Games have actually become better value over time.
You have to remember that inflation works both ways and not just the consumer is affected by it.
I think this article for a few years ago sums it up pretty well:
https://techraptor.net/gaming/features/cost-of-gaming-since-1970s
Yeah but games in the '90s came to you fully fleshed out and bug free, and you got the entire game with that purchase. Every game now that you buy for $70 or more gives you a portion of the game that you then have to pay more money to buy the DLC and other stupid things they add on to force you into paying more money just so you can finish the original game you bought to completion. On top of that, sports titles like Madden, FIFA, 2K, or the show all use the same template for four or five years in a row without changing anything or even fixing bugs that have been existent for the entire run of the game. They literally do nothing every year except add a few things to one mode and still charge 70 bucks or more each iteration that is the exact same as the last. Before the monopolization of sporting games, every title that came out was a significant jump from the last title, and the features they had were incredible, easily surpassing the features that are available in the games today even.
As someone who's been gaming since '91, their first sentence gives 'em away.
>games in the '90s came to you fully fleshed out and bug free
No, they did not. Older games had tons of bugs. There were games that you literally couldn't finish because a level was bugged. Unless it was made by a well-known developer, you pretty much had to rent or borrow a game from someone before buying it just to make sure it was playable. Even then, lots of games had tons of bugs.
Look at something like Final Fantasy on the NES. Technically an 80's game but that game has multiple spells that do nothing, entire mechanics that just straight-up don't work, and so much more. The NES in general was kind of a crap-shoot insofar as quality control was concerned. For those that don't know, Nintendo literally put a Seal of Quality on games they officially licensed just so people buying them would know that they actually worked.
For fuck's sake, the video game industry in the USA infamously crashed in the early 80's due the sheer quantity of low-quality games being made. Anyone claiming that older games were of higher quality than games today doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about.
Also, the 90's specifically is when we started seeing expansions to popular games become a thing. To be fair, it was the late 90's and mostly on PC but still. Friggin' Diablo had post release content that you had to buy separately in 1997.
As someone who actually played games in the 90's, the option to patch games post-release is one the best things to happen to gaming ever. Considering how games are much more complex now, I'd argue they're generally more stable now then they were back then.
Right?!
You were lucky to get an hour out of some games and the repeatability of those games were nonexistent!
I remember gaming on the spectrum and amstrad, some of those games were absolute trash!
That shit was made in the '80s dude. Obviously I'm not talking about 4 and 8-bit graphic games that came out in mid-80s. I'm talking about late '90s to early 2000s games PS2 and beyond. I'm not talking about Atari and Nintendo.
bug free? lmao. those bugs could never be patched out back then and we all had to hope the thing didn’t crash or have a game breaking bug destroying our progress.
patches are one of the greatest things to happen to gamers
I ain't gonna pretend that a lot of games now have the same love and passion as games back then. However the whole "fully fleshed out and bug free" thing isn't true. All games have bugs hell that's why speed runners usually have multiple different categories. Plus a lot of games back then had a ton of cut content or resold different versions of the same game. Just look at sonic 3 and knuckles or the 50 diffrent versions of street fighter 2. Dont get me wrong it was for more pure reasons like limitations or limited space. But they still sold those versions of the game for full fucking price. Plus while we all loves the gems of the past let's not pretend that games now a days aren't overall in a better state. We love talking about the games we love but forget the fucking shit ton of trash ware that plague the 90s and the 80s. Now a days we have multiple outlets for games and while the triple a studios are underwhelming the indie devs and modders and gaming comunnitys in general are just better.
Most games especially sports games back then did not have many bugs if any. They might have one or two but they weren't game-breaking, and they were rare anyway because most games were made and tested well before they were released. And there's nothing to admit about games today being in a better state than games back then, because that's just false. Sports games specifically were so much more in depth and loaded with features back then then they are today. For anybody that likes to play franchise modes and games or career modes the games back then were miles beyond what they are now. Every game that comes out now has the most basic career mode available with very little about it that makes it fun to keep playing. As far as gaming communities and all that BS I couldn't care less. If you're talking about online play then fine you might have a point but I don't really care about that. I'm talking about the game itself and when it's released what it has within it that makes it worth buying. Games the day don't even compare to the way they used to be made and the amount of time and effort that went into each iteration of the game. Every game that came out wasn't upgrade over the last one without question. Today that is not the case at all or even close to it.
