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The video game industry which loves to "anchor" us with $160.00 fake currency purchases and other predatory mafia casino behavior "Anchored" us on $70 games. boohoo imho

Ask Troy if the audience/haters will be okay with NFT's. :P

such a well behaved and happy baby.

Am I the only one whose never played gta lol

For me personally, developers have already lost me as a customer. Here in Australia it’s been around $120-125 AUD for brand new games. 🤢 And that’s just too much for me, so now I just wait until someone throws it up on Facebook Marketplace secondhand for $50 (I’m still die-hard on my physical media). There’s no shortage of people who will buy a game day 1 just to smash it out over the weekend and sell it on. The day that console makers kill the disc completely will be a very sad day for me indeed. And you know they will, because it’s just another way to squeeze us for cash.

Can the Troy pillow get it's own Camera and box on the screen? :)

You Gotta love Ben calling himself a 4, when he’s clearly a 10. He’s just the best ❤

This whole conversation just shows how ridiculous the entire concept of money is in the first place We should go back to thr barter system.

Super relevant after the ps5 pro blunder

The gang discovers project management :D It's called the "critical path" and requires doing a backward and forward pass of the plan. The problem also comes from trying to factor iteration into the plan. This is why agile is so common in software companies and partly why everything became subscription based.

Accounting for inflation, games are cheaper now than they've ever been. A typical N64 game cost well over 100 quid in today's money. Meanwhile (outside of indie games) they cost far more to make, are more complex and contain more content than they ever have. There is more competition than there has ever been too. It's not sustainable, hence all the layoffs and closures, and all of the live service and microtransaction based games as this is the only way for developers to cover the costs in the current climate.

For my money, the only way that games are 'too expensive' is that I just can't afford many games on what I'm getting paid currently. That's on bills and food/drink etc though. I still remember back around 1998-2000 happily paying upwards of $100 for a copy of Vandal Hearts on PS1. I'd played it on a friend's PS1 and bought it before I even had my own PS1 because I loved it that much. And from memory, games haven't really changed in price a great deal since then. It's not really games that have gotten too expensive, it's everything else that eats into our entertainment/leisure budgets. That being said, there are a lot of shitty games out there that sell for far too much (see Hede's games on Steam for a great example) so that could be skewing people's perspectives a bit.

If GTA costs more than $70 at launch then I'm definitely not buying it at launch. I wasn't a big GTAV fan anyway, never beat it, and Take Two is going to make so much money on that game without my money just from the onliine alone in the next ten years. And say it does cost more and others follow suit, then I can just buy less games at launch. I've already learned that I don't have wait long if I want to get Ubisoft games at a discounted price when they're still fairly new, and earlier this year I bought Persona 3 Reload for $40 a month after it released. I've got plenty in my backlog. However, I do say that and still won't wait for a new Final Fantasy, among others. So I guess in the end I'll still be a sucker, but only for some things. Go me?

Never change Ben, you are awesome.

I have a receipt for the retail purchase of The Bard's Tale III in 1988. It was $79.95 here in Canada. $79.95 is the price I pay for new games today. Everything else has gone up in price, why haven't games?

Too many people simply do not have disposable income anymore. Sure, I believe that the costs of making shinier and shinier things keep going up. And inflation surely keeps the costs of everything going up. But costs of living (groceries, rent/housing, healthcare) keep going up, too, and often from artificial manipulation, while wages have been stagnant for decades. People are struggling and don't have enough money to buy the games they want. Could you justify increasing prices for AAA games and blockbuster films on the industry end? I'm sure, but consumers are increasingly unable to justify paying for them, whether they go up in price or not. So many can't afford to house themselves or support a family even on multiple incomes. Our wealth has been extracted and hoarded by a very small number of people, so we cannot spend it. It's unsustainable. The tide must rise to lift all the boats.

Day 1 of any economics class: something is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it.

This should be called the GTA podcast >.> I'm nauseous of hearing about Rockstar...

give a chance to WARFRAME, Alanah Thousands of hours of AAA quality and yet free content, still going strong after 11 years. Mike would appreciate the narative and dozens of different gameplay mechanics and Austin would get a kick out of the soundtrack too

Economics is a human science not a financial one, according to my favourite economics lecture at university

I think $70 games for triple A games is not outrageous. I think capitalism and profit seeking board members are very bad for the industry. I'm not sure how to balance that, unless progressive tax levels for high earning inviduals are necessary and becomes more aggressive. 🤷🏽‍♂️

Mike taking the "think before you speak"-mantra to new heights. Jokes aside. To hear this story from one of the most wellspoken, thoughtful minds on youtube that i can think of, feels inspiring and made my day. Thank you!

Maybe in a future podcast you can discuss the necessity for a global release time on games. I.e I took the day off for space marines 2 today with a friend and it doesn't go live digitally until 5pm. Meanwhile the US it will be noon. Why can't it just go live at noon regionally. The game is pre downloaded. Physical copies will be playable immediately whenever you buy it that morning.

