisions have been".

Gabe Newell on the other hand used Steam to experiment entirely with game prices with insane discounts to race to the bottom to see how cheap was too cheap. And eventually when everyone except NEETs bought more games than they had time to play with Steam libraries full of games they have only played for 10 minutes if at all, the prices of games went up a bit and the discounts are rarely over 60%. It's at the $20-$40 range Tictac mentioned for non-AAA games which is about right. Over the past 2 years or so I have finished pretty much everything I have bought compared to over 5 years ago where I would have a ton of excess games and I know many others feel the same. Now the PS Store and others do deep discounts they would have never done without Steam forcing their hand.

Despite Gabe Newell factually proving with what was a 10 year study on game prices that AAA was charging too fucking much, the industry is continuing with it's high prices and feeling the need to justify an increase. The reality isn't that they weren't keeping up with inflation, the problem is that they were charging way too much back then and the industry has only grown with cheaper games. Look at mobile gaming, the cost is low as fuck and they make way more money than AAA, with AAA trying to mimic their business model in their games to keep the bubble going.

AAA continues to learn absolutely nothing and has grown arrogant since their mistakes have been covered up by other people, but I can't see them getting out of this. Attach rates for the PS4 and Xbone were pure fucking shit, and instead of lowering the price of games and making more of them to offset the risk of making new IPs they doubled down and made LESS games but filled them with microtransactions to increase profit margins on "sure thing" franchises. They are utterly committed to a shit business model that was proven to be wrong in the 2010s with indie publishers like Devolver Digital becoming a thing and the middle market becoming a thing because of crowdfunding lately, with genres that were declared dead by AAA making comebacks since the cost of development is down if you don't have bloat.

The training wheels are off and AAA is about to fuck themselves over charging more for games during a fucking pandemic which has left many people unemployed with less money. The economic effects will be felt for years, but PC gaming will continue to rise since Gabe and others are actually fucking competent.

[Dehbashi]

The only thing I disagree with is I could have sworn when PlayStation came along in the 90s that game prices did drop to below $50 then went back up the next generation but I agree with the rest. I will actually add to the old days that prices were over the place then. Some games were even higher than 60. Especially games on the SNES with custom chips in them.

The big problem was always inefficiency in the gaming industry. They always had bloated budgets which made them act the way they did. It's even worse than Hollywood.

[da PAC Nigguh]

A few SNES games were $70. I also recall most PSX games being $40.

[Poonoo]

The only thing I disagree with is I could have sworn when PlayStation came along in the 90s that game prices did drop to below $50 then went back up the next generation but I agree with the rest. I will actually add to the old days that prices were over the place then. Some games were even higher than 60. Especially games on the SNES with custom chips in them.

The big problem was always inefficiency in the gaming industry. They always had bloated budgets which made them act the way they did. It's even worse than Hollywood.

Since I was a kid I barely remember prices so I may be way off base, especially since like a lot of people the reason my family got the PS1 was because you could mod chip the thing and get games a fraction of the cost off a guy who would make copies and sell them.

The issue with games was that with every generation they could do more and felt like because they could that they had to do it. Bigger and better was the motto for a while which naturally lead to bloat by the time the PS3 was around. Every damn game was a huge spectacle with big expensive flashy shit everywhere. They had reached the point where technology wasn't holding then back anymore, simply budgets, but because the way to do things for decades was always to make things more grand with more tech that they never broke the habit. Flashy graphics meant way more back then too and sold games, technical graphics don't impress people as much as they did in the 90s and 2000s because it was all new.

In 2009 the industry should have restructured and cut out the bloat since it was the perfect time to downsize without backlash, but the idiots running it just kept doing what they always did.

[mad bum]

A few SNES games were $70. I also recall most PSX games being $40.

I remember being young and going to toys r us and most games being different prices. I remember wanting phantasy star 4 but it was $100 back then.

[rabidtictac]

When I was a kid, all GBA games were $40. That price model should have stayed where it was. $40 for a new game is fine tbh. It's on the upper end of what I consider acceptable, but it's not too bad. You could buy poggermans or castlevania or some shit and get a good 100+ hours.

With the proliferation of engines and asset reuse in current maymay year, games should have gotten cheaper, not more expensive. Game pricing bloat is a result of both greed and spiraling AAA development costs from chasing Hollywood production values. Games don't need to be movies.

The most popular and long-lasting games tend to be primarily gameplay-focused anyway. Either grindfests, lootfests or multiplayer vs.

[jpakke]

Where I live, console games would cost lot more than computer games, SNES games cost like 400-600 finnish marks if I remember right, and PSX games cost anything between 300-450 finnish marks, but computer games cost much less, something like 150-300 finnish marks, depending on game and store. Most computer (and later PC games) cost between 150-200+ marks, I rarely saw computer/PC games cost more than 250 marks.

In euros those prices are between 66-100 euros, 50-75 euros and 30-66 euros. With inflation, games were probably worth more back then than now.

It's interesting how gaming markets were shaped differently in different places, in the USA, consoles have always been huge thing, but here in Finland, it was computers which were bigger in the 80s and early-mid 90s, it wasn't till really the original playstation which became the huge thing. Sure NES and SNES were popular, but in the 80s, it was C64 which ruled. I recently read a book about C64 in finland, and the finnish distributor said that they sold over 200,000 units of C64 through its lifetime, and probably another 50,000 - 100,000 units from the unofficial distributors. A lot of those owners then moved to either Amiga or to the PC, or eventually from Amiga to PC. I remember when I was in school in the late 80s and early 90s, there was at least a few families in every grade who had C64, even in the small village where I grew up.

The most popular finnish gaming magazine didn't even cover console games up till PS2 hit the market, and before that they had parallel magazine for playstation for a few years before they were joined.

I remember reading a few bong computer mags back in the 90s, and the reviewers were fucking retarded, compared to our magazine, who had people specialized in different genres. I remember reading review from bong mag of some strategy game, and they were bitching how it's fucking boring game because it doesn't have any action in it. Bongs have always been the worst.

[Kugelfisch]

Games haven't gotten more expensive to make. It's all fucking bloat and marketing.
Hardly any company makes their own engine and those that have one usually use it forwell over a decade for fucking everything.
In terms of cost itself, how is that even relevant? Anything EA makes costs them fuck all comparatively. All those millions for the next massive AAA title? Paid like pocket change from what FIFA makes in micro transactions that year.

Physical production costs less and less and the growing digital distribution is almost free with massive profit margins.
Marketing? Pay Markyplier or whoever a few grand and you have millions of kids seeing your game and actually pay attention. No commercial gets that effective reach and it's not even pocket change. Not even lint!

All the manpower required? They own loads of studios. You've got the fuckers anyway and they hardly need to be qualified any more.
Film studios would murder for the profit margins the big fuckers have.

I'd say that 40 Euros is about the maximum a new game should cost. Half that for a year old game or indie titles. I only ever pay full price for truly outstanding games and there's been plenty little in that regard lately. Something like a MonHun that I know I'll get hundreds of hours out of would be something like that.

[Guest]

How did Sony make four consoles in a row and none of them have games?