And on the American website, the MSRP is $80, with no distinction made between digital and physical yet.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe MSRP at release (and also still now) was $60. Since the previous Mario Kart game they increased the price by 50%. That’s fucking insane.
Also, hot take, I don’t give a fuck about inflation; Games should cost less now than they did 20 years ago. The audience is bigger and the per unit cost is lower. You can make more money releasing the exact same game now than you could 20 years ago. They should cost less.
“Oh but ClimateChangeAnxiety, games cost more to make now!” No they don’t. You’re choosing to spend more to make them. You’re choosing to hire larger teams to make larger games with better graphics. Don’t do that. Make them the same way you did in 2010.
You have better tools now, you can make the same products you made in 2010 with less labor today. Do that. And charge less.
I want shorter games with worse graphics and I’m not kiddingI’ll take longer games with even worse graphics pls
Reject modernity, retvrn to ASCII. Your brain does the translating. I don’t even see the letters. All I see is tree, zombie, plump helmet.
Caves of Qud is
I keep getting all the pieces together to make myself OP as hell then dying by basically slipping on a banana peel.
It’s so good.
People say this and then the shorter games with worse graphics are mocked and sell poorly
I don’t think the people saying this and the people buying assassin’s creed in 2025 are the same group of people.
I am not concerned with sales numbers or the opinions of g*mers
I miss the PS2 era.
The video game industry is bigger than Hollywood. Imagine if they were charging $90 for a BluRay.
Step away from the lathe
The audience is bigger and the per unit cost is lower. You can make more money releasing the exact same game now than you could 20 years ago. They should cost less.
How’re those poor executives gonna buy a third yacht? Gotta buy back stock with that excess capital to drive up prices for
their own stock optionsshareholders, did you ever think of that“Oh but ClimateChangeAnxiety, games cost more to make now!” No they don’t. You’re choosing to spend more to make them. You’re choosing to hire larger teams to make larger games with better graphics. Don’t do that. Make them the same way you did in 2010.
You have better tools now, you can make the same products you made in 2010 with less labor today. Do that. And charge less.
Outside of niche games and genres, those would sell poorly. Mainstream consumers will absolutely not accept stagnation. This argument always comes up with regards to game franchises that had their heyday 10-20 years ago, and the answer is the same. A lot of those games had mechanics, progression skips, and glitches that would be considered unacceptable in the modern market. That was fine back then as the internet and YouTube were no where no where near as big as they are today, so the knowledge of game breaking progress skips, extremely overpowered builds, and glitches was contained through obscurity. You had to either phone a hotline (remember those) or go on a niche internet forum to find out about these things. That’s not possible anymore, someone will post a YouTube video within 24 hours of the latest exploit and it would be all over the internet within a few days. I say this as someone who is a huge fan of those older games and still plays them today.
The only series I’ve seen revive itself by making the same kind of game it made 15 years ago was Ace Combat, a niche franchise that was in a poor situation in the first place, because it tried to enter the mainstream and failed with it’s Call of Duty clone with airplanes game.
And besides that, the Switch and Switch 2 is already a constrained platform. Most flagship smartphones are more powerful than the Switch 2. Nintendo is the only party around making games under such hardware constraints. That’s because ever since the GameCube, they failed to compete against PlayStation and Xbox on the processing power front. So Nintendo competes in hardware niches, motion control with the Wii, and the portable factor with the Switch. Nintendo is the company making games with the technical complexity of those made 5-10 years ago. So if they’re charging more, that means the industry is in big trouble. GTA 6 $100?
And to be completely honest, this stuff (consumer electronics and video games) has always been that expensive outside of the western/first world sphere. Cheap consumer goods in the western world is possible because of globalised neoliberal capitalism, a system that is now dead. The 2009 financial crisis was the big blow, and afterwards Obama, Merkel, Macron, Cameron, Abe, they all tried to revive this system and failed. COVID and the resulting inflation was the death knell. The Trump administration in the USA is trying to lessen the blow (for the USA) by taking direct control of the world’s oceans and key points, along with tarrifs. If consumer electronics are considered expensive now, just wait for what the next decade has in store. So many potential flashpoints.
