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Discussion I'm a poor guy, yet I still believe that the devaluation of games is bad

Enpsty

Enpsty

Bob-omb
I barely make enough for living let alone playing games. I've stuck with switch and ps4. I only buy games during sales and very rarely full price and only if I know the game will provide me enough playtime for weeks.
Realistically the devaluation of games and ridiculous sales should make me happy, right?
I mean I bought Hotshot Racing for $2,99! A quality title that had already provided me with hours or entertainment.
But then I start to think... 3 euros... that's cheaper than an ice cream. Cheaper than a gyro sandwich. It's almost the same price as a cup of coffee, a coffee that I will drink in half an hour and I can make it at home on my own.
The devaluation of games has distorted my view of what is expensive and not. Games that cost 20 euros and I wait until they have 50% discount to buy them. But is 20 euros expensive? For a piece of artistic product that will provide me hours and hours of entertainment? I still remember when Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom was released at $40 some people got mad. An indie game at 40 dollars? How dare they? The fact that the game was a fantastic, lengthy quality product didn't matter. It's an indie game!

So one hand I love how cheap I can find games. On the other hand the devaluation of gaming has led us to f2p, f2w, live services crap and a lot of gamers that demand more and cheaper.


What do you think about it?
 
It's great as a customer but probably bad for the industry. That said, I think it's a broader trend with art and media being devalued due to digital distribution. Same issue with streaming, music, etc. Problem is even if games retained their value I'm not convinced that money would go towards better salaries and working conditions. It'd just get funneled right up to the CEOs and other wastes of space at the top.

The industry is fundamentally broken from multiple angles, I would say.
 
It is bad. "But it is the standard".

Well, let us look to the company to sold more games in the past years. If you are at the top, why you should adopt the "standards" of companies selling less than you?

What irks me is when some company fire their people, we have posts angry at the company made by the same people who only buys (and never play) games on sales.

For a healthy market to exist, it is imperative that games are not devalued.
 
Enpsty said:
So one hand I love how cheap I can find games. On the other hand the devaluation of gaming has led us to f2p, f2w, live services crap and a lot of gamers that demand more and cheaper.
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Did devaluation lead to these games or did these games lead to devaluation?
 
ImpromptuR said:
What irks me is when some company fire their people, we have posts angry at the company made by the same people who only buys (and never play) games on sales.
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This is a bad framing. Video games aren't a charity, these are multibillion dollar corporations in many cases making record profits. These layoffs are due to mismanagement on a corporate scale. Blaming individual consumer actions for systemic problems is shortsighted.
 
I'm a guy who is always hungry for a deal on games. That said, the industry cannot survive with a race to the bottom that we have been used to for most of our lives. Budget lines like "Greatest Hits" and "Players Choice" are going the way of the dodo. Does every publisher need to go with the Nintendo method and hold the same MSRP forever? No and to be honest, most of them probably couldn't if they tried. We are already seeing Sony try to keep the prices on their first party games high for as long as possible. It has been that way since the start of this generation.

I would not be surprised if going forward we saw less sales and $20 AAA games become more uncommon. If last Black Friday was any indication, that day is coming fast.
 
ngpdrew said:
Did devaluation lead to these games or did these games lead to devaluation?
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If we see what happened to the mobile gaming space then I believe the former. Companies want profit. If they can't have profit from normal pricing they will find an alternative way.
At least in my opinion.
 
Josh5890 said:
I'm a guy who is always hungry for a deal on games. That said, the industry cannot survive with a race to the bottom that we have been used to for most of our lives. Budget lines like "Greatest Hits" and "Players Choice" are going the way of the dodo. Does every publisher need to go with the Nintendo method and hold the same MSRP forever? No and to be honest, most of them probably couldn't if they tried. We are already seeing Sony try to keep the prices on their first party games high for as long as possible. It has been that way since the start of this generation.

