At this point I'm just not buying anything by the dumpster fire that used to be Blizzard.
Or to spend them elsewhere: https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v12/. (No games there yet, but I hope they can be added.)
and according to your interpretation stealing a car seems "not a big deal" because it comes after a murder. (They are disconnected events, so to relate them is just a mental perspective - their gravity is independent. There is no «priority» forgiving your actions, it is no excuse).
In my above example I would be guilty of both murder AND stealing cars, so yeah, I think the murder part would be a much bigger deal.
Which is irrelevant, because it does not reduce the absolute value of the other crime.
"Y is a much bigger deal than X" cannot produce "X is not a big deal".
When you pay your devs 50k per year while requiring 60-80hr work weeks, experienced devs aren't going to apply. Young, inexperienced devs fill the roles instead and make junior dev mistakes all over the place.
Once you move to subscription models, you can update games rather than constantly hype the next version. You have more consistent revenue streams and can give incentives to your devs to stick around. Valve doesn't quite have a subscription model (they make their money from their store), but does show how long-term devs working on the same game for many years gives excellent results.
As much as I dislike the idea of not owning games, I suspect it is the future, but the overall quality will go up as a result.
> Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today)
Again not my area. So these are observations:
> there is a way bigger market than 1993
> there are different business models now
> gaming engines are widely developed
> software tooling has vastly improved
Sure things like server/infrastructure cost now must be accounted for. I just dont think its that fair of a comparison. Doom was a packaged AAA title for $60. You can definitely produce a game for that price today and effectively the price is like $100 after online and dlc and all this other junk.
Except the number of people with the skills to make games has increased (which depresses gamedev salaries), the tooling to make and publish games has become cheaper (or outright free with tools and engines like Blender, Krita, and Godot), and the overhead costs of physically publishing and distributing a game have been largely eliminated by digital publishing. To top it all off, the amount of competition in gaming has increased, which drives down prices. If anything, games should be even cheaper. And in the indie scene they usually are
As they say: Cheap, fast, and good -- pick two.
With a larger talent pool and all the hard problems already solved, you'd expect games to INCREASE in quality with fewer bugs and issues. If they threw cheap out the window and were charging $200, they could hire and retain experienced talent who would make far fewer mistakes and the quality would increase dramatically.
EDIT: To address number of people further, lets say there are 100x more talent now than in 1993. If 5 people developed Doom and 500 people are needed for a modern AAA title, then the effective supply to demand ratio hasn't changed.
Speaking of markets, doom 1 sold 4M copies. The best selling hardcore gamer game is grand theft auto V with 155M copies sold.
That’s a bit less than 40x the number of sales for doom (next best is red dead redemption 2 at 39M or 10x). 9 people in total developed doom. 1,000 people worked in GTA-V. They also worked many more years.
That’s over 100x more people and probably 500x the total development time for just 40x the sales. If you look into red dead’s numbers, I’m positive they look far worse than that.
GTA-V would need to cost $300+ to match the profit margins of doom if people were getting paid the same. Of course, they get paid peanuts for the “privilege” of working on some megacorp’s game.
This is the differance. This is why so many companies pump games full of microtransactions. They don't care about the average player spending 60 dollars on the game. They want the 1 in 100 or 1000 or 10000 whales who spend 2500 to 50K on the game.
Very certainly not. Some people are probably perverts as you indicate. Others are just outraged legitimately, making it a statement and acting accordingly.
So, no, some people will not accept being part of it.
> People ... yet they will and do continue to buy
You are fighting a strawman if you focus on those few or many that pollute the market. And you seem to be supporting both a polluted market and its supporters.
And it's an easy sell for investors too: release in a couple more countries and 'hey, sales doubled, everyone loves it!!'
There's plenty of indie quality out there, but it's immensely drowned out by the top end in marketing, influencing and availability.
Once I run out of PS3 games I'll pick up a PS5 and work through the PS4 games that were actually worth it.
It's nice to see lately that Steam is providing more demos, which should have been a thing all along, but the logic that demos is bad (and how they disappeared largely some time ago) is only a benefit for those wanting to shovel crap out.
Blizzard used to make awesome games that were fun to play. They came up with some of the most enduring game franchises, and their games are still classics. Now, not so much. Actually, not at all. It's all just repetitive shite based on the same old tired universes.