What is with these people?
They are CEOs of company’s, yet they don’t seem to understand how capitalism works. What’s something is worth is depending on what the market will bear. If the market won’t bear a $90 game then it isn’t worth $90.
It’s a double edged sword
The factors that influence development costs in order to keep up with the quality of the times is no doubt complex, but at the end of the day you’re spot on. It’s only worth what the consumers will pay.
The min wage and salaries in general should have increased with every generation. Me says.
When I first started working it was still back in the days where you were given cash in an envelope. After we were paid we always used to go out to a pub together for a few rounds, I rarely used to get through all of the change I’d been given, I never got into the paper money.
You used to be able to get a pint for silvers, these days you need to give them folding money for a bag of peanuts.
Capitalism and the free market is supposed to encourage efficiency and innovation in order to remain competitive in order to keep prices low… Is Sony against capitalism? Is it against the free market? Is in adverse to innovation? C’mon Sony … Stop being lazy.
Sony, Nintendo and Xbox are not true capitalism because their consoles are not free markets so of course they don’t like capitalism when they benefit from absolute control and can fix the prices for everything in their ecosystem.
The only true capitalistic store front is steam and funnily enough it’s doing laps around all 3.
Part of why steam is so successful is because they regularly do enormous discounts.
People come to steam because of how good the deals are but they end up buying quite a lot at full prices as well.
Yes, yes, and yes. By securing a monopoly you will have the highest possible profit at lowest possible investment. That is the ultimate goal of every publicly traded company.
I’ve recently decided that I’m not spending more than $10 on a game until I’ve cleaned out my backlog.
There’s hundreds of games in my backlog, so it’s going to be a while.
If anything Steam showed us thay 60$ game is a stupid idea. Free markets pay what they feel like paying and thats when creators and consumers are the happiest not with price controll.
Uhm, they have?
What do you mean? Our generous corporate overlords have kept the price steady for us at 60. We’re lucky they haven’t done scumbag things like a Deluxe edition for 80, a complete edition for 100, a ln ultimate edition for 120, an ultimate collector’s edition for 200, season passes for an extra 40, 10 different “micro” dlcs for 10 each, or cosmetic packs for 7 each. They’ve also definitely not cut content from the base game either!
N64 game prices were $60-75 back when the console came out in 1996… so no, they’ve been static for almost 3 decades.
But they production cost has gone way down with digital releases, no more shipping and inventory in many cases. Can reach way wider audiences with just internet. Plus all the kids that grew up gaming in the 90s now have money.
They made $2 billion in profits in 2023 in their gaming division. Sony can suck my tiny little dick dick, and I’ll even dip my nuts in soy sauce just so they can get a taste of home while they’re at it.
N64 games were upwards of 90-100 dollars for some.
The more expensive Sega Genesis games were $90.
I predict an increase in market demand for sea shanties.
It’s hard for me to imagine anyone buying brand new AAA games these days. Between the huge back catalogues of previous gen consoles as well as the PC and the insane prices for new AAA games which don’t innovate very much anymore, I can’t see much reason spend that kind of money.
I have a hacked New Nintendo 3DS and it can basically run every console emulator up to and including PS1 as well as natively run GBA, DS, and 3DS games. The library for the thing is enormous and with a 128GB microSD card you can store a ton of stuff on it.
Oh and it can also run DOSBox and SCUMMVM games though I haven’t tried them so I can’t vouch for the play experience. I should think the stylus would make a decent mouse replacement but I’m not sure how well it works in practice. Arcade-style DOS games that use the keyboard only (Duke Nukem, Crystal Caves, Commander Keen) should work great though!
From what I understand, with the 3DS, you had to get roughly ‘Version 1’ of those before they changed the actual hardware to make… basically ‘rooting’ it more difficult… or maybe I’m thinking of the Switch?
Either way, what I’m trying to say is basically ‘thats impressive’ if you were the one to actually uh… cough, install the sea shanties.
I went the easier route and just have a Steam Deck, and yep, they are perfect for emulating basically everything up to roughly current gen - 2… and most stuff within the last two gens can be made to run on it in some way…
… I was doinking about with the 3DS remaster of OoT earlier, and was actually very surprised to find that with my setup, the touchscreen… just worked as a 3DS touchscreen, I didn’t even think to intentionally configure it, accidentally poked the screen and oh well there ya go, lol.
