Enough Is Enough, Publishers! Here Is A Compromise- Raise The Price of Games To $80

Microtransactions have NOTHING to do with the base price of video games. Raising the price will just mean we pay more and STILL have to deal with this bullshit. The game industry is making BILLIONS of dollars off of these things. Take-Two alone is estimating over a billion dollars in revenue this fiscal year off the back off MTs in NBA2K18 and shark cards for GTA Online. On average, publishers are spending less money on game development then they have in the past decade. While each game costs more they have all drastically cut down on the number. People parroting the whole "games are too expensive to make" idea really need to learn to actually look at financial reports from publishers.
 
Fuck the publishers, but fuck the developers more. They can all quit and then the publishers will go out of business. Self correcting problems, but most developers are fucking idiots. So we'll get stuck with more Wildlands type shit in the coming future because developers are fucking pricks who will happily gouge their customers and be lazy little cunts because enough idiot gamers will still buy their garbage. Then fuck the customers, because there are still apparently millions of idiots who run out and buy this shit.
 
Fuck the publishers, but fuck the developers more. They can all quit and then the publishers will go out of business. Self correcting problems, but most developers are fucking idiots. So we'll get stuck with more Wildlands type shit in the coming future because developers are fucking pricks who will happily gouge their customers and be lazy little cunts because enough idiot gamers will still buy their garbage. Then fuck the customers, because there are still apparently millions of idiots who run out and buy this shit.

Calm down. Up and quitting a good job is not an option for most people, especially those with family to take care of. The game industry is very small and getting blacklisted is a very real concern. Jumping ship to do indie development isn't an option for everyone either.
 
Ya they aren't doing it because games are too cheap and they can't make money. That is a straight up lie. Plenty of games make plenty of money at $60, or less. They are doing it for two reasons:

1) The non-shitty reason is because people are more willing to pay when done incrementally and they feel like they are getting something than all at once. Micro-transactions/F2P have saved some games. Dungeons and Dragons Online was dying out only about a year after release. They just couldn't get enough people willing to pay $15/month to afford to keep a development staff and servers going. So they decided to make it free to play. You could get the game for nothing and play some quests, you had to either subscribe or buy points to unlock more quests and content, and could also spend points on things like cosmetics. It was a huge success. People came back in droves, many happily gave them more than $15/month to play and they were able to continue it and it is still active now (though again looking like it might die). It is just a way that more people are willing to spend money.

2) The shitty reason is because they can. Once companies figured out people were willing to pay, some of them started doing it every chance they got. Has nothing to do with needing the cash to make the game successful, just a way to try and extract every dollar they can form people. Customers continue to demonstrate their willingness to pay for this, so they keep doing more and more of it.
 
This been discussed a couple of times already on this board. Raising the price wont do a god damn thing to MT. They will still have season pass, DLC and loot boxes. All that makes them a hell of lot more money then the base game price. I have been noticing a lot of games have been dropping in price rather quickly in the past year after release. It is just another trick to get you into the game for you to spend money on MT. Only way to stop MT is voting with your wallet and not even buying games with that bullshit. Problem is there to many dumb ass kids that don't know the value of a dollar and swipe away with their parents CC. People needs to stop trying to defend these predatory actions. I miss the day when I could just pay a game to unlock stuff. Where is wasn't even a huge grind to do it.
 
Yes, yes... raise the prices to $80. Nevermind that some games are already there if you buy the season pass dlc stuff. All that means is that I wait an extra few months for the prices to drop. There is so much competition out there now they are dropping prices 20-40% in the first month or two, especially if releeased just before the holidays. Two months after release destiny2 was $39 on consoles or PC (which had only been out 5 weeks).
 
go ahead and raise prices to 80.00 Congrats... you just priced yourself out of my range that I am willing to pay . Ahhh all the money I will save!
 
Pfft I don't even pay $60 anymore let alone $80. All micro transactions should be cosmetic only anyway.
 
even $60 is too much nowadays for most games when everything is taken into consideration (gameplay, graphics etc)...$80 is suicide for most developers
 


Seems like a good compromise to me.


