https://ma.fellr.net/@fell/111504811722666890
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You won't like hearing this, but video games must become more expensive. When I was little, my dad got me a PlayStation 2 for christmas, but without any games. My mum was very generous and took me out to pick two games for it. They were 60€ each. Nowadays you would call those full-price games. But now, 20 years later, a full-price game is still about 60€. If you correct that for inflation, it should really be 86€ now. And that's not even covering the fact that games have massively increased in visual fidelity, which is much more expensive to produce. If you don't want games to be littered with microtransactions or ads, then you have to accept that a regular video game must be at least 90€. (98 USD, 77 GBP, 149 AUD, 134 CAD) #Gaming #GameDev #GameDevelopment #Steam #Inflation #Economy #PlayStation
Can't wait to buy the next installment of insert sports game here/call of duty for 100 USD base, 200 for the dlc, maybe even 300 for the ultimate deluxe extreme version.
Okay let’s do some back of the napkin math
($60/game - Cost of distributing physical products) * not that many sales = Not that much money.
$60/game * many many sales with no distribution cost = Much more money
Digital sales and a much larger market mean game prices should’ve gone down not up. If a company is making a profit, even if it’s just one lonely dollar per year, they do not need to raise prices. And game company profits have been going up over time.
Edit:
In their first year of sales, GTA 3 sold 4 million copies, and GTA 5 sold 45 million. If we adjust for both inflation and increased sales to make the same amount of money, GTA 5 should have sold for $6.60 a copy.
Also piracy. For years they were like "piracy is killing the games, if only it disappeared, we would lower the prices". Well it was what actually happened in Poland, piracy declined greatly, in the response game distributors risen prices to full euro level (they were much cheaper before) and drastically cut down full polish localisation of games, which were surprisingly common in the late 90's/early 2000's.
It’s always been a bullshit claim and had cause and effect blatantly backwards. If you want to reduce the rates of piracy in a location where it’s common, you lower prices. High prices drive high piracy, not the other way around.
Exactly, it's on the rise again. But what's more worrying rather than games is that polish torrent scene was basically entirely obliterated and book piracy don't want to get back up (maybe it will considering book prices are currently galloping like crazy).
But their profit could have been 6 million dollars according to their data! Are you saying you are ok with these companies losing 6 billion in lost profits?? You really think it's morally acceptable stealing 6 trillion dollars from them with your greedy consumer practices?!
I genuinely believe if we wanted to only change one thing about capitalism and make it function better it would be to hide how much profit a company makes from itself.
The only information they should have about profits is “yes” or “no”. Because if you’re making one cent in profit that means your business is a success and you shouldn’t be chasing more.
That part is just not true under capitalism. You always have to make more profit than last year.
But yeah it is true that they absolutely have been making plenty more money than they did in the PS2 days.
I’ll be honest I still haven’t seen an explanation even under capitalism on why that has to be true outside of rich people throwing temper tantrums when number no go up. I see no reason why you couldn’t run an “ethical capitalism” where high profits are forbidden. There’s no law of economics that says if you make a consistent amount of profit year over year your head spontaneously explodes.
Obviously this would only be marginally less shitty than the system we live under now, I’m not saying this is the goal or anything, but I see no reason why we couldn’t do “capitalism but let’s make sure we can keep the lights on”
Because company valuations--and thus stock prices--are based on totally imaginary bullshit like "investor confidence," which is linked to "growth potential." If you as an investor don't think that a company is going to grow (and thus do better and better) year after year, you'll take your money elsewhere to find a place where you can get a bigger return (i.e. somewhere that convinces you that they'll make an even bigger profit next year). This is why, for instance, stock prices for companies tend to fall when it's revealed that they "only" had a 1% increase in profit from the year before, even if that profit was in the tens of billions of dollars: seeing a small growth number undermines "investor confidence" that their money will continue compounding toward infinity year after year. The real value of the profit--how many billions of dollars in profit the company raked in that year--actually doesn't matter that much to the price; it's all about how much more you expect to make in the future compared to right now. This is a big part of why totally unprofitable companies (e.g. Uber, Tesla) have sky-high stock prices: it's all aspirational vibes about what might happen sometime in the future. Unbounded growth is one of the nonsensical cornerstones of capitalism.
Is that not just “rich people throwing temper tantrums”?
Yes, and the candy that they're rolling around on the ground screaming for is your healthcare.