Gaming News

marcbrophy

I'd love to know how $60 and $70 digital, translates into €70 and €80!
Gowls!!

johnny_ultimate

I know games are expensive, but it is getting to the point where something has to give in terms of pricing. If an extra ten quid is what is needed to ensure developers have that extra bit of extra time and money to develop games without crunch, that might have to happen? AAA games are just growing more and more complex and time-consuming to make. Obviously digital and physical games should be priced appropriately, though - getting to that point slowly but surely. If it’s just publishers being greedy and adding an extra tenner that’s completely different, but mental in some ways that game prices haven’t really budged in decades while budgets have skyrocketed.

BUT I also think we need to get to a point in that same space where not everything has to be a big €60-70 thing either. After FF7 Remake and TLOU2 I’m firmly on the camp of thinking big-name developers need to step back from the big, sprawling, expansive AAA releases sometimes and focus on smaller, more focused projects that don’t require such huge amounts of time. Things like Lost Legacy or Miles Morales are a good start IMO, and would be keen to see more developers try smaller projects then spend years and years on massive 30-40 hour games. Would be refreshing to see more €40 games with a focus on quality over quantity.

Thecageyone

I guess it's gaming related news, for anyone who's a regular on Twitch, the streamer Byron Bernstein - known as Reckful passed away earlier today, anyone who was a regular WOW/HS [he also did a stint in the IRL section on twitch] stream viewer over the years would know of him. He was just 31. I'm not going to speculate, but a quick google suggests he took his own life sadly.

Mr Crispy

Thecageyone wrote: »

I guess it's gaming related news, for anyone who's a regular on Twitch, the streamer Byron Bernstein - known as Reckful passed away earlier today, anyone who was a regular WOW/HS [he also did a sting in the IRL section on twitch] stream viewer over the years would know of him. He was just 31.

Sounds like he took his own life sadly.

super_furry

It always goes back to Street Fighter 2 Turbo on the SNES for me. I paid £79.99 which is well over €120 in today's money and didn't feel ripped off. The price of games hasn't kept pace with the price of inflation and all the whole development costs have been growing and growing.

Mr Crispy

super_furry wrote: »

It always goes back to Street Fighter 2 Turbo on the SNES for me. I paid £79.99 which is well over €120 in today's money and didn't feel ripped off. The price of games hasn't kept pace with the price of inflation and all the whole development costs have been growing and growing.

Jaysus, yeah. I paid £70 for the original SF2 on SNES in Virgin Megastore on Aston Quay. It came in a tin box for some reason. Must have been a special edition. That's probably how I justified it. :pac:

johnny_ultimate

super_furry wrote: »

It always goes back to Street Fighter 2 Turbo on the SNES for me. I paid £79.99 which is well over €120 in today's money and didn't feel ripped off. The price of games hasn't kept pace with the price of inflation and all the whole development costs have been growing and growing.

Yeah, game prices were wild back in the day. I know some development costs are pulled back these days by economies of scale since gaming is obliviously more popular than ever, but really every time I hear a crunch horror story I just don’t feel the current model is sustainable into the future. And the thing is, sales are so prevalent these days anyone can always hold back for a few weeks and pick up the game at a healthy discount anyway (or a massive discount if they wait a few extra months).

So yeah, in short: no to corporate greed, but yes to a pricing model that allows big games to be made sustainably. Bring back different price tiers too - having smaller games would also mean better games IMO

At the end of the day when you consider games that lasted a couple of hours cost £60 punt in the early 90s, prices are generally amazingly low now. That said, sports games and the like that also nickel-and-dime the players on a yearly basis are a joke.

johnny_ultimate

[Deleted User] wrote: »

At the end of the day when you consider games that lasted a couple of hours cost £60 punt in the early 90s, prices are generally amazingly low now. That said, sports games and the like that also nickel-and-dime the players on a yearly basis are a joke.

Even in the last few years you’ve gone through different cycles. Back in the early 360 / PS3 days in particular you had 6-7 hour full price games pretty frequently - compare the first few Uncharted games to 4, for example. That brought complaints, so you then got tacked on multiplayer and the like to add ‘value’. Then you got to the point of micro transactions, DLC etc to try and claw back more money. Again, often corporate greed, but also because that RRP refused to budge despite the budgets soaring. Ultimately everything sort of settled on all AAA games being big, sprawling beasts - whether that’s through open worlds or 25 hour plus campaigns.

