Next-gen games may cost $70. It’s overdue, but also worrisome | Hacker News Reader

Next-gen games may cost $70. It’s overdue, but also worrisome

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Here's how much games of old would cost now, considering inflation:

Atari 2600 (1980, ~$25) - ~$77.79

NES (1986, $29.99-$49.99) - $70.16-$116.94

SNES (1991, $49.99-$59.99) - $94.11-$112.93

N64 (1996, $49.99) - $81.69

PS2 (2000, $49.99) - $74.43

Xbox 360 (2005, $59.99) - $78.76

So if anything, big-budget games have never been cheaper than they are now despite newer games requiring huge development budgets compared to classic titles. And there are way more "indie" games being released now in the $5-$30 range than ever before, many of astounding quality.

But even more importantly, the AAA game industry is moving away from charging a fixed price for big-budget games anyway. They would rather give you the game for free and get you into their ecosystem to buy season passes and cosmetic items. It's more profitable for them in the long term.

In a world of Humble Bundles and free-to-play games, no one has time to play even a tiny fraction of what is being released. There has never been more entertainment available for essentially no cost. The world has a lot of problems, but the high price of video games is not one of them.

Yeah, I don't get it when people are saying games are too expensive. I remember buying $50 NES games in the early 90s, and they didn't get updates and bugfixes, and unless it was a game made by a well known studio, there were no reviews to make an informed decision. Compared to almost every hobby, video games are a bargain when you consider that you can regularly get hundreds of hours of entertainment in a AAA title.

>Yeah, I don't get it when people are saying games are too expensive.

This is because of the anchoring principle. We get used to a number and everything becomes relative (anchored) around that number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_(cognitive_bias)

They also shipped well tested back then compared to now.

They were also much simpler and smaller back then compared to now

Thanks for doing the math. This article is complete clickbait bullshit. Performing a histortical price comparison without accounting for inflation or some other price index will result in nonsensical results.

But the article does account for inflation?

> Adjusted for inflation, a $60 “Call of Duty” title in 2005 would be about $78 today, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.

Does this account for lootboxes, or just base game price? Inflation comparison of the game's base price isn't the full story, but is also difficult to quantify as some players will spend $0 on in-game purchases, while others spend hundreds.

Ok now do it again as a per hour of enjoyable gameplay.

I can't remember a game lately that anyone paid for /once/ and got as many hours of enjoyment out of as Super Mario, Sonic, Half Life etc. CoD MW2 vs Half Life 2? There's an order of magnitude difference if not 2. Also the price nowadays is the price of the first 3 chapters and you have to pay plenty more to get the full game, that's still kinda short. Then the fifa/2k games, that's an anuual subscription and not the price of a game so that comparison from yesteryear sucks. They really aren't better games this year to last and haven't been for a decade or more.

Pricing alone is only a part of this story. There's more to it that cannot be ignored if you want to make meaningful comparisons over time.

Taking pricing alone we would still expect the price to come down over time as the marginal cost of production of an extra unit of a game is approaching $zero and the market is vastly bigger now than 20 years ago. So maybe total revenue is a better thing to compare in 2020 dollars?

The good news is that if you stay a generation or two behind you get the good stuff, the hype bubble surrounding titles has dissapaited and it's a lot cheaper. The water-cooler aspect might be impaired for you but ymmv.

Yeah but there's a red queen problem with games. Better GPUs come out that enable more capabilities mean more work to fully take advantage of them. Those that do are more likely to sell a lot of games. Producing a AAA game is about two orders of magnitude more expensive than thirty years ago -- compare Super Mario 3 at $800k with GTA V at $130m.

Totally. Super Mario 3 is a lot more fun to play and cleverly executed. It's not even close.

Your math around pricing is wrong, it's not about how much it cost to make, it's about how much you'll pay to play it. Some people are willing to pay for quite little.

AAA games are more like AAA movies. But just like film, I find myself enjoying good TV more, which explains why I play smaller more procedural (ha, play on words) games.

>Your math around pricing is wrong

Well I doubt that. From a business perspective pricing is what you can get so you're saying OP is using the wrong model.