I’m always so jazzed to hear about people watching Amadeus for the first time, because they always seem to come away with incredibly positive impressions. It’s easily in my top 10 movies of all time, and I think I DO prefer the Director’s Cut. To Alanah, I also recommend Cinema Paradiso if you haven’t seen it. But the theatrical NOT Director’s Cut. I’m not sure why but I often pair these two films in my head among my favorites.

BAYEK OF SIWA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <3 <3 <3 <3

I think all of this is only relevant to people who buy games on release. It's been years since a game came out I'd be willing to buy on release, even an indie game. I always wait for a decent sale, even though I could afford the release date price.

Something Mike got right was that, indeed, indefinite hours of play are monetized by microtransactions, though something he missed is that you can choose the price you wanna pay for a game by waiting for a sale or waiting for the price to crater over a few years. Also, do these executives want us to pay every time we reread a book? Now, not a day goes by that I don’t think we need another Committee of Public Safety, mais Le Deuxieme Montagne, maintenant!

So I think this is a weird ouroboros of a problem. Publishers may be absolutely right that AAA games have astronomical costs and that games have been inflation proof for more than a quarter century. But, the flip side is that at the AAA price point, the rising costs have made the industry more and more risk averse and less innovative and inspiring, and as such, they fail to meet expectations that comes associated with the premium price point an alarming percentage of the time. When you are failing to meet or betraying those expectations (with practices like day one DLC, bad/buggy launches, yearslong Early Access launches etc.) it is nigh impossible to have the discussion about needing to raise the upfront price point, because humans are very binary in their value analyses of entertainment purchases. You either got your money's worth (and I think the gaming audience would do well to remember when they're effusive about this particular point, the publishing director for Larian is right -- Baldur's Gate III is an experience well worth $100 and we need to be able to admit that for this discussion to have the nuance it needs) or you got fleeced out of the entire sum. No one plays a marginally bad to mediocre AAA game and goes "Well okay, I got 31 dollars out of this, so I overpaid by 29 dollars." They throw their hands up in frustration and despair and shout "I got screwed!" in their thinking, they just set fire to 60 dollars with zero value extraction. Im lucky, I can more or less afford the price increase without any impact, so on a personal level I'd like to encourage the shift because I know how little game developers make and I want to support that endeavor. But I haven't forgotten what it was like to scrimp and save for months at a time to purchase one of two potential N64 cartridges and then come away feeling despondent when the coin flip didn't go my way (This is where we all glower at Superman 64). Furthermore I also know that the price increase wouldn't go to the rank and file. It won't reduce crunch. It'll go towards shareholder value. So I don't know what to do as a consumer. I am absolutely 100% willing to spend more on video games that are fun to play, work right out of the box and don't engage in duplicitous practices like child gambling or selling my data as a secondary revenue stream. I am 100% willing to spend $70 or $80 or even $100 on a premium game that is made under conditions that don't erode the physical and mental health of the thousands of passionate creatives that made it a reality. But I am absolutely 100% not willing to agree to that price change until the corporate behaviors improve first, because they will only ever do the bare minimum of what I let them get away with.

Gacha games. 99% of the game is free. You pay in hours or money depending of what you as a player choose. Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves, Tower of Fantasy, Blue Protocol. All these are technically mobile games but no ads. Thousands to hundreds of thousands of people play these game for free, while others are willing to spend hundreds for a single character. This in the form of virtual “Gacha” machines to pull for characters and weapons to play as. In the most successful gacha games you can obtain 99% of the game for free if you choose to play regularly, and it’s only the “whales” that are essentially paying for the game for all of us. I mainly put this here because I’ve never heard it brought up on the podcast before. I would be very interested in what everyone thinks of this

In short. The audience and developers are often (not always) at odds when it comes to cost and content value. …and qualify.

Who tf out here is yelling "blindness"?

I quote tweeted a take once about games needing to be shorter, with the stance that i value longer experiences. And i was subsequently inundated with people calling me a dumbass. Its crazy how broad the spectrum is with what people can want from games

As you have said this is a really complex issue. As someone who has been gaming since original Tomb Raider I begrudge devs/publishers removing aspects from games to charge for them, like colour and outfit customisation. I'm willing to pay £70 for a single player, story focused game but for most devs the trust is gone. I'm not going to gamble on spending that kind of money for a badly optimised, buggy game that ends up never being fixed. I want expansions to be more popular again. I know Larian have moved on, but i would pay hundreds to get more content for that game, the same way I have bought every DLC and expansion for dragon age and mass effect. I would also appreciate shorter games again, but I think there is a sweet spot there. If a game is going to be £60-£70 I think it needs be be around the 10-30 hour mark. Less than 10 hours is when you get backlash, because that is what we expect from cheaper indie games.

