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Most likely but that's why we shouldn't roll over and accept the $70 price. If NBA 2k21 does sell well and make more profits, then other developers will likely experiment as well. Thing is the 2K franchise isn't exactly known for smart consumers, and will likely buy these games regardless of price or quality.
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It’s that attitude that leads to the price hikes though.
We’ve had ‘next-gen’ on pc for years. The answer to your question: no.
I disagree but completely understand where you're coming from. In regards to Metro, poor and unoptimized engine performance is hardly a mark of weak hardware. The 4A Engine is notoriously inefficient compared to Frostbyte, Unreal, id Tech, and others. Metro has been hamstrung by the engine since its inception. That's why, despite it running like a potato on PCs, they manage to port it quite well to both last and current gen consoles. When you have to optimize for the hardware, you can shake out a lot of the performance issues.
It's also not just about resolution. Fidelity is made of three things: Resolution, Frame Rate, and detail.... And the devil is in the details. Details include things like textures, lighting, draw distance, particles, polygon count, to name a few. You can run a PS1 game like Tenchu at 12K resolution at 1000 FPS all day long and it won't look as good as Ghost of Tsushima at 1080P at 30FPS.
The current consoles, even the XBOX-X, don't have enough CPU and GPU power to push enough triangles to put the details in that will separate the generations. As such developers didn't spend much time optimizing for detail levels that couldn't be processed by the base current consoles. Sure, they offer a toggle that doubles the smoke, increases the particles, and maybe a few additional lighting tricks. But they aren't spending nearly as much time there. As such, we aren't really making full use of our hardware, until the consoles catch up. A good example might be this: Current PCs can do physics calculations far faster than the current consoles. Why is it then that while we can add basic ray tracing and slightly better textures, we are still stuck with console level destructible environments. That book shelf may look great ray-traced, but when I shoot it with a missile it should be smoldering kindling. Another good example is the ground in most games. Play Battlefield 5 and you will notice that the bump mapping morphs into place causing a weird shimmering ground effect. Go prone and you can see that most small "rocks" are attached at the base because they're actually just a bump mapped into place. This is the same no matter what platform you play on, and what detail level you select. It's in place because despite the fact a modern PC GPU could easily produce the geometry necessary to create real 3d objects, developers were focused on the consoles that can't. Most PC players won't notice a bump mapped rock pile when they're dodging virtual bullets, but they will notice bad lighting. So they up the lighting, and ignore the ground.
Imagine if developers said this: We want to design Battlefield 5 to look so good it drops the 1080ti / R7-3700/ 16GB DDR-3200 / NVME SSD to just 30FPS, at 1080P. Think about what the draw distances, texture quality, physics, models, etc. It would be truly next gen looking game. That is what the new consoles will bring to the market. Developers are still going to aim for 30 to 60FPS at sub 4K resolution with the PS5 and XsX. We're getting a new baseline. In a year or so, we will have hardware that can run 2x to 3X the performance of the next-gen consoles. But for now, they will be what opens the doors to our PCs living up to their true potential.
An exception might be said for HFR gaming. Being able to play BF5, at a locked 120FPS at 1080P, vs about 30FPS at sub 1080 on a console, is an eye opening experience that you can easily say is next-gen and I will absolutely agree to that. No pun intended.
As for 1024x768.... VOODOO 2's SLI FOR LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Edit: I need to bring it back to the original thread before I get accused of being a thread thief. LOL....so with everything I mentioned, except my wistful love of the Voodoo2, you're going to need more artists and programmers to really bring that next-gen look. So game prices are likely to rise to account for this.
Edit 2: Also want to say I love this discussion.
If you go back to the early days of gaming, games are significantly less today than they were then. Single floppy games were 50-60, as I recall, and some games like Time Zone were 100 bucks. If you adjust for inflation, a game like Ultima 1 would sell for roughly 160 dollars.I know what I'm not buying
To be fair, I never was going to buy it anyway though.
I can see both sides of it. Prices are going up, and that sucks.
On the flip side, games really havent gone up at the same rate of inflation. I found an old Electronics Boutique flyer from ~1990 a while back and adjusted for inflation, all the big PC game prices were in the $80-$120 range in 2020 dollars.
That said, things have changed since then. Back then games were smaller affairs, easier to develop. They also sold to many fewer customers. Boxed game distribution had many costs associated with it too, box, floppies/CD's manuals, distribution costs, brick and mortar retail taking their cut, etc.
Today with digital distribution a unit costs next to nothing to distribute, so practically all of the cost is in development and licensing.
Games are much bigger affairs, with much bigger budgets and huge development staff, but they are also sold to a MUCH MUCH larger audience, which means that the initial cost is spready over many more people.
With all of these variables I can't even start guessing how the economic model today compares to the past in order to make an assessment of what is fair.
I do know what I find to be good enough value to part with my money though. I expect 60-80 hours or more interesting single player story driven game play for $29.99 or less on sale, within 2-3 years of release. Otherwise I'm not buying, except for a few titles which strongly appeal to me.
