You are, again, oversimplifying so hard you are entirely wrong at that point.
For one thing, no, Doom didn’t outsell Windows 95. That’s a bit of a misquote from a thing Gabe Newell said once about MS doing a study on their Win95 penetration and finding it was ranking behind Doom at that point in time. Doom sold a few million units, between 1 and 3, by most counts. Online reference puts Win95 paid installs at 40-50 million. Made me look that up. I am not familiar with the sales numbers of Centipede on Dreamcast but I’m going to assume that’s hyperbole, considering I am not familiar with the sales numbers of Centipede on Dreamcast.
But yes, games sell more copies now than they did in the 90s. Which I actively pointed out in my previous post, as part of a full on breakdown of how the perceived “full price” of a game has remained stable and that you’re entirely ignoring here. GTA V has sold an insane amount of copies, but it’s a massive outlier. Most games don’t move 100 million copies, even when given out for free, in the same way most NES games didn’t sell the 40 million copies Super Mario Bros sold. Most games move anywhere betwen a hundred thousand and a few million units. Steam, PlayStation and the other storefronts keep between 10 and 30% of that revenue, taxes keep some other chunk and publishers and devs split the rest, depending on how their relationship is arranged.
That needs to pay for anywhere between a handful and several hundred people for anywhere between six months and five years, give or take. The average salary in the US gaming industry is six figures. You do that math.
Would you still get games if that house of card fully collapsed? I mean, yeah, you’d get games in post-nuclear Mad Max wastelands, too. Gaming is inherent to humanity. Would you want a gaming industry that is entirely restricted to whatever sixty bucks per copy gets you for eternity, inflation be damned? I mean, I wouldn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, I spend a ton of time with small indie games. But I also spend a ton of time with larger games. I don’t want any of them to go away. I will play the next Balatroesque, guy-in-a-garage roguelike that catches my attention, but I sure would like to also get to play a large narrative action game, a AAA fighting game or another big RPG an MMO or whatever else. I am extremely not game for the games industry to have to work within the confines of whatever iteration of monetization you don’t think is exploitative because you grew up with it. You aren’t the arbiter of what is a “scam”, and you determining that subscriptions are fine because you liked playing WoW or that arcades were fine because you remember Mortal Kombat fondly or that sixty bucks is the “right” price for a videogame because that’s what you paid for San Andreas doesn’t mean it’s the subset of options that make sense forever.
You’ve built a mental model of the industry, and that’s fine, everybody does. But it’s unreasonable for you to want that mental model to be the only valid version of a videogame that everybody gets to play. This whole conversation stems from the observation that younger people are looking nostalgically at what people like you were calling a scam in the early 00s. Me included, incidentally. It’s a good exercise to get over ourselves and understand both the business reasons and the appeal that lead to each iteration of this business and art form getting popular. Turns out there was some gold in the Flash game shovelware mines, apparently, and I missed it. If you want to be the old man yelling at clouds about how games should be in a DVD for 60 bucks forever, goddamnit, I can’t stop you. But you’re wrong about the facts of how the industry works and why the costs are the way they are. That much is not opinion.
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.
whatever iteration of monetization you don’t think is exploitative because you grew up with it
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.
You aren’t the arbiter
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).
You are, again, oversimplifying so hard you are entirely wrong at that point.
For one thing, no, Doom didn’t outsell Windows 95. That’s a bit of a misquote from a thing Gabe Newell said once about MS doing a study on their Win95 penetration and finding it was ranking behind Doom at that point in time. Doom sold a few million units, between 1 and 3, by most counts. Online reference puts Win95 paid installs at 40-50 million. Made me look that up. I am not familiar with the sales numbers of Centipede on Dreamcast but I’m going to assume that’s hyperbole, considering I am not familiar with the sales numbers of Centipede on Dreamcast.
But yes, games sell more copies now than they did in the 90s. Which I actively pointed out in my previous post, as part of a full on breakdown of how the perceived “full price” of a game has remained stable and that you’re entirely ignoring here. GTA V has sold an insane amount of copies, but it’s a massive outlier. Most games don’t move 100 million copies, even when given out for free, in the same way most NES games didn’t sell the 40 million copies Super Mario Bros sold. Most games move anywhere betwen a hundred thousand and a few million units. Steam, PlayStation and the other storefronts keep between 10 and 30% of that revenue, taxes keep some other chunk and publishers and devs split the rest, depending on how their relationship is arranged.
That needs to pay for anywhere between a handful and several hundred people for anywhere between six months and five years, give or take. The average salary in the US gaming industry is six figures. You do that math.
Would you still get games if that house of card fully collapsed? I mean, yeah, you’d get games in post-nuclear Mad Max wastelands, too. Gaming is inherent to humanity. Would you want a gaming industry that is entirely restricted to whatever sixty bucks per copy gets you for eternity, inflation be damned? I mean, I wouldn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, I spend a ton of time with small indie games. But I also spend a ton of time with larger games. I don’t want any of them to go away. I will play the next Balatroesque, guy-in-a-garage roguelike that catches my attention, but I sure would like to also get to play a large narrative action game, a AAA fighting game or another big RPG an MMO or whatever else. I am extremely not game for the games industry to have to work within the confines of whatever iteration of monetization you don’t think is exploitative because you grew up with it. You aren’t the arbiter of what is a “scam”, and you determining that subscriptions are fine because you liked playing WoW or that arcades were fine because you remember Mortal Kombat fondly or that sixty bucks is the “right” price for a videogame because that’s what you paid for San Andreas doesn’t mean it’s the subset of options that make sense forever.
You’ve built a mental model of the industry, and that’s fine, everybody does. But it’s unreasonable for you to want that mental model to be the only valid version of a videogame that everybody gets to play. This whole conversation stems from the observation that younger people are looking nostalgically at what people like you were calling a scam in the early 00s. Me included, incidentally. It’s a good exercise to get over ourselves and understand both the business reasons and the appeal that lead to each iteration of this business and art form getting popular. Turns out there was some gold in the Flash game shovelware mines, apparently, and I missed it. If you want to be the old man yelling at clouds about how games should be in a DVD for 60 bucks forever, goddamnit, I can’t stop you. But you’re wrong about the facts of how the industry works and why the costs are the way they are. That much is not opinion.
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).