I second Austin’s point about the experience in a cine-MAH: I saw Infinity War on opening weekend and it felt WILD to be in the theater audience. When Thor showed up in Wakanda and slammed his weapon with a massive AOE, everyone (including myself) cheered their lungs out 🤩

Companies have been devaluing games for years. I played through Outlaws and paid €18 for it. Why would I ever pay full price for a Ubisoft game again. The same goes for Xbox. But I paid 70€ for Astro Bot. Yeah, I don't own those games, but you can't own games on PC anyway (except on GOG).

My 2 cents. Game prices increased recently and Devs still get fired, shit down, micro transactions take priority. No amount of price increase will ever be enough. The excess income the average person has is being strained so will they make more from extra unit price and less total sales? Customers get screwed over digitally already. No physical costs, same or higher price. Not to mention you don't get the "privilege" of owning the game just a licence. I saw a meme recently saying if buying isn't ownership then piracy isn't stealing. This is a sentiment publishers are only going to further increase.

I think studio teams should be fighting their bosses to make smaller scale shorter games that are a tighter experience that you can beat in well under 20 hours. Hell, maybe that should part of union negotiations. I think people want that more and more anyway. Everyone's getting burned out on open world live Service garbage the execs keep insisting is good. It's always the execs insisting on making everything bigger and drawn out for more and more money, and games only really sustain their play time in the 100's of hours by making your repeat tasks, and that burns out anyway eventually. Ultimately it's the upper echelons of companies and their shareholders who are squeezing people from both sides, and it's gotta give eventually.

Personally paying £60 is far from enough for me. Luckily a few drop off the price from £69.99 to around £60.

I almost always wait for a sale. My whole PS wishlist is of new games. Certain publishers I do spend that $70 bc I know the game is worth my money & I will replay it multiple times. CDPR, RGG, Rockstar. I would be okay with a price increase if the people actually making my games get a bigger cut which I know won’t happen.

Really, the question boils down to, "How much can I charge my consumer base before they decide to go read a book, or play a different game, or just pirate the thing instead of buying my game?" After that, you have to do some - probably quite tricky - calculus to figure a budget for your project.

You also can't compare indies or small games that blew up vs bigger games because of inherent salaries. No dev who makes a stable income would risk making a stardew while making peanuts, hoping it to blow up. I can guarantee they rather want to make madden, more stable income on a series that will go on forever.

The thing is ceos don't have their salary from a single game. It's from a separate pool of money so a game costing 200 million has 0 amount for ceo salary. So cutting ceo salary doesn't magically give a project more money.. and if you negotiated your salary, is it your fault for getting paid by that amount? What does it say to talents that "hey we will pay you less or can cut your salary even though you negotiated that salary"

This episode's kind of boring... They just talked about video games the whole time...

One of my favorite podcasts. I hope they continue this forever!

I dont make a lot of money and its a huge investment to pay 70 dollars for a game for a game for me especially if I don't end up liking it so I buy like 1 or 2 AAA full price games a year and I wish that me paying more meant devs would get better pay and working conditions but that doesn't seem to be the case most of the time so it feels like im just inflating the value of a publisher and that sucks

Why is Mike's microphone so far from his face? His lovely Received Pronunciation is the hardest to hear out of you three.

If gta6 is similar to gta5 but more story and it has a significantly bigger map, I'd pay $70 for it.

5 years ago 500k could get you a mansion in Kansas, now it will get you an ok house. My parents house is decently large, but it's still only a 3 bedroom with 5 acres and it got revaluated at like 750k last year...they bought in 2012 for less than half that. It's ridiculous. In 2022 I was looking at a house that was 110 years old, 880 sq ft, ratty as hell in a not great part of a suburb and they were asking 130k and it disappeared in a week.

Something that I can’t wrap my head around is that some directors like Scorsese, have been making movies that didn’t even recouped their budget in their theatrical run for the past decade, but in the games industry which seemingly makes more money than Hollywood, we don’t have an equivalent to it that would work, like Druckmann would be able to make a game for 200 mill and only make 150 back. He would not be able to make another game with that kinda budget again, while “prestige” directors like Tarantino & Scorsese could do it over and over.

One of the reasons I didnt buy Star Wars Outlaws was because of the high prices starting at £70 to £120. Apart from that, its a Ubisoft game, and they have a past of putting out dodgy games. As its is now, when a person buys a AAA game, it is a gamble to the consumer as to the quality and performance of the game at release. You might get a polished game, that runs near perfect and bug free, or you may get a buggy mess that runs at 20 fps. Who wants to pay £100 for a game that runs at 20 fps and is full of bugs? I think if game prices go up any significant amount, I think the only way consumers are going to have any confidence in the game, or industry in general, is if they can play the game as a demo for say 2 hours to see how it runs and plays and if they can see if there are things like microtransactions in the game. I think consumers have to have hands on experience as, I think confidence in youtube and games influencer reviews has fallen. The One reason I bought Final Fantasy 16, was cause I played a playable demo. I had no interest at all in the game, before I played the demo. I also played Baldurs Gate 3 demo, and thought it wasnt for me.