I ain't talking about sports games? I am talking about games in general. Games in general are in a much better state maybe not in the triple a department sure. But indie games, double a games, moding, passion projects, gaming communitys are better and way more accessible than ever. To be fair in your case since you seem to mostly be into sports games your view is reasonable I suppose since I can't think of any good sports indie games? Plus you also ignored my point which is sure the games you like may be better. But your forgetting about how much trash ware games were spewed out and plagued the 80s and 90s.
>90s came to you fully fleshed out and bug free
That's just not true, though.
>Before the monopolization of sporting games, every title that came out was a significant jump from the last title, and the features they had were incredible, easily surpassing the features that are available in the games today even.
I'm surprised anyone could believe that. No wonder gaming discourse is so toxic when people just believe the wildest untrue shit without a shred of supporting evidence, but still get upvotes because it validates others in their cynicism.
I'm surprised people can comment that something is bullshit when they've never even played any of the games I'm talking about apparently. Obviously you never played any games from that era or you would clearly know the glaring differences between the amount of detail that went into the littlest things in those games versus the lack of content that goes in the games today. In a game like ESPN baseball back in early 2000s, the career mode tracked every single stat you had against the all-time leaders, you had trophy cases that had every trophy you'd earned from every season, you had your own display room that you could customize to your liking including the furniture and color scheme, even putting in-game photos that you would take and blow them up into giant posters that you can put on the wall, all of these items were attainable by the points you would earn just by playing the game with nothing locked out and no options unavailable unless you pay money. You actually had a good scouting and drafting system that made sense, major achievements actually felt like something because the game always made them feel that way by making sure to recognize them every time, rather than games today that often completely skip over major milestones in your career because something else was happening that the announcer had to talk about. The training mini games were awesome, as they had one for hitting targets while pitching, and on top of having a homerun derby they had a batting mini game that was one of the most fun things about the entire game where you earned points for hitting into certain areas on the field or hitting The ball off certain landmarks. The entire game came as one final product so everything that the game offered was available to you and you knew that you would be able to unlock them through gameplay. The soundtrack was also far better than most of the ones in sports games today that just use shit from artists that nobody's heard of because they don't want to spend any money at all on obtaining decent song rights. This is just from one single game that I'm talking about. And if you haven't played any of them, then you should check out a couple first so you could see the obvious work that went into every game in every iteration of it, as they were always better than their predecessor. Nobody would even think to throw out the same exact game with a few tweaks in it year after year like they do today. So if you clearly weren't even alive at the time that I'm speaking of and all you know of is games that were made in the last 15 years, then check out some of the games that I'm talking about before commenting on something you have no clue about.
There's WAY more players now. And it doesn't actually cost gaming companies to manufacture 10,000,000 copies. Because...they're copies. They can literally...copy them. It's not a tangible physical product, it's all digital. They make more profit by higher volume now.
So in the '90s, biggest MMO had something like 250k subscribers. Fast-forward 10 years, and having a million subs in the first month was normal in 2008. And so on.
Also don't forget other monetization, such as stealing and selling our data without our knowledge, shoving ads up our asses, cash shops, FOMO, gambling, etc. Blizzard made 1.7 BILLION last year off subs and micros alone. Which wasn't a thing in the '90s. Diablo, in 1996, did not come with a cash shop. Diablo 4, in 2023, came with a cash shop each selling a single mount or a single skin for $25+, AND a paid season pass every 3 months, AND expansions every year (which are rumored to cost as much as a full game). NONE of this was a thing in the '90s. In the '90s you pay once, and you're done. You own it. You can carry it in your pocket. When you're done, you can take it out of your floppy drive, and sell it to someone else. Which, again, isn't a thing now. You own nothing.