But using the "what the market will bear model" you would need to use a rate of inflation that reflects nominal growth in dispospal income of the customer segment with the lowest disposable income. Then go a little further becuase the size of that demographic may have changed and changed shape. Estimate the demand curve, the elasticity of demand then maximise revenue in the short term

Alienate your biggest customer base at your peril, as always. Short term revenue maximization is not necessarily long-term revenue maximization and is frequently at odds with such.

So yes the original naieve application of cpi to retail price leaves something to be desired.

I bought the original Street Fighter II the month it came out for SNES for $99 CAD (which at the time was ~$83 USD).

In all the previous generations the games were paid once off though. No DLC no loot boxes, no microtransactions. The price was final. Now you pay 60 and end up paying another 60 to fully enjoy the game.

I'm not sure if this is a minority opinion, but I'm happy to pay $70+ for AAA games. I'm currently playing through Last of Us II on PS4 and will have gotten 20+ hours entertainment from it, not to mention that it's just an incredible piece of art. Alongside that, during the last 3 months of Covid lockdown I've played countless hours of Call of Duty with my friends. $70 isn't that much of an investment for so much entertainment.

Of course the real question is whether or not you'll have to pay-to-play alongside your initial $70 investment. I'd rather pay more initially to have this trend disappear (which is unlikely).

I'd be interested to hear from people with more knowledge of the industry. As someone who only returned to video games "recently" (in the last 2 years) I've been astonished at the quality now on offer, but also shocked at the revenues of some of the companies are making, in particular revenue related to in-game purchasing (if I remember correctly, Activision are making ~1.8B revenue per quarter for example, the majority of which is from susbscriptions[1]).

[1] https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-d...

I'll pay $20 for a movie and be entertained for a couple hours. I've paid $90 for a collectors edition game and played 100's of hours (maybe a thousand or more).

They could charge $100 for a AAA game that doesn't have in-app purchases and I would pay it - if its something I think I'd enjoy a lot.

I remember in the 80's and early 90's there used to be a great shareware ecosystem with computer games. I'd really like to be able to play the game before deciding to spend $100 on it. As it is there are some games I buy that I just never get to play anyway due to time or lack of interest.

Game pricing needs an overhaul. It's very expensive to make big budget triple-A games, so a standard $60 doesn't necessarily make sense.

However as a cynical gamer, I see companies bumping the price up to $70 and changing nothing about their practices. So we'll now pay $70, and still get unsavory (and predatory) behavior such as lootboxes, day 1 DLC, etc.

This increase is just another argument to join the /r/PatientGamers and /r/GameDeals clubs and pick up games for a pittance years after release. I do this for most of my games aside from some multiplayer ones.

IMHO the sticker price for video games isn't all that relevant anymore, unless you definitely want to play a game on launch day.

The only thing that's weird is that there is a standard price to begin with.

Just wait for the next sale, or until the game gets discounted after a few months, whatever comes first. Eventually the price will adjust itself to what the customers think the game is worth (of course that price will never be above the standard price, so from the seller perspective it makes sense to set a high initial price).

The most I've spent on a game in the past several years was US$40 pre-tax on Half-Life: Alyx (it was on sale just recently). In other words, I'm definitely not buying games at launch because I so rarely feel the need to play anything now.

But that might change later this year: I suspect I might be buying Cyberpunk 2077 at full price within a couple weeks of launch if it gets good reviews.

A $10USD rise usually means a $15-20 rise here in Canada. Games here are already $79.99 which means with taxes a next gen console game is likely to be >$100 at launch - that's a psychological barrier I think that will be very problematic.

When games are discounted at least 25% within 3 months of release and 50% after 6 months isn't that uncommon, I wonder how launch day sales will be impacted by this change vs longer term sales.

Maybe they've done their sums and realized that the medium term sales would be boosted by this change more than launch day sales.

"Retail prices for major release (or “AAA”) games haven’t moved since Activision released “Call of Duty 2” for $60 back in 2005"

Google tells me inflation since then has been around 35% - is this really news? I feel like price memory trips people up, it would be nice to report a stable figure that doesn't become obsolete in a decade

Since 2005 games have been more or less cutting content and nearly every AAA title now has some sort of monetization other than the retail price, season passes, micro-transactions, DLC....