I would not be surprised if going forward we saw less sales and $20 AAA games become more uncommon. If last Black Friday was any indication, that day is coming fast.
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I think Sony went overboard in the opposite direction on the PS4. They were devaluing their games like crazy. You could buy Horizon with all the DLC for $10 a year and half after release. GOW 2018 was being sold for $20 the holiday of the year it came out. This generation is a bit of a reversal. Maybe they saw Nintendo games hold their value and decided there wasn't a need to give that big of discounts so fast.
 
between the sheer amount of games coming out every year nowadays and digital distribution eliminating a lot of costs not doing deep sales on old stuff that isn't selling anymore is just throwing away money for no reason
 
It's bad for everyone in the long run. It destroyed the phone market. Once upon a time you could buy phone games at the price of indie games. Now it's barely a handful of those games that make it to market, and those that do are often review bombed for retaining that price and the winners are GACHA/Gambling games, employing emotional manipulation and FOMO to squeeze customers out of everything, or else make the game experience as tedious and miserable as possible for a free player.

I can't play a goddamn free-to-play game without it driving my anxiety up by limiting me arbitrarily.
 
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It's insane to me how quickly most publishers do deep sales on their games. And when you know that you can probably get the whole game plus DLC for cheaper than launch price less than a year after release, it's hard to justify buying any game you aren't absolutely 1000% excited for at full price.
 
You lower prices of your products in order to increase overall sales and produce more revenue. Individual consumers only have so much time and interest in games and the number of people participating in the market has nearly reached its maximum saturation. So if consumers are only so interested in buying products and there are only so many of them, they will guide their consumption towards lower prices, which ultimately means that the producers take in less revenue, negating the point of lowering prices in the first place.

The strategy was profitable, with caveats, before when the market was growing but that was never going to be the case forever and it's now a very unsustainable practice. The few companies which never engaged in it, basically just Nintendo, Sony, and 2K, have ended up better off than their competitors as it is far easier to not lower prices than it is to lower prices and then raise them.
 
Bargain binning is perfectly natural.... in the clothing industry. Clothing stores stock items that they intend to sell for 30 quid, but set the actual price to 60 or 80 while they're on the normal racks. Almost immediately the "sale" signs go up, reducing the price by 25%, and then later 50% which is where they make the lion's share of sales. Anything they sold at the so-called full price is extra gravy.

Here's the thing: they didn't mean to go down that path. They started doing the store-wide sales because it drew huge crowds to the stores, but as the novelty wore off the stores found that people's expectations had shifted and now they wouldn't buy as much at full price. This led to industry-wide designer, studio, and store closures, and a lot more uncertainty in what had been a stable and growing market.

If this sounds familiar, this is because it's quite analogous to Amazon Prime Day the PC game industry after the first few Steam sales.
 
Not much spare time for older people, so many games, a lot of them completely free... Seems inevitable, tbh
 
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ImpromptuR said:
What irks me is when some company fire their people, we have posts angry at the company made by the same people who only buys (and never play) games on sales.
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We just had Xbox shut down a studio that was publicly stated to be massively successful, that just released a game to critical acclaim that won them a bunch of awards because buying Activision Blizzard was stupid expensive.
They sent out Hi-Fi Rush to die, it didn't and they continued with their plan to shutter the company to recoup costs of their buyouts they probably had for over a year.

That's not to say Xbox devaluing games isn't bad for the industry, I think Game Pass is very clearly unsustainable. But companies firing people can have nothing to do with how successful a game is. I mean, Toys for Bob is basically a skeleton crew now and Crash 4 did very well! Entirely on upper management for that.
 
Might be a hot take though, I think Player's Choice should actually return. Not for every game obviously, but for games that sell super well and made well past their initial budget, sure! Unless you're really gonna tell me that an enhanced WiiU port that sold ~62 million copies being put on sale would be unprofitable.
Doesn't even have to be 20 bucks like they used to, I'd be fine with 30 or 40 dollar versions like that, especially if you still have to buy a 20 dollar DLC.
 
JazzyFuture said:
We just had Xbox shut down a studio that was publicly stated to be massively successful, that just released a game to critical acclaim that won them a bunch of awards because buying Activision Blizzard was stupid expensive.
They sent out Hi-Fi Rush to die, it didn't and they continued with their plan to shutter the company to recoup costs of their buyouts they probably had for over a year.