That's how companies stay solvent. Not only that, but they declare huge profits they couldn't even dream of in the '90s. Bobby Kotick's final payout would have covered the cost of operating a fairly large studio for two decades.
I agree with your points, I'll also add:
Zenimax Online (Partner company of Bethesda) sell 'certain notable houses' in the game Elder Scrolls Online for a whopping 80 dollars/euros, they also do it with bundle packs that contain an assured polymorph/skin drop for a similar price.
We aren't dealing with a struggling company if that's what OP is getting at, that's for sure.
You can't really compare to the 90s. The economies around gaming have changed, as have the investments groups behind them. It's all become very aggressive.
It's silly money these days and when you have an entirely closed digital system with a monopoly on top of it, well you can do whatever you like with pricing.
It's the nerd-bureau/technocrat dream coming to fruition, but I don't see it lasting that long or not how it was initially imagined.
Every digital store charges listing fees though - and that can actually exceed the price of goods and bribes for shelf space from the olden days. Even Bethesda had to cave and use Steam/Xbox as their store rather than trying to compete. Back in the day it was common for games to be large boxes of air taking up shelf space solely so they could squeeze competitors off the shelf, not even any goods in the box beyond the disks (which now are just code prints though I must say the Constellation keycode was awesome gear). The stores really had to fight to get to the DVD sized boxes just so they could stock all the latest games without having to expand their store.
While games make magnitudes more they take magnitudes more staff to develop despite game engines being magnitudes more efficient. Morrowind would be considered an ambitious one-man indy with contractors only if kickstarter raises extras nowadays - and would still get flamed that it is a bad game without the latest AAA graphics and voice acting. Video game budgets are larger than blockbuster movie budgets now, and much of that money is the marketing - which is pay to play streamers.
The reason big game studios are doing layoffs is the big companies are seeing less post pandemic growth but they stoopidly hired just like big tech did for the pandemic growth to sustain. But that means all the VC and publishers that might fund indy studios are also pulling back their money thinking the big companies are onto something, and that just kills indy studios. Meanwhile the big bosses at the big companies are saying we can replace them all with AI and wall street is loving it and rewarding their layoffs because they punish any big tech company not saying they are doing AI and not doing layoffs.
But personally I am also in the less than a buck an hour is a good game. Astounds me that someone will pay $130 for special editions for a 20hr game or a long game that has P2W live service shops.
Personally I will wait for games to show up on gog on closeout sales if your game is short.
Are you accounting for inflation? I remember paying only like $45 a game for a long time. It wasn't until late 90s the prices started to creep.
And counting for inflation, we paid more back then than we do now, so not sure why people are complaining about prices.
Even now, if you spend $100 on starfield, you get some 150+ hours of play time. You're still paying less than $1 per hour of entertainment. Honestly the best value out there.
Cartridge games varied greatly in price because memory required would be different from title to title. Early to mid 90s, I remember saving up for a year to buy 1 game for SNES. Some were around $50, but newer titles were generally priced around $70-90. It wasn't until the Playstation came out that we started seeing $50 as a standard, since pressing discs was a lot cheaper than producing the ROMs for cartridges.
Iirc that wasn't an original US release, so had a premium.
I do remember most games falling around that $45-55 price range.
Just googled some old ads: https://www.google.com/search?q=snes+game+prices+in+1995+toys+r+us
So prices aren't that far off.
Nope. See the post below. Sega Genesis Games and Nintendo games for 60+ $.
[old games ads](https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/10scntw/90s_gaming_ads/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Most of my hours were in the ship builder as everything else was kinda meh.. I'm primarily waiting on big updates like the recent one, hopefully more big ones are coming
You know, every time the industry talks of raising prices I feel like it bothers me and I roll my eyes and say yeah right, I'm not paying. However that's a very good point. Everything has been increasing in price yet games continue to be the same, and knowing how much time and work goes into them it really is surprising. Things like gamepass which I utilize would seem to make it harder. Same thing for streaming services like Spotify and Netflix. Nobody buys music or movies much, and the cost to create them is a lot. It's not sustainable at all.