Anyway, yep, we are absolutely gonna see a uh ‘return to tradition’ so to speak, as many high budget high fidelity modern games… basically suck, and are outrageously expensive.
As to a stylus as mouse for DOSBox and SCUMVM… i don’t know what the actual software configuration solution would look like there, but if the touch screen is high enough dpi dense… then it should at least conceptually work, as most of the games from that era that use a mouse are like, point and click adventures.
The one I have is called the “New Nintendo 3DS XL” and it has a much faster CPU (804MHz Arm 11) compared to the original 3DS (268MHz Arm 11). While the CPU difference doesn’t matter for running DS or 3DS games (apart from a handful of games written specially for the New 3DS) it makes a big difference running the more intensive emulators (such as the PS1).
When I got mine it had the very last version of the 3DS operating system installed (Nintendo still maintains the update servers even though the eshop is shut down). Yet the instructions for the hack were easy enough to follow and I had no trouble getting up and running.
The Steam deck is an attractive option too though. The main reason I got into the 3DS is because my friend bought 2 of them and gave one to me so we could both do the hack and play lots of games and discuss them. I think the main reason to really prefer a 3DS comes down to form factor: if you really like the folding case, the stylus, and the dual screen setup (which really shines for many games in the massive DS/3DS library) then you’re not gonna get an optimal experience with the single-screen Steam Deck. I think in particular the stylus really matters for puzzle games which demand higher tap precision than you can comfortably achieve with a fingertip.
Damn, yeah, thats like ~3x more MHz, that is quite a jump from the earlier version!
And yeah, no argument whatsoever that even a big 3DS can fit in a pocket, whereas a Deck is… roughly as transportable as a laptop, its gonna need a case or bag or go into a backpack.
And also again no argument that the dual screen thing is a very neat configuration with a lot of potential use cases.
I can get the dual screen emulation of a 3DS working on a Deck, but yeah it is weird doing it by basically drawing two windows on one screen.
And of course… can’t do the whole stereoscopic thing either, not without some actual 3d glasses to emulate the old red/green red/blue anagraph thing, and it wouldn’t have the same viewing angles.
See, I think there are a lot of points going toward a hacked/modded 3DS of some kind vs a Deck… unlike for a Switch/2 vs a Deck.
A 3DS is actually significantly cheaper, has all that real portable form factor stuff going for it, and sure it cant top out as high as a Deck in performance terms, but if you don’t want or need that, or prioritize the pure portability more, or you just prefer stylus type games or slightly older/pocket games… its definitely a solid choice.
You are basicslly getting your max bang for buck at a lower price point / different priority situation, and… having built a lot of custom PCs… yeah, its all about finding those sweet spots of sorts of tiers of capability at the lowest price point.
Either way, glad that you are repurposing instead of consuming next product!
Nintendo fans and Valve fans do not have to hate each other, lol.
(EDIT: Although technically, on a Deck, you can futz with Steam Input to set up a turbo clicker for those stylus puzzle games… but that is basically cheating lol)
Yeah I don’t hate Valve fans at all. I have a Steam account myself with a decent library that I play on my laptop.
I had no clue whatsoever about the hacked 3DS ecosystem until my friend basically dragged me into it by buying the consoles (refurbished actually)! Once I started learning about the scene I really got impressed with what the small homebrew community accomplished. In addition to emulators and some homebrew games, there are also a number of utilities in the scene. You can run an FTP server on the hacked N3DS and just bulk copy over files via wifi rather than having to pull the microSD card and sneakernet it to your PC. There’s also a program called universal updater which is a package manager of sorts that makes it easy to download and install emulators and other apps quite easily.
Of course none of this is as smooth and convenient of an experience as installing Steam games would be on a Steam deck, though I’m sure if you’re into emulators you’ll have to use other tools to get those installed anyway.
