Gaming News

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Giancarlo Esposito (Gus Fring from Breaking Bad, the bad guy from The Mandalorian and much else) says he's starring in a big game due to be announced soon. Only rumour I've seen is Far Cry 6.

Penn wrote: »

Giancarlo Esposito (Gus Fring from Breaking Bad, the bad guy from The Mandalorian and much else) says he's starring in a big game due to be announced soon. Only rumour I've seen is Far Cry 6.

Surely it has to be Journey to the Centre of Hawkthorne 2.

Deleted User wrote: »

The carts were reasonably expensive to manufacture, and larger ROM sizes cost more than small ones. (And enhancement chips added to the cost also). They would talk about cart size in adverts and PR releases.

Early SNES games were 4Mbit, I remember a big deal being made about SFII Turbo being the first to have a 20Mbit cart.

At the time that SFII Turbo was £80, a SNES console with Mario was as little as £100. So a single game was nearly the price of the console! Absolute madness, but it was Nintendo's model at the time.

It's not madness, you said it yourself: hardware costs were much larger, and companies need to make profit to survive.

That's why the PS1 succeeded: its manufacturing costs went down to almost nothing (CDs) allowing even 20-25 quid games to have a profit margin.

OK symbol removed from COD due to white power

https://gamerant.com/call-of-duty-okay-gesture-removed-modern-warfare-warzone/

Vicxas wrote: »

More pandering i see, no one cared but IW decided it was a MASSIVE issue

TBF, it was removed without any fanfare. That's hardly making it a massive issue. Anyway, if no one actually cared that it was there, then they shouldn't care that it has been removed.

pixelburp wrote: »

Reading that, I didn't know it started as a hoax by 4chan. That must be kinda embarrassing; making a joke at white supremacists expense only for them to adopt your brainchild in seriousness, using it everywhere.

How was it a joke at white supremacist expense.

Trump made a weird OK hand sign and 4Chan managed to convince the likes of CNN it was white power.

Grumpypants wrote: »

Printing a disc cost cents, distribution isn't that expensive either, especially at scale. GameStop took a smaller cut than the digital stores which take 30%. They also handled the sale, the money, the customer service.

When selling digitally on your own store (Never mind the huge cost of data). You have the cost of the servers, the 24/7 teams if engineers to monitor and maintain them. The extra costs in handling money in terms of legal compliance. The customer support staff needed to deal with any issues.

Digital isn't just extra free money for companies. There is a huge cost associated with it that never exist with the old ship and forget model.

Almost every aspect of game making has gone up in price bar the cost to consumer.

It has never been cheaper and we have never had so much choice in the history of the industry.

Those small costs that you describe also scale so they add up.

I'll put it to you this way, if you asked every game company would you rather sell digitally or physically, 99% of them will say digital. The gains far outweigh the costs.

The cost has gone up in certain areas: controllers are a lot more expensive; only get one in the box now and usually without a game bundled which most of them did back in the day with many of them also giving you two controllers; online subscriptions; special editions and microtransactions that while you don't have to partake in, garners such a high revenue that it can't be discounted in the argument that these businesses require upping the price of games.

dreamers75 wrote: »

For a physical game to be €50 it cost €20 for manufacture/distribution. The €20 would be broken down to Manufacturue, deliverer, shops profits. So thats €30 to the publisher and maybe €10 to the developer depending on the publising deal.

For a game to be delivered digitially it does not cost anywhere near €20, would be more like €1 with AWS.

Now its €49 to the developer.

The margin on digital is higher but not anything near what you are suggesting.

You are mixing up a few things. If you are comparing selling in a physical shop it should be compared to selling on a digital storefront.

For starters Steam, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo all take 30%. So a game sold digitally for €49 would only net the developer €35.

In that case, the physical and digital store takes the brunt of the infrastructure and service costs away from the developer.

Just because they don't print a disk and have a shop with a person in it doesn't automatically make it free. Sony need huge servers, in huge buildings with huge rent. They have massive power bills. They need a customer service org. Just 25 staff costs about a million a year.

Then you need engineers to build and manage the store front, you need QA to test it. You need a legal team etc etc. Those costs run into the millions as well.

This notion of the cost being €1, only works if you Conviently ignore all the other costs.

The main plus for digital is it speeds up delivery and lowers risk of loss rather than it boosts the margin.

Printing and delivering a disk to a shop is a small amount. Less than a Euro. The risk is if you have to print and deliver at scale. Say you print 5 million disks then you are spending €5million. If you only sell 1million that is a big €4million hit.

If you only print 1 million and the game is a hit then it takes weeks to get more on the shelf. It's why pre order numbers are a great indicator.

Grumpypants wrote: »

Then you need engineers to build and manage the store front, you need QA to test it.

Just go the Sony route and update it once per generation!