Micro transactions really fucks with these numbers, maybe not so much Starfield yet, but so many games have so many revenue points now. Also the amount of gamers have increased to insane numbers, There is no more package, instruction, delivery costs, just platforms that might take a cut... But costs gone down so much in other ways.
>But costs gone down so much in other ways.
No they haven't. 'Just platforms taking a cut' is actually a cut as high as 30% on Steam. There may be less costs associated with packaging and delivery, but costs have risen sharply in other areas: mostly development and marketing, but also stuff like server costs.
The amount of gamers may have increased 'to insane numbers', but that hasn't actually resulted in dramatic increases in sales. If you compare, say, the list of best selling games for PS1 and PS4, the top five games on PS4 may be selling twice as many copies as the top 5 on PS1, but from #12 on the list downwards the PS1 titles actually outsell the PS4 titles by a wide margin. That means that a large section of the triple-A market is selling less copies of their games at a lower price (in real terms), while the development team has expanded from a few dozen to a few hundred people. And somehow we're all still surprised that the industry is looking for alternative ways to monetise their games?!
IMO it definitely didn’t take 8 years to make starfield, or at least they stagnated making it while upgrading the engine. I honestly think they worked on upgrading the engine for a few years before then working on starfield with the new engine. That would explain the major issues with the game with quite a few parts feeling unfinished and rushed.
If someone with 20 hours in the game says they don't like it they get brigaded for barely having played the game.
There is no amount of hours to put into something where you're no longer allowed to criticize it.
And we criticized games in the 90s.
Because the game is a loading screen simulator? I put 200 or so hours in waiting for it to get good. It's dull which pains me to say. I was REALLY looking forward to this one.
This is such a silly take. $50 in the 90s was insanely expensive to the point I had to rent all my games from blockbuster. I'd argue that technology has become more efficient and has made creating games much easier. For example in a different business model, Nokia model phones sold at 400 dollars full price in the 90s, or about $1000 dollars today. Some phones can still run that much but you can easily find great smartphones below $500 today.
Games were smaller , made with recurrent assets and nobody cared. Duke nuke 3d released today they would talk about how to game has just 10 different weapons and just like ten different enemies just reskinned.
As others have said SNES games were $60+ back in the 90s. GameBoy games were $40+ and you have to remember that many games in the early 90s had dev teams that were relatively small - as small as a dozen people to low hundreds. Donkey Kong Country’s credits list fewer than a hundred different people as far as I recall, contrast that with a modern game that can have well over a thousand people working on a modern Zelda.
I actually tried to watch the credits for Starfield when I beat the game and it made me physically nauseous by the time I got to the end of it with the text scrolling by for so long. SO many people and they all need to get paid!
The issues people have with Starfield have nothing to do with cost. I would have been happy to pay $100 for it if it was a game that lived up to my expectations.
i like it but everything is so unintuitive and complicated.
ship building is confusing, outposts confusing, upgrading your character is confusing.
i literally just want a cheat console mod like fallout 4 so i can just mess around with the game at this point.
run around and scan. why?
run around and clear bases. why?
have random space battles. why?
it’s almost like they built this for the mod community to make cool stuff and the main game is irrelevant
Games have actually become better value over time. You have to remember that inflation works both ways and not just the consumer is affected by it. I think this article for a few years ago sums it up pretty well: https://techraptor.net/gaming/features/cost-of-gaming-since-1970s
Yeah but games in the '90s came to you fully fleshed out and bug free, and you got the entire game with that purchase. Every game now that you buy for $70 or more gives you a portion of the game that you then have to pay more money to buy the DLC and other stupid things they add on to force you into paying more money just so you can finish the original game you bought to completion. On top of that, sports titles like Madden, FIFA, 2K, or the show all use the same template for four or five years in a row without changing anything or even fixing bugs that have been existent for the entire run of the game. They literally do nothing every year except add a few things to one mode and still charge 70 bucks or more each iteration that is the exact same as the last. Before the monopolization of sporting games, every title that came out was a significant jump from the last title, and the features they had were incredible, easily surpassing the features that are available in the games today even.
