The Gamers Arms

I occasionally think about dipping my toe back into gaming, but these new release prices I'm seeing on some AAA games have transformed it into a completely different proposition these days on PC. Some of these games I wouldn't touch with a bargepole, no matter how good they were, whereas 10-12 years ago they were around half this price - it always used to be consoles which had the expensive games. Plus key websites used to get bigger discounts than they do now it seems.

Even the £50 for BG3 is making me hesitant. I know it's a great game with lots of content, but I'm thinking what do I lose by waiting a while for a sale? I'd much rather wait and pay £30 for it. Plus it'll have even more patches by then.

Some of these smaller studios are helmed by industry veterans who used to work for the bigger AAA companies. That's where the quality is being produced nowadays. Look at Helldivers 2, £35 for an incredible game with many hours of content by a team who are passionate about supporting it and with a very reasonable micro transaction tier which you can completely ignore and quite easily buy with ingame currency.

The likes of Ubisoft, EA, Activision and Blizzard are just parasites making by the numbers mediocre tosh and filling them with as much predatory crap as they can milk people for because they simply can't do anything else anymore. I happily ignore any games made by those big names now.

Open world games have a lot to answer for and are I think one of the main drivers behind the increase in the cost of games. It you are not spending masses of resources on making a huge open world you are trying to fill your game with loads of things to do in order to compete in terms of bang for buck with the open world games. You have a situation where people are crowing about how FFVII Rebirth takes 100 hours to complete, who wants to be playing a single player game for 100 hours? I certainly don't.

This is also linked to the rise of free to play and "forever" games as big budget titles feel they have to provide hours worth of entertainment for the price they want to charge to drag people away from ftp. And then making all of this worse is the fact that costs are rising against a backdrop of the market hitting saturation point for the first time in it's history. Traditionally you could scale reach to offset cost but you can't do that now which is why you see Sony releasing on PC and Microsoft looking to release everywhere to help mitigate the cost of big releases.

I think it is long past time that the industry thought about whether increasing budgets and bigger and bigger games, with bigger price tags for the consumer, is the way to go.

DjchunKfunK wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 07, 2024 10:18 am

who wants to be playing a single player game for 100 hours? I certainly don't.

It me.

Not always, but I do like a lengthy RPG to get stuck into for weeks on end. Depends on whether the quality is consistent over that time rather than artificially inflated. Ubisoft-style busywork is a waste of everyone's time.

Yeah, open world games when done right are fine, they're not to blame for anything. There's a massive demand for them, a lot of gamers prefer them to shorter, linear, story-lead games. Or at the very least want to experience them along side each other.

They used to be priced very reasonably on PC too.

Maturin wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 07, 2024 10:40 am

Yeah, open world games when done right are fine, they're not to blame for anything. There's a massive demand for them, a lot of gamers prefer them to shorter, linear, story-lead games. Or at the very least want to experience them along side each other.

They used to be priced very reasonably on PC too.

It's not about doing them rightly or wrongly, it's about the amount of time, effort and money that is required to be put into them to get them to the standard now expected. The price has gone up because the cost to make these types of games is massive. Even games that are not fully openworld have to have big play spaces because that is what those buying the games have been conditioned to expect. It's not sustainable. Something has to change, which isn't to say that the industry needs to stop making openworld games.

Another interesting point in the video, when talking about the increasing cost of games to buy, is official licenses... AAA publishers are paying big bucks for the rights to have a recognisable IP for their game, the cost of which is then passed onto players. Players then in turn are rejecting these licensed games due to that price, leading to all the 'not reaching expectations' messages the publishers put out, then layoffs etc.

Just concentrating on their own IPs or developing new ones would go some way towards controlling costs and helping to reduce the price tag. We've reached the point, particularly with everyone struggling with the cost of living, where simply slapping the Marvel name on it or whatever isn't a guarantee of increased sales.

There's definitely a discussion to be had on the benefits of official licenses, but I don't think EA are the right people to ask about them. We got what, 1 decent AAA Star Wars game in the ten years they had exclusive rights to one of the biggest media franchises in the world? I'm sure it probably doesn't look like a good return on investment under those circumstances.

Hatredsheart wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 11, 2024 3:35 pm

https://fallout.bethesda.net/en/article ... 0254670482

Well that's good, they announced the update about 2 years ago I think. Unfortunately the space for mods on the console probably won't be getting an increase.

Former Lionhead-staffed studio announce their new game, release a demo, and in the same breath postpone its development.

https://www.eurogamer.net/ex-lionhead-d ... -same-time

It's a pretty sobering take on the state of the games industry right now.

Yeah, it sounds like the demo was a last-ditch effort to attract some funding

Shame. Gloomhaven was so good as well.

The Fallout 4 Next Gen update is out and it's honestly a bit underwhelming. I'm playing on Xbox so it still looks like a 10 year old game but runs a bit smoother. A lot of the mods have stopped working so you're back to the shitty cluttered settlements and lackluster weapons. It's probably best to leave it for a while until modders can (if bothered) rework the mods.

Same for PC..
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fallout/f ... ch-at-all/