Oblivion was The first AAA game to have microtransactions and now Oblivion Remastered could possibly be the last AAA game to be priced at $50-60 dollars.
with the Switch 2 being a success, we could see a rise in prices for all AAA Games. to 80-90 dollars
WHEN games do inevitably become 80-100 dollars, I’ll definitely be buying more Indie games
very true. a bunch of years ago I was suddenly too broke to stay on the bandwagon and fell off for a few years.
I got into that whole “patient gamer” community, where people would stumble across 5+ year old games on deep discount and share those titles.
nowadays I am on surer footing, but see no reason to chase the eternal hype wagon. not only are older games cheaper, they don’t require me to upgrade my shit and any stability or compatibility issues are long sorted.
I just got Far Cry 4 for $5. it’s pretty fun and runs great lol.
meanwhile my gaming friends–who game are all fucked financially–and are tripping all over themselves to give what little cash they have to these asshole companies for hardware upgrades and/or to download buggy betas and spend the afternoon trying to to get all the cutting edge DRM and driver updates to load some game that they’re probably just going to get mad at and quit playing after 20 hours.
of course, there are also all the Indy games that are cheap and fun too.
there’s something really sad, stupid and insidious about how consumer commodification has degraded the pursuit of a desirable gaming experience to be less important than the appearance of having had a gaming experience aka FOMO. far too many people are out there, completely miserable in their gaming experience, so they can represent themselves as consuming games correctly.
the notion of asking oneself what one wants to get out of a gaming experience and then seeking satisfaction is somehow eccentric.