this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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They'd hire fewer people and ship more often. Oh no, apparently. It is impossible to make video games for less than one billion dollars.
Genuinely - how the fuck do you write "between a handful and several hundred people, for anywhere between six months and five years," and still pretend it can't mean a handful in six months? Like namedropping the high numbers means nothing else is real.
And those games would be pretty fuckin' good, actually, with rapid response to consumer desire, and abundant variety, and readily-available iteration on whatever parts you liked.
If I felt current bullshit was only as bad as what I grew up with, I would call ban what I grew up with.
You glibly insist we can't even own things, as if that's an immutable fact of the universe, and not a dogshit interpretation of buying a disc in a case at a store. But sure, I'm the one pounding the table for the status quo.
Cult thinking. Like there's only "I said so," not the central fucking argument we've been having.
Subscriptions are part of rational economic decision-making. Fuck you for ignoring that Econ 101 concept, despite several mentions. People spend more when getting their balls tickled, inside a video game, because humans are predictably irrational, and that can be exploited. That is the only way this shit makes more revenue.
Sixty bucks is what games have cost for goddamn near the entire history of video games, not just my personal childhood, you asshole. Even if you want to bicker - there has always been some general price point, since long before it was possible for a home game to seek rent. At no point could it justify charging one thousand dollars to a single player. I'm sorry you were taken for that blatant abuse. But repeating that abuse is now the thrust of halfthefuckingindustry.
Play inflation-games with those numbers all you like - "microtransactions" will always gouge orders of magnitude more than whatever a whole-ass game costs. That's what they're for. That is the entire reason this is happening. They make more money - by charging more - through manipulation. That process of abuse is the keystone of this entire business model.
We could end it tomorrow and it wouldn't make games smaller, or worse, or more expensive. The biggest as-a-service games today have one map each.
Nah, "fewer people and ship more often" isn't math.
Do the math.
Because I didn't give you "a billion dollars", Doctor Evil, I gave you ranges with actual numbers. If you have more likely ranges or more likely numbers, by all means, use those.
But do the math.
I didn't "pretend nothing else is real", I told you that games, big and small, are within some constraints. And that small games aren't the only games I want to exist. So some games are going to be five people for six months, some are going to be two hundred people for five years. You don't get to tell people (or the industry) that only one of those models is valid.
And for the record, that sixty bucks is what games have cost for "goddam near the entire history of videogames" is my entire point. Which would be easier to discern if you were less concerned with the name calling and more concerned with the reading.
Because for goddamn near the entire history of videogames sixty bucks have gotten you an increasingly bigger, more expensive game. Meanwhile, during the goddamn near the entire history of videogames a snickers bar went from 40 cents to 1.5 bucks and lost a fifth of the size.
So how do you think that worked? Because that's not "inflation games". It's inflation-inflation. Games weren't shielded from it because they're magically ordained by nature to be sixty bucks, it was a set of market reasons shaving costs and selling more units. But then that dried up and there are only two ways past that: you charge more up front or you charge more after. If, you know, you do the math.
Again, your mental model for the industry is wonky and simplistic. You can call me an asshole all you want, that is still the case. And of course, calling me an asshole doesn't mean anybody is going to listen to you. The market, driven by smarter, better informed people, will continue to look for ways to survive and make money. I would prefer for those ways to be sustainable, fair and ethical. That requires some intervention, consumer and worker protection.
"Waaah, games should be sixty forever and I think MTX are inherently more evil than subscriptions" is... not that.
Oh, and it wasn't abuse to dump a bunch of quarters a day in Samsho for the better part of five years. It was a thing I did with friends in a social setting. Was it the best value? No. Did I end up paying more than I would have buying the game up front? Very likely. Was I abused, scammed or taken for a ride? Not particularly, although I fully understand why a kid today would absolutely not see the point (and why my dad didn't either).