Game prices are relatively cheap in the modern day. I know forking over $60 doesn’t sound very cheap, but considering the prices haven’t adjusted much for inflation since the 90s, I’d say it isn’t all that bad. That and the fact that our current gaming market includes stores like GameStop selling used games at a fraction of the price and online services with insane deals on games like Steam and the online console stores shows how easy it is to be a gamer in the modern day.
It was never this easy nor this cheap to get into the medium in the past. Back in the 90s, game cartridges sold for $50-$60, the value of which has almost doubled in the modern day. Even games that cost $60 ten years ago would cost nearly an extra $10 now as it is. So, as a result, since games still cost the same amount, we’re actually paying less due to inflation. This makes the medium much more affordable, which is something that gamers everywhere would probably want to keep this way.
Despite being so consumer friendly, this inflation mixed with increasing costs in staffing and creating modern video games is harming the producers in the industry. Now, I know that most consumers won’t care but the relationship between the two should be symbiotic for the system to work. By that, I mean producers make quality content for the consumers and said consumers pay them what they deserve for that content.
Since the scale started weighing in the favor of consumers, producers started fighting back with their own methods of keeping it balanced, which many gamers are not fans of at all. Concepts like DLC, micro-transactions, and season passes all exist for game developers to earn extra money on their product. Some of these started off benign enough. Extra content would be added to a game if gamers wanted it and it would have no real impact on gameplay, story, and so on to make the experience fair and enjoyable for all parties involved.
However, these business practices have devolved to the point of taking content from a game that should be there and locking it behind a paywall, creating incredibly unfair pay-to-win situations. A somewhat recent example is the 2015 Star Wars: Battlefront which had very lackluster content at launch and had a $50 season pass, totaling the price up to $110 for the full game. By “full” I mean all the content that was originally supposed to be in the game was there. However, this was done by taking bits and pieces out and selling them back as DLC. While anti-consumer, it brings the price close to what a full, 90s equivalent version of the game would have cost. While it would have been a very different game back then, with an entirely different development process and quality, I’m saying this assuming both would have top-of-the-line visuals for their time like the 2015 version did.
So now that producers have swung the scale way in their favor, I think the best solution is a healthy compromise. Game developers should stop these business practices since they hamper the enjoyment, balance, and quality of the products they deliver. However, I also think gamers should be expected to pay slightly more for their products for developers to safely make their money back on the increasingly expensive venture of game development. I don’t know exactly how much more would be a healthy compromise since I’m not an economist, however I think game prices should at least increase somewhat. A lot of people won’t like this idea, but I think it’s a step in the right direction for fixing the divide between producer and consumer in the gaming industry.
What do you think? Post your input down below.
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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