You won't like hearing this, but video games must become more expensive. When I was little, my dad got me a PlayStation 2 for christmas, but without any games. My mum was very generous and took me out to pick two games for it. They were 60€ each. Nowadays you would call those full-price games. But now, 20 years later, a full-price game is still about 60€. If you correct that for inflation, it should really be 86€ now. And that's not even covering the fact that games have massively increased in visual fidelity, which is much more expensive to produce. If you don't want games to be littered with microtransactions or ads, then you have to accept that a regular video game must be at least 90€. (98 USD, 77 GBP, 149 AUD, 134 CAD) #Gaming #GameDev #GameDevelopment #Steam #Inflation #Economy #PlayStation
Can't wait to buy the next installment of insert sports game here/call of duty for 100 USD base, 200 for the dlc, maybe even 300 for the ultimate deluxe extreme version.
What if I told you games are actually priced efficiently for the current market? They don't want the games to be more expensive because fewer people will buy them. They want microtransactions because they make more money with them then they would if games didn't have them but were more expensive. The true desire of publishers is to have both expensive games and microtransactions. The market will eventually shift to have both, you're already seeing it in some cases like MWIII. Once they hit the limit with microtransactions, they will raise prices on the base game. Don't worry.
There was a time period in my country where games (especially brand new triple A releases) could be up to the equivalent of $90 USD. As a result, people bought fewer games and pirated a lot more, so they had to reduce their prices because charging more was causing them to actually make less profit.