5 ms·

>I'm convinced that's more that games were very overpriced for a long time. Dunkey (famous YouTuber) made a pretty interesting short video essay on the topic:

>I'm convinced that's more that games were very overpriced for a long time. Dunkey (famous YouTuber) made a pretty interesting short video essay on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvPkAYT6B1Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvPkAYT6B1Q His takeaway that video game pricing doesn't make any sense, and never has. $60 for a beautiful work of art that you'll remember for the rest of your life is the deal of a lifetime, whereas $60 for a forgettable, shameless cash grab is a complete rip-off. I'm run a retro games business now, and the pricing honestly makes a lot more sense from an economic point of view. $300 for EarthBound is still a better deal than $8 for Final Fantasy XIII-2.

seanhunter 4y ago
> $60 for a beautiful work of art that you'll remember for the rest of your life is the deal of a lifetime, whereas $60 for a forgettable, shameless cash grab is a complete rip-off. This exactly. I can't remember what I paid for Factorio or Subnautica or Valheim but 100x what I paid still would be amazing value vs 1/100th of what I paid for Fallout 4 would still be too much.
npteljes 4y ago
>$60 for a beautiful work of art that you'll remember for the rest of your life is the deal of a lifetime, whereas $60 for a forgettable, shameless cash grab is a complete rip-off. I don't think this is how experiences work. Because you haven't had them in the first place, there's no way whether you'll like it or not. Second thing is, what's the point of the pricing? Covering the expenses of the creator, publisher? Making them have a buffer for a future work? Extracting as much from the people as they can? These yield very different outcomes. In the end, pricing making sense boils down to one's economic view. If you think about it, it's about the fairness of the compensation, and so, the thinking centers around what's fair, how to ensure fairness, and whom should be included in fairness and to what degree. And so, you get the "let the market decide" people, the "manage it centrally" people, and many other people too of course. And pricing might make sense only in a framework like that. With no framework, it will never make sense.
Waterluvian 4y ago
A used games business has the luxury of hindsight. Earthbound is a great example: Nintendo didn’t know it would be a “$300 title.” They weren’t even confident it would sell in the West. Lots of titles we know today as timeless classics were like this. They were incredibly anxious about Super Mario Kart and Mario 64. They were so unsure of the entire N64 console that they made a controller with a fallback D-pad for 2D gaming.

seanhunter 4y ago

> $60 for a beautiful work of art that you'll remember for the rest of your life is the deal of a lifetime, whereas $60 for a forgettable, shameless cash grab is a complete rip-off. This exactly. I can't remember what I paid for Factorio or Subnautica or Valheim but 100x what I paid still would be amazing value vs 1/100th of what I paid for Fallout 4 would still be too much.

npteljes 4y ago

>$60 for a beautiful work of art that you'll remember for the rest of your life is the deal of a lifetime, whereas $60 for a forgettable, shameless cash grab is a complete rip-off. I don't think this is how experiences work. Because you haven't had them in the first place, there's no way whether you'll like it or not. Second thing is, what's the point of the pricing? Covering the expenses of the creator, publisher? Making them have a buffer for a future work? Extracting as much from the people as they can? These yield very different outcomes. In the end, pricing making sense boils down to one's economic view. If you think about it, it's about the fairness of the compensation, and so, the thinking centers around what's fair, how to ensure fairness, and whom should be included in fairness and to what degree. And so, you get the "let the market decide" people, the "manage it centrally" people, and many other people too of course. And pricing might make sense only in a framework like that. With no framework, it will never make sense.

Waterluvian 4y ago

A used games business has the luxury of hindsight. Earthbound is a great example: Nintendo didn’t know it would be a “$300 title.” They weren’t even confident it would sell in the West. Lots of titles we know today as timeless classics were like this. They were incredibly anxious about Super Mario Kart and Mario 64. They were so unsure of the entire N64 console that they made a controller with a fallback D-pad for 2D gaming.