That's not to say Xbox devaluing games isn't bad for the industry, I think Game Pass is very clearly unsustainable. But companies firing people can have nothing to do with how successful a game is. I mean, Toys for Bob is basically a skeleton crew now and Crash 4 did very well! Entirely on upper management for that.
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It's not about "recouping" costs through closures: despite glowing industry praise, Hi-Fi Rush wasn't making [much] money, and a sufficient return on investment in Tango (et al.) just wasn't there, certainly not in the way it is for CoD. For MS, it's simply a profit deal. If Tango's games were [significantly] profitable -- that is, if large numbers of people bought them at full price -- MS would have kept the studio open.

Ultimately, though, the issue is that there are too many games competing for too little time (which means too little money).
 
as fellow poor guy in very poor country who lives with his parent and doubt that he will ever be able to buy a house i agree with you
 
em said:
It's not about "recouping" costs through closures: despite glowing industry praise, Hi-Fi Rush wasn't making [much] money, and a sufficient return on investment in Tango (et al.) just wasn't there, certainly not in the way it is for CoD. For MS, it's simply a profit deal. If Tango's games were [significantly] profitable -- that is, if large numbers of people bought them at full price -- MS would have kept the studio open.
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More people were playing Hi-Fi Rush on Steam than people were ever playing Starfield on Steam. You gonna tell me that Starfield made back more of it's budget that was astronomically higher if they haven't shut down BGS yet?

Also it was reported that Microsoft was shutting down studios because they were pitching games and weren't actively developing them yet because they didn't want to cancel any publicly announced games let they have another Scalebound situation. It was never about Tango being unsuccessful.
 
em said:

330K for Starfield vs 6K for HFR. BGS also has a far better track record than Tango.
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Cool guess I just believed twitter misinfo, but as for that last part... do they? Do they really?
Fallout 76 and Starfield back to back are games people really did not like (though 76 was much worse initially and then they turned it around). And even before then, they've become famous for releasing buggy, broken messes that never run well on console and frequently crash on PC. The Evil Within 1 may be kinda divisive, but like, so is Fallout 4.
 
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JazzyFuture said:
Cool guess I just believed twitter misinfo, but as for that last part... do they? Do they really?
Fallout 76 and Starfield back to back are games people really did not like (though 76 was much worse initially and then they turned it around). And even before then, they've become famous for releasing buggy, broken messes that never run well on console and frequently crash on PC. The Evil Within 1 may be more divisive, but like, so is Fallout 4.
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Fallout 4 had 400K max concurrent players. The Evil Within 2 had 10K (TEW1 had 4K). Full price sales ratios were pretty much in line with those numbers based on publicly available data.

Again, forum/Twitter drama is irrelevant. What matters is money, and BGS games make bank while Tango's don't.
 
em said:
Again, forum/Twitter drama is irrelevant. What matters is money, and BGS games make bank while Tango's don't.
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You said their track record is better. I assumed that meant their general reception, as that usually implies.
But I think it's definitely worth noting that BGS is a much bigger money sink who usually has far more budget than Tango. Even with Hi-Fi's music licensing, I'd bet you anything that any Bethesda game since Skyrim took more budget to make than anything Tango has put out, and could have easily made back more of their relative budget compared to stuff Bethesda is making.

Elder Scrolls 6 is said to be at least 5 years away, and it was announced in 2018. No fucking shot that 10 straight years of open world development for one game alongside 2 other open world games that were in development is not more money in the drain than anything Tango made, and the decision to shutter them is not anything the consumers could have stopped even without sales and Game Pass. And to then turn around and say they need award winning smaller titles after shuttering their studio that did exactly that is salt in the wound.
 
HockeyBird said:
I think Sony went overboard in the opposite direction on the PS4. They were devaluing their games like crazy. You could buy Horizon with all the DLC for $10 a year and half after release. GOW 2018 was being sold for $20 the holiday of the year it came out. This generation is a bit of a reversal. Maybe they saw Nintendo games hold their value and decided there wasn't a need to give that big of discounts so fast.
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Yeah, the days of getting Sony first party games for $10 are long gone.
 
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Honestly I don't think games are devalued, it's just that selling smaller games at lower prices is more accessible nowadays. Cheap games have always existed, tapes full of small replayable games for 80s micros, CDs full of dozens or hundreds of smaller games and experiences on the PC in the 90s. Sure you could say those were all utter slop but I'm not convinced of that! Some were Mahjong!