I don’t agree. Maybe 2010 was a stretch, that’s still PS3/360 time, but let’s say 2013/2014 instead, early PS4 era.
I’ve been replaying GTA V and Wolfenstein: The New Order recently and outside of some UI and QoL changes I think those games could be released today and be hugely successful.
Obviously GTA V was, at the time, basically the new record for size and scope, but that record has been beat since and didn’t have to be.
Now you’ve got me interested in looking at this so I’m gonna go down the list of big games released those years and see how we feel about them. I really hope this doesn’t come off as me being a dick I just got curious and wanted to see.
2013
GTA V - Totally could release today with mild UI and QoL changes.
CoD: Ghosts - AFAIK CoD games have not changed that much.
FIFA 2014 - Come on.
Battlefield 4 - Not sure on this one, barely played it and haven’t played any battlefield games since
AC Black Flag - Assassins Creed format has changed because people got bored of it, but not in a way that requires more labor, they just changed the gameplay some.
The Last of Us - They literally just rereleased this game in 2022.
Tomb Raider (2013) - Gameplay is stale by now but as far as graphics, size, and scope go holds up fine.
2014
Not gonna go through these ones individually, aside from GTA V (again) none of these games would do well today but not because of technical limits and labor spent on graphics, but because they just aren’t very good games. They weren’t good in 2014 either, and most of the ones in a series sold worse than the one before.
Fifa 15
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
Titanfall
Grand Theft Auto V (PS4 and Xbox One release)
Destiny
Watch Dogs
Minecraft: Xbox Edition
Fifa 14
Far Cry 4
Assassin’s Creed: Unity
2015
Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Could totally release today.
Metal Gear Solid V - Could totally release today.
Bloodborne - Absolutely.
Super Mario Maker - Weird one but for sure.
Fallout 4 - Starfield looked worse, ran worse, and was worse in pretty much every aspect except for how the guns felt. Starfield sold decent, but was critically panned. Fallout 4 could be released today as it was on launch and probably do better than Starfield did.
Rise of the Tomb Raider - Same applies as 2013 Tomb Raider.
Until Dawn - Was recently rereleased, holds up perfectly fine.
Splatoon - Would do perfectly fine released today.
Cities Skylines - Still the best and most popular city builder there is, but I also do think city builders are one of the few genres that do still have a lot of room for technical improvement.
Very few of those would do poorly now aside from the fact that their core gameplay is a bit stale now, but that’s not something that requires more labor and increasing scope, that’s just trends.
In the top 10 best sellers list on the USA switch store right now, #1 is a game from 2015, #4&7 are games from 2016, and #6 is a game from 2014.
I was shocked how good MGSV still was when I went back to replay it recently, and many people consider Until Dawn’s remake a downgrade compared to the original in most things but graphics.
MGSV is still my personal GOAT, as far as single player aaa games go at least I don’t think its been seriously challenged in terms of scope and depth and quality.
but it costs server money to run our panopticon skynet skinchanging marketplace to sell your data
Also the fuck you mean 90? We just jumped up from 60 to 70 a couple years ago. You can try 80 in 2030.
“You’ll buy it anyway” and its consequences.
every game company wants to increase the base price of aaa games
Nintendo will do it first, giving everyone else cover to follow
by next year it will be accepted for aaa games to cost $80 and have a $120 deluxe edition and a $60 season pass
not surprising tbh
I hope that console will be cracked fast, those prices are completely stupid.
Dorks on reddit already crying about people talking about piracy on the switch 2. I’m not even considering touching the thing until I can mod it, paying 80$ a game is not happening lol.
Lol.
Don’t forget to check the emulation thread!
i dont think my computer will be good enough to run it :(
Lol, lmao even. And to make things even more expensive, regular microSD cards won’t work with Switch 2 games, so if you run out of internal storage you’ll have to get a microSD Express card, and those are more than twice as expensive. What a shitload of fuck.
If the switch 2 isn’t a catastrophic failure, the price of games is going to skyrocket
Wishing a very Dreamcast
How did we just get to a point where we collectively allowed even digital games to cost this much
Like, that’s incomprehensible. I think the ubiquitous digital age of everything is what fried people’s brains, not Trump
The immortal science probably has a better explanation though
Everyone made fun of horse armor. Everyone also bought horse armor.