Call of Duty 2 had a 9 hour campaign and everything out of the box was free, there were two map packs costing $5 each and as long as one person in the lobby had it the entire lobby could play on those maps.

The latest CoD, Call of Duty Modern Warfare has a campaign length of 6 hours a season pass and micro transactions.

My friends and I just got back into CoD with the new modern warfare for the first time since mw3. While I've been annoyed by Blizzard's launcher compared to Steam, I haven't been too bothered by their season passes and stuff. I bought the game for $40 I think, and haven't felt a need to put another dime into it. In fact despite owning the full game, we spend quite a bit of time just playing the free to play mode.

Don't get me wrong, I'd rather they did away with all of it, but I don't get a sense that content was cut from the game in this particular case.

There have been many games giving you far more content for the same amount of money. And the amount of work to create the same amount of content had increased, the level of detail is far higher.

Some examples I have played include GTA V, Doom/Doom Eternal, Dirt Rally, Fallout 4, Red Dead Redemption 2, and the Uncharted series. There are lots of games that have far more content and detail then their predecessors, and still sell for $60.

Some of those games have additional monetization (ex. GTA online, Fallout 76), but I think if you just buy the game you still get a lot more than before.

There are so many entertainment options today. Far more than in 2005. Price increases may be met with more resistance for all but the most popular titles. Perhaps it's telling that it took 15 years for this price increase.

YoY growth of gaming market was at least as much, so it makes sense that the prices didn't go up.

At the same time I wish the production quality of games went up instead of the number of games (I feel the same with movies as well though).

Yeah shouldn't be news N64 games were around 50 bucks in 1997 which is ~80 dollars with inflation.

N64 games would go for 59.99 to 69.99 for 3rd party games if you bought it from Electronics Boutique or KB Toys for instance. I remember paying 69.99 before tax for Turok at Toys R Us on We release.

I vaguely remember $60 and (a limited amount of) $70 SNES games in the mid-90s (US)

I remember paying 64.64 after tax for Killer Instinct on the SNES when it was released. We were desperate to get it after release so not sure if that was lost price. Friend and I at the time took it as a nice sign for the upcoming Nintendo 64.

SNES games were more expensive to manufacture at the high end, having more powerful processors embedded in the cartridge than even existed in the console.

N64 didn't have any extra computation in the carts for the most part.

I will accept $70 under a few conditions:

1) You can't pack a full price game with hundreds of dollars of micro transactions and DLC.

2) Stop with the gambling box nonsense.

3) Stop hacking out uninspired, yearly squeals over and over by incrementing the number on the box by 1.

Agreed on all 3 points, but realistically - you know as well as I do that there's zero chance publishers will stop doing any of these things. :)

The only games where the sticker price matter are Nintendo games. Everything else gets discounted after release.

The "AAA" gaming industry seems unsustainable. Big budget games are getting more uninspired by the year and are mostly the same old games with identical game-play and mechanics with shinier graphics on top. They have become passionless assembly lines following a formula.

You'd think at some point people would stop caring so much about graphics. It's also such a huge portion of the cost. Smaller studios and indie developers can make nearly identical games without bleeding edge graphics technology.

One could argue that this is already the case. How many AAA games actually give you the full game for $60? Usually you need to buy a season pass to access the full content. Some of the most notable examples have included Mass Effect 3 which locked plot critical characters behind DLC. Total War: Rome 2 had $50 worth of DLC less than 1 year after launch, and their more recent Warhammer titles lock iconic factions like Chaos Warriors behind DLC.

"Worrisome"? Critics are never happy. Free to play game with option to buy features? Horrible scam by evil corporations! Expensive games that give you a lot of content up-front to recoup development costs? Robbery by evil corporations!

There are so many games out there, you can be entertained for a lifetime without ever needing to buy a recently released AAA game. Things cost what they cost, no one puts a gun to your head.

Really they’re right though.

There’s really little reason a game can’t be art assets slurped into a pipeline like devops employs.

Engine code itself needs to be performant, but from the perspective of “shipping a game”, asset management and build pipelines look ALOT LIKE a devops pipeline but offline.

