Seeing how expensive new games and consoles are, I'm glad to be a patient gamer

[Danieru-Emanyueru]

I think we are slowly getting back to Dmark prices here in Germany. Back then, the prices for games were already very high but we also had a bigger income. When the Euro came everything became more expensive and our salary became less and less and now it's that time again.

 

[MrChester]

I think we are slowly getting back to Dmark prices here in Germany. Back then, the prices for games were already very high but we also had a bigger income. When the Euro came everything became more expensive and our salary became less and less and now it's that time again.

This is legitimately fascinating - I've never considered how the change in currency changes pricing like that. Would you say games were more or less affordable at the end of the dmark's life, compared to now?

 

[moonbits]

The video games have become a luxury to play

this has always been the case, snes games could cost up to $80.
That would be $150 today.

This hobby has always been and will forever be an expensive luxury.

 

[Danieru-Emanyueru]

This is legitimately fascinating - I've never considered how the change in currency changes pricing like that. Would you say games were more or less affordable at the end of the dmark's life, compared to now?

Back then everything was more expensive but we also had more money available but now with the Euro everything is just as expensive but we don't have more money available that makes everything more difficult.

 

[Zeo]

Meanwhile, here i am waiting for Steam, GoG or Epic to give some free games and be happy with them

The prices of videogames hasnt really changed that much compared to back then, what now days are just some MB of size with games you can download and play even with your phone where expesive as hell at release

And this isnt just a problem with videogames, but any product ever. Sure, some decide to go for a big sales to not loose to competition (or worse, let the product waste) but in the end all of them are expensive

It depends of how ones need the product, and videogames got the low priority against everything else

 

[Adrastia]

I only buy used or on sale. I also take advantage of any free games that are available. Nintendo should be ashamed never putting its games on any good sale.

 

[Lena CE]

I just can't stand this whale culture

I hate capitalism too man

 

[Spyrone]

Yeah, even if it's a game I might like I don't buy them new. I do not have the money to spend on a single new "AAA" game (especially when I can get half a dozen indie games I'll likely enjoy more for the same price) haven't bought any for years. Literally the newest AAA game I bought when it was new was DOOM Eternal, and that was only because it dropped to $40 roughly thanks to a Steam sale. I think that's a reasonable price for a new game, and of course most them cost nearly $70 now. The newest AAA game I own is Cyberpunk 2077, and I waited years for the glitches to be ironed out and it to finally drop to a price I consider reasonable (IIRC, I bought it for $35 this past July). The way it's going there is not a good enough reason to pay $70 for a single video game, especially when two-thirds of my income goes to rent and I still have to buy groceries and pay bills. Near as far as I can tell most people buy them for novelty purposes. Makes me think of a Joy Division song.

 

[Deleted member 58254]

Im very lucky to not care about most modern games. Because the pricing is indeed crazy. I have my emulators always on hand

 

[DjQuick2008]

I'll buy sonic crossworlds on a sale. Got car x street for less than £7 on monday for the ps5.

Post automatically merged: Oct 8, 2025

Im very lucky to not care about most modern games. Because the pricing is indeed crazy. I have my emulators always on hand

Same ive got a gaming build thats due an update. I can play arcade games without wifi all day long.

 

[Lee__Kanker]

I just want to complain and it's mostly just going to be vitriolic, anecdotal, and not very coherent...

View attachment 113464
Some dipshit is gonna pre order this game, digital deluxe (don't wanna miss out after all), nearly 1 ton price tag. They're gonna casually play it for about 8 hours, fall off of it, tell everyone they know it's their game of the year, and never touch it again. People like this are the reason I can't buy new games. This is a retarded amount of money to pay for a game you don't even know the quality of (cause it's not even out) - this is a scam and it just keeps happening.