I’m sick of playing through new games these days that are really, really good but ultimately fall short because they feel obliged to be really long in order to justify a price tag. Definitely miss the glory days of short and sweet campaigns - Titanfall 2 is maybe one of the only really killer ones from an entire generation of AAA releases?

Thank god for the indie space, of course, offering all manner of alternatives.

Thecageyone

Mr Crispy wrote: »

Sounds like he took his own life sadly.

Yeah it seems so, I was just doing the research to confirm while editing the post, didn't want to suggest it otherwise.

Seems there was some bullying/trolling involved on his twitter too, he tweeted only 4-5hrs ago proposing openly to his ex-gf

People are just junk when it comes to understanding others with mental health issues. Loads of them desperately pulling/deleting response tweets now

dreamers75

Games have been 70 for consoles for years

Retr0gamer

dreamers75 wrote: »

Games have been 70 for consoles for years

Yep. People keep forgetting this every new generation.

New Generation. Games look like they go up a tenner but they are actually selling for RRP.

70 is the RRP for new games. The price drops as the generation goes on because the install base for the console increases meaning games can be bought in bulk for a discount which is passed on to the consumer.

In an all digital future though, forget about that happening.

Most new SNES games were £40-50, it was only the likes of SFII that were £80.

The cart was a large part of the price. PS1 games were around £40 new, £20 platinum.

dreamers75

Yes but wiith Digital games we remove the distributor and the shop and make massive savings!!!!

I left a CD/DVD company in 2003 because the market was dead and downloads were king........


Games still €60/70

Those savings 17 years later sure have worked out.

Rob2D

This is why I moved to PC gaming years ago. Works out so much cheaper.

Retr0gamer

At least PC has competition. The consoles don't and have locked eco systems. People say PSN has great sales but it has great sales in comparison to consoles, it ain't great compared to PC.

johnny_ultimate

Honestly think PC sales ain’t what they used to be. Epic sometimes have ludicrous deals and freebies, and bundles and the like can occasionally be a bargain... but even this recent Steam sale to me is basically what I’d expect from a console sale, albeit with some bargains if you dig deep. Been that way for a while. Brand new games are a bit cheaper on PC for sure, but again not in the way they were five years ago even. And physical copies on console mean there is competition - although the digital-only consoles seem intent on changing that up.

With the likes of Xbox Game Pass in particular I think the price differential between PC and console has faded quite a bit. The only really cheap PC games are on key sites, and they’re dodgy as hell so I don’t even count that.

johnny_ultimate

Some very bleak stuff going on over at fighting game tournament Evo. Very serious sexual misconduct allegations (involving young boys) against its president Joey Cuellar. Lots of companies and players withdrew from this year’s event; the event has now been cancelled; Evo’s cutting ties with Cuellar; and Cuellar himself acknowledging he did things he “isn’t proud of”. Awful story: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/k7q3wm/evo-president-on-administrative-leave-following-misconduct-allegations

CatInABox

The "PC sales are better" isn't really a thing anymore, games are often on sale with better prices on console this generation. At least through the official stores like Steam anyway, I'm sure you can get some better deals through the likes of CDKeys, and obviously the key resellers are even cheaper, but officially they around the same price.

In saying that, I don't know about Epic, I just haven't been looking there really, although even if there's better prices there, I'd say that's more a tactic to grow market share than anything else, like the insane amount of great games that they've given away for free, they just really want to eat into the "Steam only" mindset. Once Epic has a large enough market share, I doubt that there'd be much difference in price.

Rob2D

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Some very bleak stuff going on over at fighting game tournament Evo. Very serious sexual misconduct allegations (involving young boys) against its president Joey Cuellar.

Shur that was all well known. Stories have been told about him for years. Funny how all the big names are acting horrified now. When some of them were probably even there when these things happened.
But of course nobody ever spoke out when the times were good and he was head of the biggest competition in the world. Hollywood all over again.

B.A._Baracus

Deleted User wrote: »

Most new SNES games were £40-50, it was only the likes of SFII that were £80.

