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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

The price of ~~content~~ games is too damn high!

Basically this, the cost for a AAA game at ~$69.99 is just fucking ridiculous.

AAA games take thousands of hours of labor from huge teams to create. When you consider how much work goes into it, $70 seems like a bargain. Also, if you account for inflation these kinds of games are cheaper now than they've been for most of gaming's history.

In practice, however, many games fail to break out of super basic gameplay loops. I usually prefer cheaper indie games where I have more fun.

There were 70 USD games in the 90s. Yeah those were cartridge games but still, it’s probably the sector were inflation has been felt the least.

In the 90s I didn't have to give Rare $5 to play as oddjob, and another $5 to make heads big, and another $5 to fight slaps only, and another $5 to.....

That's the difference. Those games were $70 because the ROM chips nintendo forced you to use were basically unavailable at sufficient quantities. Playstation games were cheaper despite being able to use literally 10x the amount of assets.

The only people forcing AAA studios to add a billion polygons to every stick are themselves. They haven't tried anything different, so of course they think it's the only option. Meanwhile billions of dollars a year go to people who spent $10 on an asset in the unity store to back up a game that actually is interesting.

Actually, even worse, they often AREN'T wasting millions on assets. Grand Turismo 7 has plenty of cars that are just copy/pasted from the previous release.

And my salary was $6.72 cents./hr at 16 years old. *1993*

Compare that to today.

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