Resident Evil Village was an absolute mid-fest. Completely average game that got blown out of proportion by these fucking whale ass videogame tourists. Resident Evil 2/3/4 remake - same fucking deal only now with a little bit of incentive for new players to find out what made the older games so special (which they won't even fucking do - if you wanna experience the originals you could just... experience the originals directly?). Totally mediocre games that only need to be good enough to retain the first wave of buyers who are naturally gonna be more charitable because they just spent a day's wages on this shit

£80 for a Silent Hill game?? Silent FUCKING Hill. There might be a lot of lineage but this isn't a popular franchise by any means, yet apparently all you need to do is throw a dispicable price tag on it, and splurge on a bit of marketing and suddenly whales start washing up on shore

I just can't stand this whale culture and this constant need to make or spend money. I fucking love videogames - genuinely when I'm not having a meltdown I consider this shit one of the purest forms of art - but when you put a £70 price tag on it you make me realise this is just a bunch of cruddy children's games designed to make money

Konami, Capcom, and any other suit-wearing, nostalgia gouging, anti-social cretins that want to hold for ransome the popular culture that THEY HAVE CULTURED - bite a brick, shove a firework up your ass, and jump off a cliff, you money hungry losers

My favorite thread opener on the site so far

I wanna add that this bullshit is also part of the reason big budget games all feel the exact same

Same photorealistic look, same hollywood/netflix acting and cutscene direction (just compare the feel of silent hill 2 with the shitty remake), same god forsaken controls where everything is a slightly more heavy feeling The Last of Us, and EVERYTHING HAS TO BE LONG AS SHIT and braindead-broof, with ui markers and yellow paint up the ass in case the player ever tries to think for himself.

They're very passive too, they feel more like an interactive tv show, a lot arent made with replayability in mind, no wonder many people just rent them and never touch em again.

You cant risk anyone ever getting lost or not finishing the game, or not liking a new and unfamiliar game mechanic, or being offended by an edgy story, or struggling to learn the controls or with the difficulty; it costed more than three blockbuster movies put together!

Resident evil 2 would never be made today, you can finish it in 4-6 hours! A game HAS to be over 10, all to justify costing this much I guess; even if that's way too long for most horror.

I can't understanf or the life of me how every youtube comment/tuber looks at an old game and goes "Remake when?!"

You take all these games that looked, played and felt distinct from one another, you see them All getting turned into the same thing over and over, and you call it progress??

 

[kamille]

Most game developer's do not deserve any money for their work. I'd never pay a person a single euro for making corporate mandated games. The age of triple a games is over.

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

Digital deluxe as a concept is an aberration to me.

 

[Pearly]

Games went through a period of being cheap, well, relatively cheap, from about 2001 - 2016.

Before that they were expensive due to manufacturing costs. After that they are expensive because of shareholders and standard pricing.

Arguments are made by business types that we get far more value an hour per dollar than say a book or a movie. This is just trying to justify greed. Mario kart world is not worth 80, game is barebones, has a fun set of cups for maybe 1 or 2 playthroughs but does not have the replay value of almost every Mario kart beforehand.

Video games make more money than any other type of media, by a large margin, this is were the modern issue of it's expense is coming from. There's also the issue of triple A games not being budgeted correctly and causing a massive money sink that needs to be recuperated.

All this just to say it went from expensive manufacturing cost, to affordable, to inflated pricing that genuinely cannot be justified outside of mismanaged development costs, even then it's clearly just inflated pricing as manufacturing costs aren't even in the equation for the most part anymore, so It's clearly becoming a "luxury".

As for the why direction of "luxury", proof of this is the price of modern GPU's(a knock on effect from AI boom and crypto mining) and even the marketing of the switch 2, Nintendo do not want to be the affordable family console anymore but a high end tech product, chasing the high end PC market would also be affecting this, this is where the tech whales are. This is also why we started getting "pro" monikers on consoles, some people take that word very seriously.

Buying a high end PC/Laptop specifically for gaming and not just upgrading ram or a GPU is costing between €3,500 - €6,000 in Europe with it being around $500-800 cheaper in America. Ironically most PC gamers own a mid range PC at best, that usually tends to match current console generation in terms of how games look and run as the games tends to be excessively optimised to run on consoles, but are often bought still many times more than the price of a ps5, because of the stigma of "console player". There's definitely a broken almost classist mindset around a lot of this and that's it's own terrible can of worms.

I literally only bought a high end Laptop for developer reasons, but I am well aware that spending that much to play games at 240fps is some serious whale behaviour.