Jesus fuck. I was sure we dispelled this bullshit idea as being a viable way to end microtransactions. So I'll say it again for the cheap seats:

The problem isn't that companies aren't making enough money on $60 games. The problem is that they found another way to get even more money from games through microtransactions that's been very successful. Raising the price of games to $80 wouldn't be a compromise and it probably wouldn't cover what they make in microtransactions. In fact, you say compromise and all they hear is: We are willing to pay $80 for a game that costs $60 today. You can't pay someone $60,000 a year and $100,000 in bonuses and get them to compromise on a pay increase to $80,000 with a total loss of their bonuses. That is in effect what you are asking game companies to do. We've reached a point where some developers are making more money off microtransactions than they do the core games themselves. This is why the developers of games like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided are now switching from single player to online multiplayer games. They are far more lucritive financially. That's due to microtransactions. Plain and simple. No one will pay for cosmetic items or unlocks on a single player game they play once and then shelve for months, years or never play again. In multiplayer games people shell out for costmetic crap just to keep up with their friends.

Game companies have reached levels of greed you cannot fathom. Let me give you an idea of how greedy these blood sucking leeches really are. When EA was developing Mass Effect 3, the game wouldn't fit on two discs for the XBOX version with all the new full motion video content in the game compared to previous installments. It was fine on the PS3 and the PC. The developer didn't want to pay the price difference to resize aspects of the game so they would fit on two discs on the XBOX version or increase the disc count in the package to 3 for the XBOX alone. The cost of a third disc and the package for it was minimal. We are talking pennies to a buck or two. Instead, EA/BioWare reduced texture resolution in the game to the point where it would fit on two discs for the XBOX version. It was done that way and released for all three platforms with the same shitty graphics. In fact, the graphics and textures on reused items from ME2 were better. Textures were shrunk from sizes of 4096 x 4096 to 128x128 in some cases. There are three or more texture layers for objects in that game. In ME2 they were all about the same size. In ME3 you had main texutres which were half the size or one quarter the size they were in ME2. The othe rlayers were even worse.

This was done over a couple of bucks at most. It spurned modders like myself to build new textures for the game. In the modding community, there exists a replacement for almost every single texture in that game. No one bothered to do that much work on ME2. There are only a handful of mods for it by comparison.
 
I rarely pay $60 for games, let alone $80. They can go fuck themselves if they start charging that, I will continue to wait for steep discounts or not buy at all.

The "microtransactions are necessary to make up the difference" is a completely unfounded myth.
 
How is this a fucking compromise?! Fuck this shit. I'll give you a compromise. Make decent fucking games without trying to pull some shady bullshit and in return we'll give you our business.
 
Vote with your wallet.
This is why I am back to pirating some games. The greedier the developer is, the higher chance it is that I'll end up pirating the game.
I still buy some games like Divinity Original Sin 2 which have honest devs who are not assholes, but I don't shy away from pirating a game.
I used to buy all my games. Not anymore. It has become ridiculous.
 
All this BS that is the game industry nowadays is why my Brother and I actually cut back on PC/Console gaming when we get together now. We went back to physical board games.

X-Wing, Armada, some of the D&D Dungeon Crawls, Mice and Mystics, Carcassonne, Panedemic, Escape: The Curse of the temple and soo many more.

Soo much better than %99.99 of the Video game BS that's out these days.
 
Prices should be north of 100 USD really. Anything less is stupid.

1. Games were 60 before or more and that hasn't gone up despite inflation.
2. Gamers screamed and moaned for massive graphics and physics which has massively driven up development costs.

Games are way under costed for what they are given those two factors. The issue is the majority of chud man children in the gaming community which has lead to problems. Put prices in line with inflation and you're at 100 bucks, raise them up as well to reflect development costs. Charge over 100 a game and ditch the DLC.
 
There is never a point where you make "Enough" money and are just satisfied and leave it there. At least not in the publicly traded corporate world

No amount of shifting funds around gets you to the answer you want, because the only thing the publishers are after is "More".

The only thing that will get them to pull back, is when people stop paying "More". That's either from the inability to pay or from competition offering something for a better value.
 