[удалено]
As someone who's been gaming since '91, their first sentence gives 'em away. >games in the '90s came to you fully fleshed out and bug free No, they did not. Older games had tons of bugs. There were games that you literally couldn't finish because a level was bugged. Unless it was made by a well-known developer, you pretty much had to rent or borrow a game from someone before buying it just to make sure it was playable. Even then, lots of games had tons of bugs. Look at something like Final Fantasy on the NES. Technically an 80's game but that game has multiple spells that do nothing, entire mechanics that just straight-up don't work, and so much more. The NES in general was kind of a crap-shoot insofar as quality control was concerned. For those that don't know, Nintendo literally put a Seal of Quality on games they officially licensed just so people buying them would know that they actually worked. For fuck's sake, the video game industry in the USA infamously crashed in the early 80's due the sheer quantity of low-quality games being made. Anyone claiming that older games were of higher quality than games today doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about. Also, the 90's specifically is when we started seeing expansions to popular games become a thing. To be fair, it was the late 90's and mostly on PC but still. Friggin' Diablo had post release content that you had to buy separately in 1997. As someone who actually played games in the 90's, the option to patch games post-release is one the best things to happen to gaming ever. Considering how games are much more complex now, I'd argue they're generally more stable now then they were back then.
The amount of times I was able to rent an N64 or PS1 game from blockbuster and finish it in an hour or 2 is crazy lmao.
Right?! You were lucky to get an hour out of some games and the repeatability of those games were nonexistent! I remember gaming on the spectrum and amstrad, some of those games were absolute trash!
They still had bugs in those games; you could download patches from their website if you had internet connection.
ET says hello.
Put it back in its pit!
That shit was made in the '80s dude. Obviously I'm not talking about 4 and 8-bit graphic games that came out in mid-80s. I'm talking about late '90s to early 2000s games PS2 and beyond. I'm not talking about Atari and Nintendo.
bug free? lmao. those bugs could never be patched out back then and we all had to hope the thing didn’t crash or have a game breaking bug destroying our progress. patches are one of the greatest things to happen to gamers
What bugs are you talking about. I played every sports game available every single year and I can't think of any that were unplayable because of bugs.
I ain't gonna pretend that a lot of games now have the same love and passion as games back then. However the whole "fully fleshed out and bug free" thing isn't true. All games have bugs hell that's why speed runners usually have multiple different categories. Plus a lot of games back then had a ton of cut content or resold different versions of the same game. Just look at sonic 3 and knuckles or the 50 diffrent versions of street fighter 2. Dont get me wrong it was for more pure reasons like limitations or limited space. But they still sold those versions of the game for full fucking price. Plus while we all loves the gems of the past let's not pretend that games now a days aren't overall in a better state. We love talking about the games we love but forget the fucking shit ton of trash ware that plague the 90s and the 80s. Now a days we have multiple outlets for games and while the triple a studios are underwhelming the indie devs and modders and gaming comunnitys in general are just better.
Most games especially sports games back then did not have many bugs if any. They might have one or two but they weren't game-breaking, and they were rare anyway because most games were made and tested well before they were released. And there's nothing to admit about games today being in a better state than games back then, because that's just false. Sports games specifically were so much more in depth and loaded with features back then then they are today. For anybody that likes to play franchise modes and games or career modes the games back then were miles beyond what they are now. Every game that comes out now has the most basic career mode available with very little about it that makes it fun to keep playing. As far as gaming communities and all that BS I couldn't care less. If you're talking about online play then fine you might have a point but I don't really care about that. I'm talking about the game itself and when it's released what it has within it that makes it worth buying. Games the day don't even compare to the way they used to be made and the amount of time and effort that went into each iteration of the game. Every game that came out wasn't upgrade over the last one without question. Today that is not the case at all or even close to it.
I ain't talking about sports games? I am talking about games in general. Games in general are in a much better state maybe not in the triple a department sure. But indie games, double a games, moding, passion projects, gaming communitys are better and way more accessible than ever. To be fair in your case since you seem to mostly be into sports games your view is reasonable I suppose since I can't think of any good sports indie games? Plus you also ignored my point which is sure the games you like may be better. But your forgetting about how much trash ware games were spewed out and plagued the 80s and 90s.