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

I don't want to read the full thread but I'd be the devil's advocate and argue that even in the SNES days games were expensive (even without inflation rate).

 

[Tetronomicon]

I tapped out just before the Xbox One. The newest console I have is a Wii U and I can see myself probably getting rid of that sooner than later. Best case scenario is a get a modded PS4 (Pro) and a One X to play the vanishingly small number of Xbox exclusives.

Hell, I don't even have a Steam account. I pretty much exclusively play 10+ year old pirated games and that's basically it. In that sense, I've "retired" from gaming considering the companies don't really even see me as a customer anymore. I don't really care for whatever the hell the industry morphed into during the 2010's, so why would I want to buy any console from the 2020's onward?

 

[Pearly]

I don't want to read the full thread but I'd be the devil's advocate and argue that even in the SNES days games were expensive (even without inflation rate).

This was manufacturing costs though, cartridges were very expensive, these days most sales are digital and maintaining servers is much, much cheaper than assembling cartridges in the 80's and 90's.

There's a reason we all rented back then outside of maybe a Christmas or birthday gift, compared to when CD's and DVD's became much cheaper to manufacture. Now it's all on servers and basically printing money which means the profit margins are higher than ever.

The switch 2 would still be turning a profit even if it was sold for $300 based on all it's parts, it explains the price in Japan, they're just fleecing the rest of the world because gaming is becoming a "luxury".

 

[Lee__Kanker]

Digital deluxe as a concept is an aberration to me.

Paying extra to play it 3 days early

Advertising dlc when the game just came out

Post automatically merged: Oct 8, 2025

Advertising dlc when the game just came out
[/QUOTE]

There's a reason we all rented back then outside of maybe a Christmas or birthday gift, compared to when CD's and DVD's became much cheaper to manufacture. Now it's all on servers and basically printing money which means the profit margins are higher than ever.

Its all cause they dont want their online storefront to compete with retail

That said they hated retail enough to invent online passes (or catwoman passes)

Post automatically merged: Oct 8, 2025

I tapped out just before the Xbox One. The newest console I have is a Wii U and I can see myself probably getting rid of that sooner than later. Best case scenario is a get a modded PS4 (Pro) and a One X to play the vanishingly small number of Xbox exclusives.

Hell, I don't even have a Steam account. I pretty much exclusively play 10+ year old pirated games and that's basically it. In that sense, I've "retired" from gaming considering the companies don't really even see me as a customer anymore. I don't really care for whatever the hell the industry morphed into during the 2010's, so why would I want to buy any console from the 2020's onward?

View attachment 117431

So there are people with the same metality as me

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

Paying extra to play it 3 days early.

Who invented it?

 

[MajesticSiN]

Who invented it?

Some dingus who probably got promoted three times for it.

 

[Lee__Kanker]

Who invented it?

The first game I recall doing it was deus ex mankind divided

Which had a uniquely bullshit preorder method where the more people preordered it, the more stuff you got for doing it


Another unique bullshit is One Time Use "easy fatalities" for mortal kombat x


Remember platinum/greatest hits/nintendo selects? I heard those dont exist anymore

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

Remember platinum/greatest hits/nintendo selects? I heard those dont exist anymore.

I miss them.


But in the same time I heard the Platinum discs were somewhat "weaker" so could get broken more easily because they were cheaply made.

And it costs less when being sold because of the cover not being the original.

 

[iamthemilkman]

I'm trying to think of the last game that I played that was worth $70. Maybe KCD2? Most games nowadays -- especially AAA stuff -- suck.

 

[Matricks]

THIS.

 

[ThatOneLum ThatOneLum]

Unless we all suddenly get happier with much less impressive games, these prices are only going to keep climbing.

There's an amount of corporate greed at play, obviously, but it's also just a simple fact that these days a triple-A title is made by 100s if not 1000s of people and takes years to produce. The games are bloated and huge, and the constant chase for the prettiest-looking game is slowly but surely killing the AAA industry.

Stick to older games, and pick up Silent Hill f in 12 months when it's reduced by like 80%. They are using FOMO to make you feel like you need it now. You don't. That game ain't going anywhere. Wait for the price to be reasonable.