There’s no artistic or technical reason open license content and, for example, Github actions, couldn’t leveraged to build a game pipeline.

Iterate over that until the results look AAA.

Emotional capture of attention by social norms is the only thing in the way.

Here we are though, accepting inflation as a real thing. Not saying much explicitly about the pressure on our buying power, effectively deflation, that creates.

Why not deflate their profits a bit, I wonder?

Gig artists are out there. Rules for RTS, FPS, and generative algorithms are all well known and documented. There’s literally no reason an open pipeline for compiling AAA games from crowd funded content couldn’t be a thing except for how we are expected to apply attention to such things

If your theory is correct then you (and only you) figured out a massive arbitrage opportunity - while all those deeply profit-oriented business people over at those game studios got it all wrong.

More likely though, your theory is just wrong.

If you want to create an "AAA" game with this production method, it'll take 10 years to complete and still look cobbled together like Frankenstein's monster in the end.

Also, you won't get very far with "devops infrastructure", or git, or github since you'll need to process a couple of terabytes of source asset data for each nightly build.

You need an experienced team which already has a couple of games under their belt for such an undertaking.

I'm fine with paying over $60 as long as the game is well made and does not contain non-cosmetic micro-transactions. I think the recent influx of micro-transaction-heavy games and incomplete games is a sign that the current standard triple-A price tag is too low and the developers are having to ship early or use other monetization schemes to support themselves.

As an avid gamer, the price increase I find a bit unsettling (especially since content is moving digitally - thus cutting several costs). Realistically, it's only a $10 increase, however, I feel the sticker price is approaching that point where I personally am at the "wait for sale" mindset. Not to mention that many games these days include a variety of gimmicks (loot boxes, micro transactions, cosmetics) to vacuum as much money out of the customers as possible. EA is notorious for this behavior so I am interested to see how this game in particular (NBA 2K21) is received.

Lately I've found myself purchasing more games on my PC as they frequently have sales and prices tend to be lower than the console equivalents. Of course my "gaming PC" was a bit more than a console, that doesn't seem to be the case anymore with some of these rumored prices coming out on the next gen systems.

> games these days include a variety of gimmicks (loot boxes, micro transactions, cosmetics) to vacuum as much money out of the customers

Do other people avoid video games these days for this reason? Perhaps it's a function of being busy, and generally liking other hobbies (like programming), but I just don't want to participate in a gaming world which is defined by this sort of economics. I understand it's more profitable, but it turns me away.

I certainly avoid games that put these trends front and center (even if free). Some games that I've purchased over the years, Destiny 2 for example, have changed their model completely and I find it saddening. The core game is now free (which I paid full price for) and all expansions (DLC) are paid. They also include paid seasonal content (4 times per year, 10 weeks in length, $10 each) where they introduce some (typically poorly received) content to grind out and some new items in their in-game real money market (Eververse). Typical items in the "Eververse" are $10+.

I hope these trends fade away over time although I am not expecting that to be the case with the profits some of these publishers are reporting.

FWIW, the NBA 2K game is not published by EA. But it is still full of micro transactions!

Bullshit. Every game released now has DLC, season passes, etc. on PlayStation you even have to pay a subscription to play online. Games are more expensive than ever befote with AAA titles easily surpassing $100 for a game including season pass and that doesn't even include all the DLC for many games now.

I remember when DLC started we all knee where this was going to end, and all the publishers and Microsoft went on and on how they would never piecemeal games and nickel and dime us.

What did we get? Disc locked DLC and when you find out they slap you with an EULA making datamining illegal. cough Destiny 1 with Activision /Bungee cough, and fames with upwards of $10 for a single skin!

And the worst of it all- loot boxes.

In what world do publishers think they deserve more money? They all dream of the day they can charge us per minute of play. We will be there soon enough.

There's also perceived value vs delivered value as well. I bought RDR2 for £30 as it seemed like a relative bargain for the gaming potential it'd deliver. I've put maybe 10 hours on it in 3 months.

Euro Truck Simulator was under a tenner, with the thought it might be a "play once, get bored" title, probably 40-50 hours into it.

