Topic: Everything else is rising in price, but games are getting micro-transactions and DLC.

For many many years the average price of a new home console or PC "AAA" game was about 60 USD. I remember as far back as the N64 this being a commonly accepted trend (though PS1 games tended to be cheaper at the time). That was the mid-late 1990s. Can you name me one other product that still is priced the same today that it's equivalent was in the mid-late 90s?

Not phones, not food, not gas, not TVs, not radios, not cars, nothing I can think of.

Without veering too far into economics or politics this is because the value of money has gone down. The relative spending power has decreased. What you could get for one dollar then and now is not the same.

According to an online inflation calculation I found, 60 USD in 1997 is about 95 USD today.

More and more money goes into game development these days, often times bigger teams, longer development times, more marketing, voice acting, even Hollywood actors signing on, games are becoming increasingly more complicated, etc... yet the number on the price tag has not changed. Even though for almost everything on the shelf around the video games, it has.

I believe this to be the main reason why companies are resorting to DLC and micro-transactions to make profit they used to get just from selling the games. Even though they often put the same or greater effort into the development, they are getting less return, not more.

Obviously it can be argued that, perhaps many, developers take it way too far. I personally HATE micro-transactions in full priced retail games. But I'm okay with paid DLC content, as long as it's actual content and not loot boxes.

I'm curious, would you be okay with 70-80 dollars a game, or even maybe 100 dollars, for the promise that you were getting everything, on the disc, right at day 1 or as it's released in "free" updates? Instead of a 60 dollar game with a 20-40 dollar "optional" expansion pass or DLC pass and micro-transactions.

Also, do you think there is any chance of that sort of change even being attempted? Or is the public mindset too firmly locked on that base game price?

$59.99 is MSRP because that's the price the market will bear. If big publishers thought they could get away with charging more for home console games, they would. Besides, DLC and microtransactions are so lucrative that I'm sure a lot of big publishers wouldn't have it any other way to begin with. Even if you raise the MSRP, "service games" that make an obscene amount of profit from micro-transactions aren't going to go away.

Besides, is there functionally much of a difference between buying some "complete" version of a game on day one for $89.99 and paying $59.99 for the base game and $29.99 for the season pass? Seems like the latter setup gives you more control over what you're paying for. I'm generally OK with saving on $30 and skipping optional content for most games.

And no, I wouldn't pay more than standard MSRP for a new game. I actually almost never pay full MSRP to begin with, as, between vouchers, online preorder incentives, etc. I can usually get games for $49.99 or less on day one.

@Heavyarms55 : Absolutely, but other markets (including Australia) have generally been more receptive to higher pricing-tiers. In fact, the U.S. market is ruining things for the rest of us in the West, as game prices often fluctuate overseas (in terms of their suggested retail price), while the absolute maximum in the U.S. is US$60, and the majority of Western releases are built around catering to the U.S. market, warts and all. In Japan, they charge the equivalent of US$80-$100 for certain niche releases (such as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, and Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 Scarlet) as they generally sell in very small quantities, and charging less for such releases is unlikely to result in a dramatic influx in additional sales, so perhaps charging a premium for a few thousand units would likely be more profitable than selling 10,000 units at a lower price.

I am completely fed up with DLC and really frustrated with all of the DLC begging from the market, but I suppose I would be in the minority. Call me crazy, but I'm actually happy to have a Version 1.0 game on cartridge AND have it stay that way! (and fewer and fewer do). I would easily take a new installment in a series over a DLC pack which would only contain a tiny fraction of the content (for the price) that is also limited to a single console (so it cannot be shared). It absolutely sucks unless you're a sole user with a sole console, and even then, a lot of DLC packs only allow it to be used/redeemed by a single user, and other users on the same console would have to make a separate purchase.

Considering the sheer volume of games being released nowadays, there is less and less incentive to buy any of Nintendo's season passes, of which I had only purchases very, very few (and the only one I have played/completed was the Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, and I confess that I profaned when they announced the DLC as I was happy I thought that would have remained a Version 1.0 game).

With Smash poised to come out with a second wave of fighter DLC next year, the combined cost of (what I estimate will be) 11 characters and the Mii costumes is likely to outweigh the cost of the base game itself! And worst of all, the complete experience cannot be shared if a family were to have multiple Switch consoles. And all for a tiny, tiny amount of content relative to the base game.

