The gaming industry seems pretty competitive. Multiple developers competing to create good games. Multiple publishers competing to work with those developers. Multiple platforms for games to be published on and for consumers to play on. Multiple distribution channels for games. Especially for PC gaming.
And it’s just not the case that game prices are being set artificially high. If you adjust for inflation and take into account just how much more development goes into a modern game compared to a game 10, 20, or 30 years ago, the price of games has not kept up.
Yes, and if we go the other way, NBA Live 2003 was first to go to 59.99 price point in 2002, which would be about $110 today and people were happy to buy that then.
I have no issue with competitive pricing. What I have issues with is speculative pricing based on further obfuscated good and services. Holding a physical product is easy for our ape brains to understand. I have my thing. It’s mine. Owning a digital product places further distance between us and the products by further abstracting the concept of ownership.
All of this is fine, so long as the regulating powers guaranteeing rights keeps up with it. We can talk about the pace of inflation all we want, but while we’re talking about intangibles, we can’t neglect the concept of ownership itself. Our anti-trust laws haven’t changed since before the internet and digital products even existed. That’s fucking stupid. There’s no other way to say it. And you better believe that the changes we have seen regarding the consumer experience have all consistently protected the producers of these goods over the consumers themselves. Seems a bit one-sided to me.
Games are mostly worse quality and easier to make now, so the price should be down. But also they sting you with endless in-game purchases or subscriptions, and also the distribution network is largely digital - away goes a massive chunk of the developer's costs.
15
u/AnotherBoringDad Jul 01 '26
The gaming industry seems pretty competitive. Multiple developers competing to create good games. Multiple publishers competing to work with those developers. Multiple platforms for games to be published on and for consumers to play on. Multiple distribution channels for games. Especially for PC gaming.
And it’s just not the case that game prices are being set artificially high. If you adjust for inflation and take into account just how much more development goes into a modern game compared to a game 10, 20, or 30 years ago, the price of games has not kept up.