this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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people are right to be upset their hobby is pricing them out. (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 days ago by NoahFuel@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net
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"Mario 64 was 60 dollars in 1995 meaning that it would be about 100 dollars today"

Pay has NOT kept up with inflation. People are poorer.

Folk need to stop pretending like people have as much money as they did in the 90s. Rent costs, house prices are astronomical.

Xbox's business is still impacted today by outpricing people with their initial Xbox One reveal pricing a decade ago.

Nintendo Treehouse comments are absolutely packed with people complaining about prices.

Again, I'm vastly aware that game budgets, inflation etc have increased!

but Pay has NOT increased accordingly. I don't know the solution, but that's the reality.

And I make these points as someone who is lucky enough to earn well enough to just buy them regardless. Most aren't as fortunate.

Game bubbles regularly disregard the poor, unfortunately, as the industry has an above-average number of middle-class background workers.

Price increases combined with physical knock effectively prices the poor out of legally gaming (Buying directly from them/the digital store)

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[–] FortifiedAttack@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Not really speaking about the consumers but it has a big impact on Indie developers, and I care about those too.

[–] KoboldKomrade@hexbear.net 7 points 2 days ago

A partly counter, many devs wouldn't have had a chance at reaching "this is my career now" without steam either. Games like Terraria, stardew, gmod, all would not have sold nearly as well without steam.

As a kid/teen, my dad was much more willing to buy from the same service (steam, amazon, fuckin' runescape, whatever) then let me put his cc into minecraft(.)net. My friend grabbed nubby's number factory because he knows he can throw 2 hours into it and get a refund easily (and is definitely keeping it). Even now, I'm much more willing to buy from steam/itch then go to the devs directly, because then its all in one place that I can see. (Vintagestory is a decent example, having to go grab the updates manually, because they had to recreate a distribution system, was annoying.)

Definitely not saying 30% is fair, but 70% of $1,000,000 is better then 90% of $1,000, or $10,000, or $100,000. Taking the hit is worth it for most devs, especially if they can kick start their development credibility. Ultimately, as someone who wants to make some games, the biggest hurdle isn't taking the 30% hit on future sales, its justifying "investing" my current savings on a project that might not make it to steam, or itch, or my friends at all.

The system sucks, it especially sucks when the "solution" is downloading yet another piece of software and supporting the fortnite factory.

[–] mamotromico@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 day ago

Honestly, every indie dev I see speak on the matter said that the 30% is easily worth it for how much benefits the steam ecosystem offers. Beyond just the storefront (which is better than average on discoverability), you also have systems to easily set regional pricing, APIs for multiplayer integration, friends, invites, achievements, etc.

Of course it would be better if it was lower, but 30% is not unreasonable for how much steams facilitates your work.

[–] Future_Honkey@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago

Fair enough my friend :D