I agree with you about CDs but I'm not sure I understand your point about physical copies. If they're still buying and shipping a physical SD card, from a production perspective, I'm pretty sure that's the same cost regardless of whether it's a key or a full game. And considering that digital copies of games tend to be the same price as physical ones anyways, I think the physical aspect is pretty negligible and doesn't factor into the price in any real way.

They're referring to hours of entertainment. People pay $20 to see a 2 hour film. Games give us 50+ hours at times.

That's not to say games should cost the same as movies in terms of "entertainment hours".

This is the way.

The developers and artists absolutely need to be fairly compensated for the highly skilled work they’re doing. The question is, does a good game require 1500-2500 of them? That’s where you need to sell 9 million copies of an $80 game to break even. Particularly in an era where online sales mean you no longer need a distribution partner who will produce hundreds of thousands of discs at a time, and who has existing partnerships with big box retailers, so much of that publishing budget, relationships and supply chain are no longer needed. Even with the standard 30% cut that digital storefronts take, a team of 30 people can spend five years developing a game for $15-20 million, including marketing and localization, sell 500K copies at $50 and break even. This type of scaling back is what’s needed to keep the industry profitable and sustainable. I’m not saying there’s no place for huge budget games, but they don’t need to be the norm that bankrupts developers from one bad release.

If the customers still buy it in the end, the publisher was right. We will see over time. Maybe there will be a drop in sales but then GTA6 comes along and no one can resist, opening the path for other games.

Yeah. I think there's a problem with the modern development cycle that a fuckton of the budget goes into marketing and marketable assets (i.e. all them graphics that look great in the trailers but nobody's computer can actually handle, and then the rest of the team's on the hook to make a game on a shoestring that can actually use all of that content - The only way you can possibly accomplish that with a fraction of a fraction of the budget is if it's super simplistic and repetitive gameplay that's stretched over 40+ hours like a peasant on a torture rack.

Think about how many games you've played over the last decade, and how many of them were still fun to play after the first five hours, either because the primary gameplay loops were satisfying enough to keep you engaged, or because the game was keeping it fresh with new mechanics that didn't bungle clumsily atop one another like a raspberry and beef trifle. Making great games is difficult and expensive, and most studios would rather put out something with a guaranteed return than anything that's fun to play.

I would say something like elden ring might be worth that price point given the breadth of the experience. Thing is, Elden ring is actually kinda too big. I like it, but a run through is like a multi week commitment, and I definitely don't want that to be the norm, especially for fromsoft.

isthereanydeal isn't grey market and only shows prices from resellers that operate "above board".

You can find way cheaper than the prices listed there if you're willing to go grey market.

There is an argument to be made that Expedition 33 was essentially created by a studio with 30 people (though once you add everyone that worked on it the credits do balloon to over 400) with a rather small budget, and meanwhile companies like Rockstar, Sony and Activision have thousands working for years and spending hundreds of millions creating games like GTA 6, CoD and Concord, so naturally they should be a lot more expensive to buy too.

They just shouldn't be surprised if people don't buy all the $500 Waguy steak on offer and are perfectly happy with way cheaper options.

As usual, the problem isn’t so much that the cost of everything is rising; It’s that wages aren’t keeping pace.

We are already are, look at season passes, dlc etc, 90+ is the de facto price of a lot of AAA games. They'll claim going even higher is to support developers or whatever when laying people off en masse and posting even larger quarterly results, it's pure avarice.

They also tend to sell more copies vs decades ago, which is partly why the $70cad game was so normal for so long IMO.

That's not inflation works. Inflation shouldn't apply to everything at the same rate.

My first computer costed the equivalent to 1000 euros. Do you think the average desktop should cost 3000?

But every time I pirate one of their games they lose $80. So they say.