The cart was a large part of the price. PS1 games were around £40 new, £20 platinum.

Funny you mention that as I remember going in to the old Virgin Megastore on the Quays (Dublin) in the early / mid 90s and seeing WWF Royal Rumble for the MegaDrive and it was 45 pounds! Insane money back then.
Even if you take inflation and the pound to euro conversion that would be more than 60 euro worth today, right?

Grumpypants

I've Two games on my shelf with their price tag still on. £49.99 for sending soccer on SNES in 1992. £49.99 for Zelda on N64 in 1998. (Sterling £)

That's €100 in today's money.

I was reading an interview with the guy who made sensible soccer he said they got a £90k advance from the publisher and they sold about 2mill copies (if you include the follow up world of sensible soccer between 1992 and 1998). They had a 50/50 split in profits too.

At that time piracy was about 10-1. So they reckon about 20 million people played it.

It's crazy to think about how bad piracy was and how good for the industry DRM has been. The anti DRM crowd forget this.

pixelburp

Thing about cost of production vs. cost to customer, I don't believe for one second that any reduction of cost to produce AAA games would be reflected in the price. It'd either remain static - or more, likely - go up to reflect "inflation". Not like the industry has a great reputation for treating its customer base as customers, preferring us as consumers instead; between DLC and microtransactions they will gouge us if they can get away with it. And the "AAA" monicker has become a convenient shorthand for basically saying "premium pricing".

Robert ninja

Grumpypants wrote: »

At that time piracy was about 10-1. So they reckon about 20 million people played it.

It's crazy to think about how bad piracy was and how good for the industry DRM has been. The anti DRM crowd forget this.

https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-study/

As for pricing it really doesn't matter to me what the 'norm' becomes as it will only affect consoles. As others mentioned things are just outright cheaper on PC with competing and legit key retailers like GMG and gamebillet. If the standard becomes €70 then I'm still getting it launch week for €40ish like I did Tekken 7, one of the last big AAA titles I bought at high price in its launch week. Before that I think its been better half of a decade since I paid full price for a single title.

In relation to drm, I'd suspect piracy drastically dwindled because of platforms like steam and even humble bundles. Drm still gets broken for pc games but in general, I'd say people are more likely to buy.

The Raging Bile Duct

Grumpypants wrote: »

I've Two games on my shelf with their price tag still on. £49.99 for sending soccer on SNES in 1992. £49.99 for Zelda on N64 in 1998. (Sterling £)

That's €100 in today's money.

I was reading an interview with the guy who made sensible soccer he said they got a £90k advance from the publisher and they sold about 2mill copies (if you include the follow up world of sensible soccer between 1992 and 1998). They had a 50/50 split in profits too.

At that time piracy was about 10-1. So they reckon about 20 million people played it.

It's crazy to think about how bad piracy was and how good for the industry DRM has been. The anti DRM crowd forget this.

That actually works out close to €200 in today's money.

Cordell

In any case, as price per hour of entertainment, gaming is quite a good value even at double of the price of today.

Skerries

B.A._Baracus wrote: »

Funny you mention that as I remember going in to the old Virgin Megastore on the Quays (Dublin) in the early / mid 90s and seeing WWF Royal Rumble for the MegaDrive and it was 45 pounds! Insane money back then.
Even if you take inflation and the pound to euro conversion that would be more than 60 euro worth today, right?

I did the math!

WWF came out in 1993 so £45 back then is the equivalent of €93.44 according to the following sites

http://kildare.ie/business/euro-cal.asp
https://www.inflationtool.com/euro-ireland/1993-to-present-value?amount=57

CastorTroy

I think the reason given at the time for the high cost of games like Street Fighter 2 on SNES was the cost of the cartridge. Like think was later SNES or N64 games where they felt heavier than others. Same reason they're using for Switch games now and why some are basically just including unlock keys on the cartridges then you have to download the rest of the game.



As for those Evo allegations, how many have been kicked out of the tournaments in recent times due to saying or doing something and then this comes out

Skerries

The Raging Bile Duct wrote: »

That actually works out close to €200 in today's money.

I did the math again and that would be €99.17 for the 1992 game