My friend and I are currently playing through some classic NES RPGs which we’d previously overlooked. The N3DS has pretty good battery life, lasting about 10-12 hours on a full charge; far more battery life than I have time to spend gaming in a day anyway (due to my job). The standby time is good but not great, knocking off maybe about 10% battery per day while sleeping. Lastly, a big plus for me is that replacement batteries are available through iFixit. I bought 2 of them and the install process is very easy (just a couple of screws and you’re in).
My hope is that iFixit will continue to make replacement batteries available long term. That could potentially allow my N3DS to last decades into the future, barring premature capacitor failure or some unfortunate accident.
I think the N3DS really shines as a dedicated older emulator (NES/SNES/SEGA/GBC/GBA) machine and it may be very hard to beat if you’re like me and prefer those older games. For newer games, especially PC games of the last decades or PS2/GameCube/Wii/Switch emulators, the N3DS is just not an option. I am looking forward to playing the Majora’s Mask remaster (written specifically for the 3DS) however!
Damn, all that is great info and much of it is news to me as a PC centric gamer person!
Like, I’m starring this for myself, for future reference.
I had no idea n3ds homebrew OS had gotten to the point you can run an FTP server on it, I knew PS3 had gotten to that point, but still, damn!
Yeah I mention the Nintendo vs Valve thing because… well, lately, there has been a lot of online screaming centered around the Switch 2 and a lot of Nintendo’s business practices, a whole lot of Nintendo fans on Xwitter just fucking hate Deck users, its been a whole genre of harvestable slop for youtubers for months now.
Wasn’t trying to imply you personally partook in any of that, I just wanted to exemplify that… level headed people from basically somewhat different fanbases/knowledge sets/ tech backgrounds can in fact have level headed discussions, without becoming tribalistic.
Always proud to see someone else pursuing their own useful specialized skill set, always ready to learn from someone who isn’t obviously blowing smoke up my ass, haha!
Anyway yeah, I am currently in the process of building a huge rom lib for my Deck… so far I’ve filled up about 350 gb of a 512gb sd card… internet archive still has a fuckton of working, downloadable collections, I’m grabbing as much as I can before we get an even harder crackdown.
Nope, not going to argue against obviously dumb points from executives. Do it. Raise your prices yearly. Fuck it, you think prices need to increase? Increase them.
It takes me five clicks to close Steam, open Firefox, open my favorite piracy site and download your game. Raise the fucking price, test how much I value my money versus five clicks.
Well if they’re gonna charge those prices, they’re probably gonna opt for Denuvo and then we can’t pirate it. But if enough of them do it, then we might see a concerted effort into breaking denuvo
There’s a handful of people out there cracking Denuvo games.
Lol
The longer they take to lower the price of their game, the longer it takes me to buy it.
This just shows execs do not understand why piracy diminished
“There were more sports cars in the parking lot in the PS1 era than there were in the PS4 era, …"
dude, fuck you, your parking lot and i wish that giant acme anvils drop on every fucking sports car you’ll ever own.
I’m pretty sure the few overpaid execs that are “fuck you” rich are still there, and they’re probably richer than ever. However now they probably consider themselves too important to park with normal people. It’s all about private jets and helicopters.
Tells a lot about this guy and his ilk that he thinks you measure a healthy company to how many assholes actively flaunt their money with shallow luxury shit.
Um… show us how the salaries of game devs have risen compared with game prices?
“No” -John PlayStation
You can price your game however you want. But it doesn’t mean I need to buy it. I still have a choice.
Not sure about the future where we will work for corporations for free and they will pay us with products we don’t want, because we’re heading this road pretty fast.as well as my salary. but it didnt.
One factor they don’t seem to consider is that they are competing for a finite resource: consumer attention.
There has never been so much content to consume: not only games, movies, series, music, books, podcasts, and even old games.
New games have to compete with and stand above all that content to justify the price.
As others have said, purchase power is down, people subscribe to more services (net, mobile, streaming music and video), all that bites into the available budget to buy games.
Bottom line: it’s getting hard to justify spending that amount on a game you don’t have time to play.
yea, cant justify the orignal switch and shtty swsh games, and then theres the new switch too.
Yeah it’s hilarious to me they wanna charge more and don’t expect to sell less. Ppl would go from being iffy about indie games to checking them out more if 4 at base price cost what a AAA one does