As much as the numbers above are true, I'd still be unlikely to consider paying £30 for ETS, whilst still likely to buy RDR3 (whenever, wherever) for £50+. Perceived quality and potential payoff will win out, actual reality of playing that much game [0] be damned.

[0] I have neither the time nor patience to pour 100+ hours into a game any more.

"I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding."

-- https://twitter.com/Jordan_Mallory/status/127748375624544256...

(later immortalized in foone's death generator by https://twitter.com/moshboy/status/1278202555995090947)

I want infinitely long games with impeccable graphics made by people who live for nothing but their work. I'll also stop playing after the first ten minutes so I'll only buy the game at 90% discount.

I guess we'll have to meet somewhere in the middle.

Looking at Amazon's top PS4 games right now, the vast majority are under $35.

I wonder what % of gamers actually pay full price anyway. The next 12-24 months look like an insanely busy release schedule, with that long a backlog for many gamers I doubt many but the most hardcore of gamers will be picking up more than 1-2 titles at full price and many (most?) will be picking up games at more like 50% off, many (like me :) ) wait until the price dips below $20...

"Never pay more than $20 for a computer game" - Guybrush Threepwood.

I rarely get a game on first release anymore and usually wait until it’s on a huge discount sale. I don’t do multi-player, so lack of community isn’t an issue. $60 is just too much to gamble on whether or not I’ll enjoy or not, given that we’re just beta testers these days. If the price goes up even more, then that’s just incentive to quit altogether.

In the rare instance when I buy a AAA title, I wait a few months after release to save 25%. This saves me money and it also gives time for bugs fixes and balance patches to come out.

More often lately I have been buying $2.50-$20.00 PC classics from Steam or GOG that I never got play.

Also, every now and then Playstation Plus offers a good game for "free".

I think video games are moving more towards subscription based models (i.e. PlayStation Plus, Google Stadia, etc). And from a consumer standpoint, I think it makes sense given most people only really play through a game once.

$10 per month is a far easier sell than $60-70 a pop for one individual game.

I remember being horrified when Nintendo 64 games cost about £70 in the UK in the mid/late 90's. At the exchange rate back then that would have been just over $100.

But then I had been used to paying £9.99 for mainstream titles and £2-3 for budget titles for my ZX Spectrum!

Those were pretty darn expensive yeah, the cartridge format was a contributor.

I'm not a gamer by trade, but have played them in the past. Does the pricing differ if you're playing on Steam vs. buying the game outright?

Steam sells you the game outright as well so, no.

Steam is an online store. Maybe you’re thinking of Stadia?

I remember certain N64 games costing $70 at launch, notably Ocarina of Time.

With inflation, this is cheaper than the 90s.

Yeah but back then they actually had to make expensive physical hardware.

CDs are cheaper, and it's incredibly absurd that the download product, which has no production or shipping costs, is the same as the physical.

Think at this stage we're just paying for the IP, regardless of the distribution medium which is just absorbed into the price point. There's also probably an incentive to not undercut in-store sales which would expedite the demise of the game store.

Why does it have to be cheaper just because it's not physical? That's how the majority of people get games now.

Not only would getting a physical disk be a hassle compared to downloading, but I don't have a drive to put it in...

Downloads for consoles always felt like risky propositions.

They're DRMed. Once the console is no longer sold or supported, there's no store for you to connect to to validate or re-download your purchase. I don't feel comfortable with them living on an encrypted and unsupported hard disk partition.

Do you anticipate playing your games again in 15 years?

I like that I can play all of my old N64, Gamecube, and PS2 games on their original media.

I considered switching to mostly digital games for my Switch. Then I bought a Switch Lite for my daughter, and Nintendo's poor handling of digital titles when you own multiple consoles made me wish I had bought all of my titles physically. What we had to settle with: my daughter's Switch is the "primary console", and she can play any of the games I purchased digitally as her user, on her console. My Switch is the "secondary console", so I can only play my digital titles (a) as my own user, so my younger children have to play as my user rather than their own, AND (b) when I am connected to the internet, so I can't play digital titles in a car or on a plane. If I had gone with purely physical titles, I would have neither of those restrictions— and yeah, I do resent paying the same price for digital copies which are less useful.

Could be an early indicator that inflation is starting to really rise.

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