Gaming for "cheap" has always been an option. Even for systems with ludicrously expensive games like the SNES, there was the rental market. Right now I'm playing through a game from the library!

I would go so far as to say the opposite has happened in the so-called 'AAA' space. The $70 price jump was never justifiable in a AAA space where that gets you an entry ticket where you will be further nickle and dimed. Forza Horizon 5 straight up played video ads for expansions, with added microtransactions for base game cars and larger fees for car packs. I think an argument can be made for games that do exactly none of this while providing truly fantastical scale, Tears of the Kingdom is the only one that comes to mind for me, but when Breath of the Wild, which I think is the better game, was $60? I don't know. Maybe.

I don't think the current state of gaming is sustainable, but I certainly don't think higher prices are the answer. How does that saying go? I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding. And don't tell me that the $70 pricetag is needed to do the "paid more" part, we all know they aren't seeing a damned dime if that. Maybe executives could refrain from buying a third waterfront property instead?

I do think people should be more open to price variations in the indie space, like I saw some guffawing at Penny's Big Breakaway's $30 price tag despite its scope and quality, but I don't think low prices in and of themselves are the problem.
 
Yeah, the film/tv and music industries were hit extremely badly by the devaluation of their content via streaming, as can be seen with all the recent issues surrounding writers, the falling box office numbers for movies lately, and how little music artists make from services like Spotify. I was deeply afraid that streaming services like Game Pass would cause similar issues to happen to gaming, but that seems less likely to happen now.
 
Concernt said:
I do think people should be more open to price variations in the indie space, like I saw some guffawing at Penny's Big Breakaway's $30 price tag despite its scope and quality, but I don't think low prices in and of themselves are the problem.
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Same for Another Crab’s Treasure, or Tunic. There’s loads of great indies that launch at around £25, they are pretty much the ‘mid-tier’ these days.
 
JazzyFuture said:
a game to critical acclaim that won them a bunch of awards because
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This means nothing.

The only metric that matters if the players are buying, otherwise, these are just buzzwords for covers and forum users.


Mekanos said:
Video games aren't a charity, these are multibillion dollar corporations in many cases making record profits.
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Exactly. And your company do not reach this status making charity, but instead making unpopular decisions like shuting down studios and firing people sometimes.

People here want to play games for free yet complain when studios close. I can not understand this. Everyone wants to pay as low as possible, but this is unsustainable.
 
Game prices...

When I was still small, I wished for N64 games. Those were between 120 German Mark (=60€ in the year 2000) and 150 (=75€ in the year 2000). Sometimes the games would be on discount for the equivalent of 40€. That was more than 24 years ago. Adjusted for inflation games are dirt cheap nowadays. Yet, they have become much more expensive to make... Find the mistake.
EDIT: And most games were really short and light on content compared to today's games.
 
Just on game price crashes- it’s not always the publisher that does so with physical copies. Ubisoft prices drop like a rock because they print hundreds of thousands of copies for x region, hoping for a total of however many millions of sales across phys/digital worldwide. But then a month later stores don’t want a thousand copies sitting in their warehouse when that space has a value of its own.
 
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As someone who went to music college, and has followed how streaming services ended up pricing most musicians out of their own industry, I have always had a grudge against the devaluing of content by tech companies purely as a means to grab growth.

Looking back at music streaming: if you are not in the top tier of popular music acts, you are not making money from your money being on Spotify at all. If you don't have rich parents to subsidize you, you will find it impossible to have a full time career as a recording musician. Spotify is great for giving consumers free music, but it has absolutely destroyed the ability of low income musicians to make a living off their work. Even a decade or two ago, it was possible for indie musicians to make a living off record sales through indie labels, but that has well and truly gone. The only people able to work full time as musicians are those wealthy enough to do so, or an insanely lucky few.

Racing to the bottom on cost is an absolute losers game if it means companies are not supporting the actual talent that makes the art they're selling. It's companies exploiting the work of others to drive their own growth and please they're shareholders, while making their own industries more insecure long term.

