Is it? What game requires any of that? Even the most microtransation heavy games lile NBA 2k and Fifa are perfectly playable without micro transactions. You’ll still get a top team you’ll still get 100s of hours out of it.

Paying for an expansion to a game you like doesn’t seem like it belongs that list. DLC from the Souls games (Bloodborne included) adds a ton to its respective base games.

Except Nintendo. And the mentality is spreading, I’ve never seen sekiro below $40

My friend, let me tell you about this thing called “Pre-order.”

There are plenty of “gotta have it first” people out there. Doesn’t matter if it’s a new phone, game, see a movie on opening day, whatever. Plenty of gamers want to be in Alpha and Beta tests (which FML they do nothing but bitch about as being unplayable) and shell out money for skins and early upgrades or level up packs. Vloggers and tiktokkers too or whatever who want to pull in the views as they play the new games.

These are the people the studios cater to. Not the patient gamers who wait for the product to go on sale 90 days down the road after the initial rush is over.

So as long as the people in the first paragraph exist that’s what the studios will charge.

How much of that money goes into marketing, and executive pay checks?

Well, many complex games have no budget on graphics, that’s why you can have one-man army dev making a monster of a game like Aurora 4x.

Yeah, and then the game made by a small team ends up being much more successful.

Where are these statistics from?

I just played Escape from Ever After. Every bit as good and polished as the old Paper Mario games. $25. They cost $50-$65 back then.

This… Put games on your wishlist, set your wishlist to only show sales, and sort by price. Then only buy games from that list when they go on a significant sale. Plenty of decent games out there regularly go for $5-10 or less. With very few exceptions I refuse to pay more than $20-30 for a game and, even then, only if they’re like 50% off and not likely to come down.

Also… stop pre-ordering games. They’ll still be there when they do go on sale. You don’t need to play them as soon as they come out. Conquer that FOMO shit and develop some integrity.

I set a rule not to buy any game util i finish what I already have. I have not bought anything for the last two years. Any game that interest me is going to my wishlist for now.

You don’t even have to be that patient these days. I got Arc Raiders 3 weeks after release for 60% off, it was like $18.

I rarely buy games on release. Recently, ghost of yotei. While I enjoyed the hell out of it, it was shorter than I would have liked and had a very predictable ending. I didn’t feel burned, but I should have waited. The other was the new dragon age. I didn’t pay full price but it was still a lot and I knew within a few hours that it was going to be ass. I pushed through for a few more hours but the soulless writing and lack of weight behind conversations turned me off. I decided to forget it, and play inquisition yet again. Lastly there was forbidden West that I got with my ps5 which was a gift. Don’t regret that one, though it’s not without its flaws. None of them, however, did I find buggy or unplayable.

Its the best way. Its cheaper, you have plenty of user reviews to check first, and you get a completed game, without bugs.

And, not buying immediately you get to know if the shiny is real or is just a painted turd. Or if it disappears after a couple months.

Basically do the same thing. Until a game hits $20 or less, I won’t purchase it. For $70, I would rather buy something useful like new shoes.

Counterpoint: It’s just so much fun when you are starting on release day, not getting spoiled, no one has a clue where what is there is no meta and a lot of community interaction.

E.g. Elden Ring, we started together at 12 am when it launched, killed the first couple of bosses. Then the next few days forums were filled with posts, people had different theories, NPC questlines were being discovered. It was the same two years later with the DLC. A friend of mine bought it finally and started playing last week. But he is .missing all of that.

On that note, Dark Ages was probably my favorite game I played last year and was worth the cost new as well. For half price, it’s absolutely worth it even more.

I limit myself to one or two “new full price” purchases a year, and it’s usually games from known devs i want to support that I’m excited about.

I haven’t paid over $20 in 5 years. I honestly can’t justify spending more than that on a video game. I don’t care how good: price will drop eventually, and I will wait.

I buy a ton of games a year after they release or so. I got the benefit of the expanded edition or whatever and it’s just as much fun for me as it was for everybody else a year or two ago.

Now I play a lot of single player stuff, so your mileage may vary.

Same here, only exception: Baldurs Gate 3, because i loved the mindset of the devs and i knew from their prior games that they deliver quality. That was more about supporting Larian with extra cash.

And the Son, Emulation?

Unfortunately, some genres struggle going indie because they’re too expensive to develop and aren’t guaranteed to sell well. There is a reason PlatinumGames can’t afford to make Bayonetta if Nintendo doesn’t put up the money, for example, and almost every indie studio that attempts a similar feat has to spend years and years in early access.

The Genokids developer has been working on the game for +5 years and has only 2 chapters to show for it. Mahou Arms released on Steam in April 2020, and is still in early access today.

The world has become too expensive for some things to comfortably exist, or exist at all, unfortunately.