Also worth remembering the time that Microsoft forced Valve to charge money for new Left for Dead maps that were free on PC.
It’s like when I used to play madden/nba games as teen, nearly everyone complained about getting the same game every year but gladly paid nearly 100 hundred bucks for nothing but roster upgrades
Like this is obviously small potatoes in the scope of things but why do people behave this way about all services that objectively fuck them over
Plenty of us bought it as a joke!
“haha check it out guys, I just bought an expansion pack for a single player game that cost $2. This is gonna blow up in their faces so hard.”
And it did blow up in their faces - which is to say a minor PR dip wisped past them and then a huge pile of minimal-effort cash blew up into their faces.
So that is to say, I’m sorry future generations. We thought it would turn out funnier than this. :(
See, shit like this is why Bad Rats got two sequels.
Pro controller with broken D-pad and no analog triggers? 90 dollars, Ned!
Everyone forgets that there were n64 games for $70 bucks back in the 90s.
Also adjusting for inflation, Atari games were $120.
What made games get less expensive out of curiosity?
Gotta be economics of scale and disc media. Cartridges and older media were much more expensive by comparison and had limited production runs.
Suddenly compact disc comes along and dozens of manufacturers are printing them for pennies at a time with production lines that could scale up or down as you required.
The readers and the tech behind them was ubiquitous and even for the added complexity, you only needed one disk reader on each console, whereas carts had a bunch of redundant hardware that had to be copied for thousands upon thousands of copies.
Now digital copies are even cheaper, and disk drives are less space and speed efficient so print runs are scaling down and manufacturers are charging more. All the while, physical access to software has tangible downsides to publishers such as sharing games and making copies (since drives are, again, ubiquitous) so they’re frontloading the price of physical games to offset this reality.
Games sold for the most part. Baldur’s Gate 1 sold 2.2 million copies over 5 years, Baldur’s Gate 3 sold that during early access and over 10 million in less than a year. First Call of Duty sold 5 millions while the newer ones sell 30 millions. OG resident evil 2.7 million, newest resident evil 10 millions.
Once you’ve made a game the cost of producing another copy is pretty much just the cost of the physical disk and shipping and distribution. Like the biggest cost is labor from developers but once it’s made you can and should makes as many copies as possible.
I’m sure there are a lot of factors, but shifting away from cartridges was a big cost cut.
I looked up PS1 game prices and apparently they were about $50 which was about $100 in todays money. I remember $50 being the price of some of the bigger Wii games back when I started gaming and the $60 price point was the norm for a while. Kinda interesting how games seemed inflation proof.
most likely RAM/ROM prices at the time (probably a natural disaster caused a shortage that screwed anyone not using CDs like PS/PS2). Also CDs were significantly cheaper even if there were no supply chain issues. I actually think most games were sold for $50 USD, it’s just that the outliers that cost more are a mix of first party games and games where at least the publishers thought they were better than everyone else.
Emulators take my energy destroy the pikamario company
This is going to sell like hotcakes because everyone and their mothers loves Mario Kart. Nintendo will shut down any emulator attempt and every game will be $80 now. Kinda a miracle that games were about $60 for a decade.
Also everyone that says they will hold out will buy it launch day.
doomer mindset (i believe they’ll go to 78.99 instead)
Its not on the card. Physical is just a bit of plastic for collectors.
Right, maybe I should edit the title to metaphysical
Im serious. The switch 2 might as well be digital only
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/68415/kw/switch 2
This isn’t anything new and it’s still only for a handful of games. Otherwise they wouldn’t be talking about the new cartridges having faster data transfer
This doesn’t make sense to me. The costly part of producing a game is making the cart, copying the data to it is so cheap it’s almost free. How on earth do they economically justify this, and why am I absolutely certain it will work and spell the end of game carts actually containing game data?
It could be useful to clearly delineate between games that fit on the cartridge and games that are too big for it and require an additional download, but the only game confirmed to use this is Bravely Default so I have no idea.
Besides collecting, the actually important difference is that physical allows to resell the game, or to buy it second hand.
Would be a shame if somebody hacked the new Switch and torrented the file.