If certain Switch cartridges could contain a writable partition so that patches/DLC can be installed to them so that the updates/DLC are permanently stored on the cartridge, I would have no qualms about the practice at all, but sadly, this is not the case, and while such a cartridge would of course increase the costs of manufacturing, that of course would be offset by the exorbitant amounts that publishers charge for the minuscule content that they provide. I would be totally cool with that, even for otherwise overpriced DLC.

Hell, I wouldn't mind the practice of DLC so much if Nintendo would at least reissue their games with all patches/DLC on the cartridge once the entirety of the game's development is complete (at a higher price if, say, the complete edition may require a 32GB cart), but I am increasingly apprehensive about supporting releases that leave out content to sell as DLC, and I am finding myself buying less and less of it as they are overwhelmingly terrible, terrible value for money. Even in instances where DLC packs do provide "bang for the buck" in terms of content, I would overwhelmingly prefer to have paid an extra $10 or $20 to have it all on cartridge/disc instead.

@Heavyarms55 I'll write a more elaborate response later today, but it also depends on the market. I remember games being €50 10-15 years ago. And PS1 games were indeed less. N64 and other cartridge based games were maybe more expensive, but the production costs of the former was sometimes as high as $30 per cartridge, inflating the price a lot, even though the "game" itself wasn't that expensive.

Rise of digital and the switch to disc-based systems were essentially big price hikes for games, even though we didn't notice it.

@Silly_G You're absolutely right, I live in Japan now and I've noticed a lot more variety in pricing for new games, from as low as roughly 40 dollars to as high as 80. Different regions certainly handle it differently.

This is an incredibly dubious claim. It's not taking into account the fact that a lot of products massively improve in quality over time. The problem is people judge value based on social comparisons to other people, rather than judging it based on some kind of objective standard that remains constant.

So if you say that the standard price of a laptop is basically the same today as it was 10 years ago (that's about right), you're ignoring the fact that the laptop is like 10 times as fast as the equivalent laptop was 10 years ago. If you actually bought literally the exact same laptop at both points, it wouldn't be the same price at all. It would have come down in price massively. Probably like 4 or 5 times as cheap from what it was.

The same is true of all kinds of products. I mean houses and cars are so much safer and more efficient in terms of things like fuel efficiency for cars, or heat loss for houses. But people just get used to that as the new norm, so they don't take it into account.

When we get to video games though, I think that's simply a matter of competition. Competition reduces prices. There is more competition today than there was in the 90s. Simple as that.

@Heavyarms55 My thinking is even if all video games were launched at $80, you’d still get micro transactions and paid DLC. There is just too much money to made from those purchases. You also have to consider how purchases made digitally have lowered the cost of publishing and distribution, as well as taken away a lot of the used game market.

A game box with no book for 60 bucks seems fair to me. I’m not in favor of raising prices when it seems AAA companies are rolling in the dough more than ever. Gaming is already too expensive as it is.

We’ve seen a lot of developers and publishers fold in the last five to ten years, but it wasn’t because consumers weren’t paying enough for the games. It was more about poor leadership, wasting resources, and staff upheaval.

Man, there's so much to unpack here. Even beyond markets, I think the type of game also plays a huge part here. Hollow Knight manages to simultaneously exemplify two competing sides of the conversation, being an incredibly cheap game with enough content to be worthy of a retail MSRP in its base form that offered MASSIVE free updates (three DLC packs free of charge + quality of life alterations), with these DLC packs coming at the cost of the vanilla experience (aforementioned DLC packs having insane implications for the canonical story of the game).

And then, of course, beyond the philosophical stuff, there's a massive chunk of the market running on free-to-play models that make retail priced games that do sell DLC content look a little silly at times (Paladins vs Overwatch being the commonly cited example).

I'm personally in favour of games having an MSRP and then having season passes or DLC as bonus content over an all-in-one price because if you enjoy a game but dislike the DLC, at the very least you made the decision to buy the DLC separately. You can't buy DLC for a game you don't own, so if the DLC seems not worth the coin, well, your card can stay in your wallet.