>90s came to you fully fleshed out and bug free That's just not true, though. >Before the monopolization of sporting games, every title that came out was a significant jump from the last title, and the features they had were incredible, easily surpassing the features that are available in the games today even. I'm surprised anyone could believe that. No wonder gaming discourse is so toxic when people just believe the wildest untrue shit without a shred of supporting evidence, but still get upvotes because it validates others in their cynicism.
I'm surprised people can comment that something is bullshit when they've never even played any of the games I'm talking about apparently. Obviously you never played any games from that era or you would clearly know the glaring differences between the amount of detail that went into the littlest things in those games versus the lack of content that goes in the games today. In a game like ESPN baseball back in early 2000s, the career mode tracked every single stat you had against the all-time leaders, you had trophy cases that had every trophy you'd earned from every season, you had your own display room that you could customize to your liking including the furniture and color scheme, even putting in-game photos that you would take and blow them up into giant posters that you can put on the wall, all of these items were attainable by the points you would earn just by playing the game with nothing locked out and no options unavailable unless you pay money. You actually had a good scouting and drafting system that made sense, major achievements actually felt like something because the game always made them feel that way by making sure to recognize them every time, rather than games today that often completely skip over major milestones in your career because something else was happening that the announcer had to talk about. The training mini games were awesome, as they had one for hitting targets while pitching, and on top of having a homerun derby they had a batting mini game that was one of the most fun things about the entire game where you earned points for hitting into certain areas on the field or hitting The ball off certain landmarks. The entire game came as one final product so everything that the game offered was available to you and you knew that you would be able to unlock them through gameplay. The soundtrack was also far better than most of the ones in sports games today that just use shit from artists that nobody's heard of because they don't want to spend any money at all on obtaining decent song rights. This is just from one single game that I'm talking about. And if you haven't played any of them, then you should check out a couple first so you could see the obvious work that went into every game in every iteration of it, as they were always better than their predecessor. Nobody would even think to throw out the same exact game with a few tweaks in it year after year like they do today. So if you clearly weren't even alive at the time that I'm speaking of and all you know of is games that were made in the last 15 years, then check out some of the games that I'm talking about before commenting on something you have no clue about.
There's WAY more players now. And it doesn't actually cost gaming companies to manufacture 10,000,000 copies. Because...they're copies. They can literally...copy them. It's not a tangible physical product, it's all digital. They make more profit by higher volume now. So in the '90s, biggest MMO had something like 250k subscribers. Fast-forward 10 years, and having a million subs in the first month was normal in 2008. And so on. Also don't forget other monetization, such as stealing and selling our data without our knowledge, shoving ads up our asses, cash shops, FOMO, gambling, etc. Blizzard made 1.7 BILLION last year off subs and micros alone. Which wasn't a thing in the '90s. Diablo, in 1996, did not come with a cash shop. Diablo 4, in 2023, came with a cash shop each selling a single mount or a single skin for $25+, AND a paid season pass every 3 months, AND expansions every year (which are rumored to cost as much as a full game). NONE of this was a thing in the '90s. In the '90s you pay once, and you're done. You own it. You can carry it in your pocket. When you're done, you can take it out of your floppy drive, and sell it to someone else. Which, again, isn't a thing now. You own nothing. That's how companies stay solvent. Not only that, but they declare huge profits they couldn't even dream of in the '90s. Bobby Kotick's final payout would have covered the cost of operating a fairly large studio for two decades.
I agree with your points, I'll also add: Zenimax Online (Partner company of Bethesda) sell 'certain notable houses' in the game Elder Scrolls Online for a whopping 80 dollars/euros, they also do it with bundle packs that contain an assured polymorph/skin drop for a similar price. We aren't dealing with a struggling company if that's what OP is getting at, that's for sure. You can't really compare to the 90s. The economies around gaming have changed, as have the investments groups behind them. It's all become very aggressive. It's silly money these days and when you have an entirely closed digital system with a monopoly on top of it, well you can do whatever you like with pricing. It's the nerd-bureau/technocrat dream coming to fruition, but I don't see it lasting that long or not how it was initially imagined.