Games should be priced at what they're worth, what consumers can pay and what is sustainable long term.
 
rickyson33 said:
between the sheer amount of games coming out every year nowadays and digital distribution eliminating a lot of costs not doing deep sales on old stuff that isn't selling anymore is just throwing away money for no reason
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A very simplistic way of looking at it, flooding the market with GOOD games at super low prices will only lead to GOOD games not selling well at launch, and therefore only selling on ultra low promotions.
 
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Here's the catch 22. There's an oversupply of games, which leads to undercutting /sales in an attempt to gain traction.
I think the issue is the line has become blurred between new releases immediately going on sale to pad out sales before the next quarterly report and back catalogs going on sale.

The latter makes a bit more sense, because you assume the company has made their money on those and it's just gravy on top and its sitting there doing nothing.
50-60% price collapses of AAA games 2 months after release is just asking for trouble. It may work the first few times, but after a while, most people will just wait for the sale.
 
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Great point OP.
I almost always buy PS5 games on sale (I always have a backlog so don't need day one purchase), Nintendo I more often pay full price.
I am extremely lucky in that financially I can easily afford full-price games so OP makes me think that I shouldn't wait for sales, especially when it comes to games that need the support. I recent paid almost full-price for Alan Wake 2, I wanted to play it but want to support a fantastic, independent developer.
I should do this more.
 
ImpromptuR said:
Exactly. And your company do not reach this status making charity, but instead making unpopular decisions like shuting down studios and firing people sometimes.

People here want to play games for free yet complain when studios close. I can not understand this. Everyone wants to pay as low as possible, but this is unsustainable.
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Consumers are not responsible for the decisions of companies.
 
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Good point, OP. If you keep lowering and lowering your price, customers eventually no longer see it as value. It happens all the time in the fashion industry. Look at all the clothing brands that used to command high prices but are now found at middle to lower end retailers for less money.
 
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ImpromptuR said:
People here want to play games for free yet complain when studios close. I can not understand this. Everyone wants to pay as low as possible, but this is unsustainable.
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I still agree with this-


I don’t think generalising about Fami helps here. I don’t want to play games for free. I‘ve tried various free-to-start micro transaction/gacha products and they aren’t for me. I can see why such provision is important for people with limited access to funds for media, particularly kids (I’d have been all over such games back when NES games were £40 in 1990). Personally I’m quite happy paying indies for creative games at a range of reasonable prices, I’ve played good ones for £2 and good ones at £25. I’m just not happy paying multinationals ever higher prices for the latest AAA game when I never asked for them to have crazy levels of fidelity in a video game, or to work their staff in permanent crunch to reach unrealistic deadlines set by management to line up with a marketing plan.

Studios close and are sold without it being due to customers making a choice of what to play out of the thousands of games available. Perhaps the studio didn’t make the right title or it wasnt any good, or were just unlucky in not securing the right contracts, it happens (See Paladin Studios for a recent example of a studio sadly closing down in a responsible way to the credit of the leadership team).
nintendoeverything.com

Good Job developer Paladin Studios has closed its doors

Paladin Studios, the development company perhaps best known for its work on Good Job, has closed its doors. The news was shared on its official website. Co-founder and co-CEO Derk de Geus said that the studio “unfortunately failed to land enough work to cover our burn-rate.” In order to avoid...
nintendoeverything.com nintendoeverything.com

However, way more often these days it seems due to mismanagement over unrealistic expectations and gambles by the owners of the studio.
 
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I have always thought video games at full price are one of the best valued purchases a person can make, especially relative to other entertainment.

I don’t even want to think about things I’ve spent $60 on over the years (disappointing meals for 2 when we could have eaten at home, average activities or experiences that didn’t last very long by comparison, etc) and have much less to show for it.

I love a good discount or sale as much as anyone, but dozens if not hundreds of hours of content at the original price is already a bargain. Even as game prices creep to $70 + tax they have been remarkably resistant to inflation too. The way so many people have been conditioned to devalue games doesn’t take the reality of their very reasonable value into account.
 
Don't feel bad OP. There's room in this hobby for everyone.

All of the companies you're worried about save on costs whenever they can, too.

Also -- you might be looking for sales today, but one day you might be in a position to buy all the games you want. I used to buy all my games on eBay a year or two after they came out because I couldn't afford to buy them new. Nowadays I have more money. If those cheap games hadn't been around when I was poor, I might not still be playing today.
 
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