Can’t remember the last time I paid over $30 for a game and didn’t immediately regret it.

Meanwhile, I paid $5-10 for The Longest Journey 15 years ago and I still think of that game like every week.

This is the inevitable result of the non-fixed prices neolib corporate dipshits keep complaining about when they say games shouldn’t be pegged to $60USD and so on. Having fixed tiers of expected prices limits how much people are going to do this with games because there’s a wider gambit of games/game lengths per price tier. $60, big game; $40, medium game; $20 and under, small game.

Games have continued to find success in the middle ground – this year’s $50

$50 used to be the full price for AAA games.

but it can be “trickier to win” in this price range if a game lacks that dirt-cheap or mega-brand appeal.

How is that mega-brand appeal going? Is’ln’t the reason for these articles that the franchises are underperforming? It seems to me like a pretty obvious consequences of pushing the life service model that people who are still mainly playing AAA are buying fewer games.

To me it’s also a bit weird that Expedition 33 is considered an Indie game. 30 people studio + contractors and funding through a publishing company is really pushing the definition. Yes there is a difference to games made under EA or Ubisoft but that’s not the right language to describe it.

According to the article, the median average is down, but the mean average is not. Therefore, while some games are indeed cheaper, the bit the article leaves out is that some are also not, and some are actually more expensive. It’s hard to draw massive unqualified conclusions from what looks like fairly noisy averages.

The other point the article makes about big discounts on Steam sales isn’t quite true any longer and isn’t backed up by any provided data. I don’t think the massive discounts from the early to mid 2010s happen quite in the same way any longer, and a quick glance at price trackers suggests that many games haven’t matched or beaten their historic lows in years.

It has to be so incredibly difficult to make a competitive (in the market) video game these days.