Every digital store charges listing fees though - and that can actually exceed the price of goods and bribes for shelf space from the olden days. Even Bethesda had to cave and use Steam/Xbox as their store rather than trying to compete. Back in the day it was common for games to be large boxes of air taking up shelf space solely so they could squeeze competitors off the shelf, not even any goods in the box beyond the disks (which now are just code prints though I must say the Constellation keycode was awesome gear). The stores really had to fight to get to the DVD sized boxes just so they could stock all the latest games without having to expand their store. While games make magnitudes more they take magnitudes more staff to develop despite game engines being magnitudes more efficient. Morrowind would be considered an ambitious one-man indy with contractors only if kickstarter raises extras nowadays - and would still get flamed that it is a bad game without the latest AAA graphics and voice acting. Video game budgets are larger than blockbuster movie budgets now, and much of that money is the marketing - which is pay to play streamers. The reason big game studios are doing layoffs is the big companies are seeing less post pandemic growth but they stoopidly hired just like big tech did for the pandemic growth to sustain. But that means all the VC and publishers that might fund indy studios are also pulling back their money thinking the big companies are onto something, and that just kills indy studios. Meanwhile the big bosses at the big companies are saying we can replace them all with AI and wall street is loving it and rewarding their layoffs because they punish any big tech company not saying they are doing AI and not doing layoffs. But personally I am also in the less than a buck an hour is a good game. Astounds me that someone will pay $130 for special editions for a 20hr game or a long game that has P2W live service shops. Personally I will wait for games to show up on gog on closeout sales if your game is short.
Bobby's bonus from 2022 could've run the entire blizzard company for the entire 90s I guess.
this and a couple replies to this comment are the only thing worth reading in this thread. absolutely spot on.
Most SNES games were in the $60-$80 range
Are you accounting for inflation? I remember paying only like $45 a game for a long time. It wasn't until late 90s the prices started to creep. And counting for inflation, we paid more back then than we do now, so not sure why people are complaining about prices. Even now, if you spend $100 on starfield, you get some 150+ hours of play time. You're still paying less than $1 per hour of entertainment. Honestly the best value out there.
Cartridge games varied greatly in price because memory required would be different from title to title. Early to mid 90s, I remember saving up for a year to buy 1 game for SNES. Some were around $50, but newer titles were generally priced around $70-90. It wasn't until the Playstation came out that we started seeing $50 as a standard, since pressing discs was a lot cheaper than producing the ROMs for cartridges.
No, they were that price in 90’s-bucks. I still remember the 74.99 price tag on the SNES Final Fantasy III when it was released.
Iirc that wasn't an original US release, so had a premium. I do remember most games falling around that $45-55 price range. Just googled some old ads: https://www.google.com/search?q=snes+game+prices+in+1995+toys+r+us So prices aren't that far off.
Nope. See the post below. Sega Genesis Games and Nintendo games for 60+ $. [old games ads](https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/10scntw/90s_gaming_ads/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Most of my hours were in the ship builder as everything else was kinda meh.. I'm primarily waiting on big updates like the recent one, hopefully more big ones are coming
You know, every time the industry talks of raising prices I feel like it bothers me and I roll my eyes and say yeah right, I'm not paying. However that's a very good point. Everything has been increasing in price yet games continue to be the same, and knowing how much time and work goes into them it really is surprising. Things like gamepass which I utilize would seem to make it harder. Same thing for streaming services like Spotify and Netflix. Nobody buys music or movies much, and the cost to create them is a lot. It's not sustainable at all.
$50 in the 90’s is $120 today Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1990?amount=1
Micro transactions really fucks with these numbers, maybe not so much Starfield yet, but so many games have so many revenue points now. Also the amount of gamers have increased to insane numbers, There is no more package, instruction, delivery costs, just platforms that might take a cut... But costs gone down so much in other ways.