Simultaneously, I'm in favour of games stopping at 1.0.0. But this really depends on the game. Tekken 7 is a huge example of why DLC and season passes are, at times, an incredible blessing. And a good majority of my favourite single player experiences are an example of why DLC can and should often be avoided at all costs.

Microtransactions are a separate beast altogether. The general rule would be they are fine if they have no gameplay implications and the user isn't gambling. They should also stay out of fully priced titles, being relegated only to games that run off of cosmetic stores (MOBAs, free to play shooters, etc). It's a tricky one though, there are always exceptional cases as the topic is constantly evolving.

@Dezzy I see what you argue, but that's not entirely accurate. Even assuming you could buy the same exact laptop 10 years ago, it would have been massively more powerful than anything you could have needed it for at the time as little to no software existed yet that needed the power. I'm talking comparatively. Comparing a general use laptop then to a general use laptop now.

But let me give a different example. The cost of basic goods has gone up. Things like milk, meat and bread. Things like gas for your car or the cost of electricity.

It's not dubious at all to say you do not get as much for your money as you did in the past. Furthermore wages have not kept up with inflation either, but that's a whole different issue.

You're completely missing the point though. The point is simply that if you're comparing literally different laptops at 2 different periods, based on what you think the 'average' laptop is, you're going to end up with a completely different price difference than if you compare the exact same laptop at those 2 periods. Whether you can use it in the same way in both of those times is a completely different issue. That's largely a social issue, not one that is inherent in the product.

That distinction matters because it IS what you're doing when you compare other products. Something like a loaf of bread is literally identical today to what it was 10 years ago. It's not that today's loaf of bread is 10 times as nutritious as it was 10 years ago. For the most part, it's identical. So it is much more legitimate to look at price increases/decreases in that situation.

@Dezzy Computer technology is, perhaps a bad example. But I hold to my position.

I like DLC, it allows games to have a longer lifespan. Music games are where DLC excels at the most because you get a large collection of music that in the case of Rock Band and Rocksmith mostly transfers with you to the next game in the franchise so you can end up with a library of thousands of songs after several years of the franchise being around. That said with more traditional games that only has an expansion pass or a few DLC packs (e.g. BotW) it would be cool if there was an option after all the DLC is released to have all the DLC and updates on the cart.

Microtransactions are terrible all around though, I'd take a more expensive game over microtransactions any day. Companies may be starting to move away from loot boxes but battle passes (its replacement) is just as bad if not worse. The upcoming setup for Master Chief Collection is as far as acceptable battle passes go (no cost, doesn't get removed after a certain time) though the original Halo Reach approach of earn credits ingame and spend on whatever you want is much better.

I like having all the content of a game included in the base price, but if I had to choose between a £40 game with £30 worth of DLC, or a full game for £70, I think the former is preferable, as long as the DLC is substantial without taking away from the quality of the base game. That way, each player can choose whether they want to pay for all the content or if they're happy with just the base game. Microtransactions have no place in non-F2P games though.

I would like to remind people that Breath of the Wild only needed to sell 2 million copies to be profitable, despite being on two consoles, having the longest development time of any game in the series and being used and marketed as the definitive launch title for a brand new console.

By contrast, Dead Space was cancelled as a series because the microtransaction filled Dead Space 3 didn't sell 5 million copies.

No opinion I could say actually says more than these two factual statements.

@kkslider5552000 Yeah, for some companies it's not about making profits anymore. It's about increasing their yearly revenue, so smaller titles are held up to incredibly high standards. If it doesn't sell like FIFA, there's no point in even making it, because it doesn't make enough money. EA said they were going to focus more on sports games and remasters. No big surprise, because the former can be filled to the brim with MTX, and the latter are incredibly cheap to produce.

Meanwhile Ubisoft seems to be making a turn for the better, reevaluating all their upcoming games after the colossal failure of GR: Breakpoint.

No, I'd just wait until the games go on sale. I'd only spend $100 on a game I know I would love, so a new Xenoblade or Persona.

DLC and microtransactions usually make a game feel cheaper. I make an exception for new characters in fighting games, or when you release an entirely new game like with Torna. Otherwise no thanks. BOTWs DLC was a waste of $20.