Microtransactions have NOTHING to do with the base price of video games. Raising the price will just mean we pay more and STILL have to deal with this bullshit. The game industry is making BILLIONS of dollars off of these things. Take-Two alone is estimating over a billion dollars in revenue this fiscal year off the back off MTs in NBA2K18 and shark cards for GTA Online. On average, publishers are spending less money on game development then they have in the past decade. While each game costs more they have all drastically cut down on the number. People parroting the whole "games are too expensive to make" idea really need to learn to actually look at financial reports from publishers.
Exactly. They're not doing it to make ends meet. They're doing it because it makes them more money and they can. Raising the game prices to 80, 100 or 1000, won't do shit to microtransactions. Besides where I live console games are already over $80.

The only way to fight microtransactions is to not engage in them. That's it. And as long as there are stupid idiots out there who do it, there is a market for it, and you can pleed and cry and do whatever you want, they won't stop doing it.
 
Prices should be north of 100 USD really. Anything less is stupid.

1. Games were 60 before or more and that hasn't gone up despite inflation.
2. Gamers screamed and moaned for massive graphics and physics which has massively driven up development costs.

Games are way under costed for what they are given those two factors. The issue is the majority of chud man children in the gaming community which has lead to problems. Put prices in line with inflation and you're at 100 bucks, raise them up as well to reflect development costs. Charge over 100 a game and ditch the DLC.
Prices are what they are, so games can reach a larger audience. You completely ignore the fact that the target audience of games have grown many magnitudes as well. So the number of sales offset the larger cost of development. Gamers doesn't hold a gun to publishers head to not raise the prices. They would if they thought they could make more money that way. Just think. Which is better? 1.000.000 sales at $60 or 500.000 sales at $80? There are a lot of people out there who would buy half as many or even less games if prices would go up. Yes that includes me. And it would also result in a significant rise in piracy. Game publishers know exactly what they're doing as far as the money goes. They don't need wannabe self appointed counselors from a forum to tell them how much to charge for games.
 
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Prices should be north of 100 USD really. Anything less is stupid.

1. Games were 60 before or more and that hasn't gone up despite inflation.
2. Gamers screamed and moaned for massive graphics and physics which has massively driven up development costs.

Games are way under costed for what they are given those two factors. The issue is the majority of chud man children in the gaming community which has lead to problems. Put prices in line with inflation and you're at 100 bucks, raise them up as well to reflect development costs. Charge over 100 a game and ditch the DLC.

Nonsense. M76 pretty much outlines why this won't work. If game companies thought they'd make as much money with higher prices, they'd raise them. Right now, they try to entice you with all kinds of deals to get the game cheaper or at original retail cost and then tempt you with add ons after the fact through microtransactions. Game companies are making money hand over fist despite the increased costs associated with game development.
 
the $60 games are usually the ones from the big AAA developers that have the biggest fan bases such as Fallout, Call of Duty, Battlefield etc...so I think most of the same people paying $60 at launch would pay $80...it's the mid tier developers that would suffer in this case...I also think console gamers are even more willing to spend more on games...
 
Yeah, the argument that $60 isn't enough is a lie. Yeah, games cost more to make now, but they also sell more than ever and with digital storefronts, cost less and less to distribute.

If tripple-A game publishers were somehow free to charge $80 for new titles, they would STILL put in microtransactions and loot boxes and on-disc DLC and season passes etc.

Remember: the goal of a traded business is not to make money, it's not to make a lot of money, it's job is to make MORE money.
 
Prices are what they are, so games can reach a larger audience. You completely ignore the fact that the target audience of games have grown many magnitudes as well. So the number of sales offset the larger cost of development. Gamers doesn't hold a gun to publishers head to not raise the prices. They would if they thought they could make more money that way. Just think. Which is better? 1.000.000 sales at $60 or 500.000 sales at $80? There are a lot of people out there who would buy half as many or even less games if prices would go up. Yes that includes me. And it would also result in a significant rise in piracy. Game publishers know exactly what they're doing as far as the money goes. They don't need wannabe self appointed counselors from a forum to tell them how much to charge for games.

You've just said why paid DLC is the only solution! Congrats, you proved why it should be supported entirely!
 
There is no way I'd spend 80 bucks on a game, 60 dollars is even pushing it. I'd stop buying them if they went that high.
 
Game companies have reached levels of greed you cannot fathom

It's not just game companies....

In fact, you say compromise and all they hear is: We are willing to pay $80 for a game that costs $60 today.

... Hey I know! We should "compromise" and give them a massive tax cut, and then.. .!!.. Oh, wait...

Sorry, couldn't help myself.
 
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