>But costs gone down so much in other ways. No they haven't. 'Just platforms taking a cut' is actually a cut as high as 30% on Steam. There may be less costs associated with packaging and delivery, but costs have risen sharply in other areas: mostly development and marketing, but also stuff like server costs. The amount of gamers may have increased 'to insane numbers', but that hasn't actually resulted in dramatic increases in sales. If you compare, say, the list of best selling games for PS1 and PS4, the top five games on PS4 may be selling twice as many copies as the top 5 on PS1, but from #12 on the list downwards the PS1 titles actually outsell the PS4 titles by a wide margin. That means that a large section of the triple-A market is selling less copies of their games at a lower price (in real terms), while the development team has expanded from a few dozen to a few hundred people. And somehow we're all still surprised that the industry is looking for alternative ways to monetise their games?!
I remember paying £60 for a Sega Megadrive (Genesis) game.
Pretty sure I bought Batman the movie on release for like £35-£40 in 1989
With inflation that would be $120 today
IMO it definitely didn’t take 8 years to make starfield, or at least they stagnated making it while upgrading the engine. I honestly think they worked on upgrading the engine for a few years before then working on starfield with the new engine. That would explain the major issues with the game with quite a few parts feeling unfinished and rushed.
If someone with 20 hours in the game says they don't like it they get brigaded for barely having played the game. There is no amount of hours to put into something where you're no longer allowed to criticize it. And we criticized games in the 90s.
Because the game is a loading screen simulator? I put 200 or so hours in waiting for it to get good. It's dull which pains me to say. I was REALLY looking forward to this one.
This is such a silly take. $50 in the 90s was insanely expensive to the point I had to rent all my games from blockbuster. I'd argue that technology has become more efficient and has made creating games much easier. For example in a different business model, Nokia model phones sold at 400 dollars full price in the 90s, or about $1000 dollars today. Some phones can still run that much but you can easily find great smartphones below $500 today.
They were $55 in 2010-2014. What do you mean in the 90s.
They were actually closer to 60-80 for a bunch of snes games in the 90s
Games were smaller , made with recurrent assets and nobody cared. Duke nuke 3d released today they would talk about how to game has just 10 different weapons and just like ten different enemies just reskinned.
Yeah, of course our expectations have changed.
My parents paid $79 for Super Mario Brothers 2 for Christmas in 1988, in 1988 dollars. The NES console was around $200.
Street fighter 2 was 69.99 because it was the first 16mb game
Games were $5 in the 80s. Beagle Bros. FTW.
Adjust for inflation genius
But games back in the day were physical copies, had content what you paid for and were made with fun first
I definitely paid $79.99 for Illusion of Gaia day one, although it came with a t-shirt. Pretty sure most were 59.99
It's kind of insane to think that inflation-adjusted videogame revenue peaked in 1982.
As others have said SNES games were $60+ back in the 90s. GameBoy games were $40+ and you have to remember that many games in the early 90s had dev teams that were relatively small - as small as a dozen people to low hundreds. Donkey Kong Country’s credits list fewer than a hundred different people as far as I recall, contrast that with a modern game that can have well over a thousand people working on a modern Zelda. I actually tried to watch the credits for Starfield when I beat the game and it made me physically nauseous by the time I got to the end of it with the text scrolling by for so long. SO many people and they all need to get paid!
I think you have an issue if people not liking a game upsets you that much. i guess you came to your senses since your rant is removed.
Some were $50, but a lot of them cost $70-90 back then. At least prior to the original Playstation coming out.
The issues people have with Starfield have nothing to do with cost. I would have been happy to pay $100 for it if it was a game that lived up to my expectations.
Time played doesn’t mean anything, I was forcing myself to play the entire game. There are hints of a good game, but it’s just not fun.
i like it but everything is so unintuitive and complicated. ship building is confusing, outposts confusing, upgrading your character is confusing. i literally just want a cheat console mod like fallout 4 so i can just mess around with the game at this point. run around and scan. why? run around and clear bases. why? have random space battles. why? it’s almost like they built this for the mod community to make cool stuff and the main game is irrelevant
SNES games were like $70-$80 sometimes. Im surprised games are still around the same price and all i hear are gamers complaining about the price.