Nintendo [ARCHIVED] Video Game • Page 661

People value different prices and reasons to pay a certain price on certain games

This argument is not going to go anywhere. If you want to buy it, do it! If not, it's okay too. There's valid reasons for both for sure.

 

The Nier: Automata Steam port exists so idk why anyone would think SE would patch up FF9's Switch port for improvements

 

Also reality is games by and large are too cheap and it is hurting the industry but

 

They should patch that too. They should fix all of them. No excuse for shoddy port jobs of any kind.

 

Idk if I agree with this take, idk if I disagree with this take, but I feel like this is the kind of take I wanna hear more about

 

I'm gonna buy FF7 for the 11th time on switch because i'm an effing puppet and SE KNOWS IT.

 

Always been strange to me that people will happy spend £80 on a pair of jeans that were made in a sweat shop, but a game that 100 people have spent 3 years making, that's far too expensive!

 

Oh yay my other favorite pundit lmao

 

Games probably need to be more expensive to make the industry more sustainable but also people like Bobby Kotick and Andrew Wilson should not be making the salaries they make

 

The simplified version is: development costs have balooned, prices have stagnated or worse, the ”waiting for a sale” mentality has increased. Both gamers and the companies share blame in this, but whoever you decide to blame, the fact remains that it’s bad for the industry and games and thus gamers.

A lot has been written about this, in case you feel like searching.

 

If anyone thinks that raising prices on games would save the industry and convince publishers to abandon their current business practices regarding monetization and everything else, I have a bag of magic beans and some real estate on Mars I'm willing to sell you as well. This is a problem that's more sprawling than just the rising costs of development and the amount of money that executives make in relation to what they actually bring to the table.

 

People will spend £1000 on a phone, but £400 for a console?! blasphemy!

 

The difference is, the stagnating prices vs. balooning costs and so on are facts, whereas the “they would have done this shitty stuff anyway” is speculation.

 

Prices are not stagnating, that's absolutely ridiculous. Publishers don't just make $60 anymore on game sales, between season passes and microtransactions publishers are making more money now than they ever have before. They're doing just fine. ActiBlizz just boasted about record profits before laying off hundreds of workers anyway just to make a few dollars more.

The industry doesn't need any of us defending it, they're doing just fine as is.

 

People, pundits and fans, are already frantically prophesizing the end of the generation, when the facts are that the closest thing we have to a next gen console right now (One X) is seen as “too expensive!!!” even though it is sold as a loss. That’s not healthy.

 

This.

I mean, even more importantly than AAA games being underpriced is that indie companies, releasing games with dozens of hours of content or multiple modes and such, are constantly berated if they try to sell their games at a decent price. If it's not under $15 or something absurd like $5 people just give them shit.

 

You're having an awfully myopic view right now.

 

These new monetization practices largely came into play in response to outrage at the prospect of game prices going above 60$ (in responde to costs going up due to the HD era), at the beginning of the last gen. That they happened to be a goldmine for some (and bad news for those making games not suited to them) is another story.

 

Right. So why are you now lobbying for more expensive games when we already have fully priced $60 titles stuffed full of microtransactions and loot boxes?

Uh, how?

 

No. I never said that these monetization methods aren’t part of the bad things happening to the industry as a result of games being too cheap. In fact, they are part of these bad things, as they shift the industry’s focus on a more narrow range of games. This, although maybe profitable for some, for a while, is bad in the long-term. What should happen is that prices go up so that they can cut the crap. That won’t happen though, for many reasons, not just game companies. I’m not actually very optimistic about the future of the video games business. Never said I was. I just don’t like inaccurate (or semi-accurate), selective outrage.

 

Because you can't just look at a company like Activision and think that's indicative of the entire industry.

 

Publishers set prices, not developers. Indie devs that are self-publishing set their own prices and can charge what they feel they need to in order to make back their money. So, yeah, I'm talking about the major publishers, not the indies.

And anyway, it's possible to make plenty of cash in a fair way that doesn't take advantage of customers while also charging a reasonable price for the experience. Look at League of Legends. Look at Warframe. Those games are free and have widely respected monetization models. And they print tons of cash. Tell me why no AAA publisher can't follow those models and make plenty of cash doing it. Or some modified version of it at least.

You can't just uniformly raise prices and expect that to make things better, for either the consumer or the industry. This isn't a simple problem that can be solved with a blunt solution. It's just not feasible.

This isn't "selective outrage." I didn't even explicitly make this about the cost of the port in the first place, I just made a comment about how I wasn't willing to pay $21 for a lazy, tossed-off port when I already own a version of the game I enjoy. I'm outraged that SE is fine with the current state of these ports across all platforms and also that someone trying to inform the public about it is baselessly being accused of "grandstanding."

 

Anyway to refocus the discussion on the original point Square Enix turned in a lazy port job, not just on the Switch but on every platform, and Jason Schreier was totally justified in writing what he did. Calling out industry crap is not grandstanding, it's a journalist doing his job to keep people informed.

 

Fair enough, I personally just can look over minor issues like that. It's also possible they patch it, it has happened before. Just not often lol.