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🏴☠️ easiest boycott ever 🏴☠️
The one Playstation game I want right now is $50 but no physical copies are available, and the three games on the horizon are the sorts of things that I can wait to buy used.
Any games for other systems are either competitively-priced on Steam or easy to emulate because they're distributed by a shitty company that I don't mind pirating.
I'm not paying $80 for a game.
millionaire says thing that is easily affordable to them is a good deal, news at 11
Naturally he'd say that, its easy to be careful spending money when the PS5 has no games to buy.
They are definitely a steal. If your game is 70 or 80 dollars I'm stealing it
Read this in Rodney dangerfield’s voice.
"No respect for me at all"
All the games I play are a steal
Oh ho oh ho a pirates life for me ☠️ 🏴☠️
Uhhh hello? Based department? You're gonna wanna check out this comrade
The industry is making a mistake if it forces everyone down this path.
Audiences have a limited income and will not spend above budget for gaming, their spending is already saturated, they don't have more money to spend.
The title is correct but it's not a positive thing like he frames it. All raising prices is going to do is force audiences to choose between games, meaning they buy fewer games. It will shrink the size of the industry by crushing the companies that people choose not to buy from in order to afford the higher priced games.
There will be fewer games and fewer professionals in the industry as a result. Talent and skill will be lost permanently.
My most unnecessarily doomer take on the subject:
The industry recognises that things cannot continue as they are, and is shifting to making video games more of a rich (or at least well off) person's hobby. This price increase will coincide with attempts to crack down on piracy as much as possible and will also attempt to patent more video game gameplay, and sue indie developers out of existence. As we've seen with this Palworld lawsuit, the big companies will probably start trying to eliminate the competition as much as possible, and rely on a legal system that still treats video games as "pac man, but with fancier graphics." Additionally, If the big publishers refuse to allow indie games on their systems, or take huge portions of the sales, it will result in indie games having far less reach, pretty much being limited only to PC.
I know this doesn't all really flow very well, it's my most doomer take, not my most coherent or reasonable take.
As we've seen with this Palworld lawsuit
Okay stop it right there, there's a lot (and I do mean a lot) of moving pieces that is going into that lawsuit. The major thing is that the narrative that everyone i've talked to seems to have latched onto and not know anything about it is that they think it's a big company is bullying a small indie dev, however that isn't even remotely true because Pocketpair had officially in July 2024 (so it likely had been in the works for months, or up to a year beforehand) entered into a partnership with Sony, the same kind of relationship that Gamefreak entered with Nintendo back in the day when creating Pokemon. And as a short history lesson, Nintendo and Sony don't like eachother, and if you want to know why look into the original Playstation, the CD based SNES one, and ultimately why the Philips CDi came into existence.
Yes I am insinuating that the lawsuit is happening purely because of Pocketpair making a bit of a faustian bargain with Sony, and there's plenty of reasons to point to that being the reason. Like did you know that the damages that Nintendo is demanding from Pocketpair for allegedly violating patents is 10 million yen (and halting distribution, but that part is very normal for court cases in general), roughly $65,000 USD? Yes actual chump change for Sony, and also very low for what you'd think a patent lawsuit would bring in. Not to mention that patent lawsuits are inherently very risky endeavors to begin with, considering that right now it looks like both Nintendo and Sony are playing a game a chicken, and daring the other to blink first there's only a couple results that ends up happening. Nintendo wins, and forces Sony+Pocketpair to seriously reconsider how they market and merchandise the Palworld IP going forward, while also likely more clearly defining Nintendo's patents. Nintendo loses, yet has their patent affirmed, and more clearly defined. Nintendo loses, and has their patent invalidated. In all three results, they still get to make Sony bleed for doing from what Nintendo's pov is, a blatant encroachment of territory by Sony.
The closest thing I can think of something like this happening in the past was when Sega sued Radical over alleged patent infringement in The Simpsons: Road Rage, except there it felt more like it was simply because Simpsons Road Rage was so much just a Crazy Taxi copy paste job with a Simpsons coat of paint dumped all over it.
I did say it wasn't my most coherent take.
But I think general public perception of a case like this is just as important (or more important) than the actual outcome, just like the McDonalds "Hot Coffee" lawsuit, which is treated in public perception as an example of a frivolous lawsuit, when it actually wasn't. The public perception that big companies will sue small indie studios into oblivion, or sue them to remove basic game mechanics from their games will harm the indy side of the industry, it'll harm the AAA industry as well, but more in a "people will grumble about it while buying the next Legend of Call of Assassin's Red Dead Grand Theft Kart" rather than actually boycotting the big brands or anything. Sure this is just two big companies going at it, if you want to look at it that way, but that doesn't mean it won't have direct effects on the indy market as well. What happens the next time an indy company is given the choice by a AAA company of "join us or be destroyed" and they know joining a big company will just result in a situation like this?
To properly monopolise this industry they will have to find a way to prevent indies from existing at low cost altogether. The best method I can think of to do that is to go after the engines. Forcing indies into developing their games from scratch without a comfortable engine that already exists as the foundation.
I do think this is mostly about consolidating and monopolising within the industry though. Capitalism is at work doing what it always does, consolidating industries into fewer and fewer companies.
With Unity declaring last year that they'd charge developers more money if their game went over certain sales thresholds, it could be already in the works. Nothing they can do about Godot though.
All raising prices is going to do is force audiences to choose between games, meaning they buy fewer games.
maybe a shift of consumer indulgence to indie? I feel like this hurts mid-budget games specifically.
maybe a shift of consumer indulgence to indie? I feel like this hurts mid-budget games specifically.
Yes. Medium studios will drop out of existence as they get bullied out of the market. Either they'll be swallowed into the big publishers doing AAA titles at high prices or they'll break up into indies selling low priced games.
Yeah but think of the AI !
Going up to $70 after 15+ years of $60? Fine, whatever, annoying because imo the economics of the video game industry mean games should cost less money in absolute terms but it’s fine. I’m not gonna whine about it.
$80 less than 5 years after that? Ridiculous. $90 after less than 5 years like Nintendo is trying to do is fucking insanity.
I see they didn’t learn from “people should get a second job to afford a PS3”.
I got a Best Buy credit card to buy one, and then simply never paid the bill.
five-hundred ninety nine US dollars
I know some people get really upset at the idea of pirating indies but even $20 feels like a lot of money to spend on a video game I'm not sure if I'll like and play all the way through. 80? Forget about it.
i don't really understand the moralizing about pirating indie games. like, piracy is not stealing. i was not going to buy it. i am more likely to buy a game after pirating it bc i realized i liked it.
I'm pretty sure its small business brainworms
ah yea that makes sense
especially since this argument is usually used for indie games that did quite well or had high budgets. i dont think the creator of stardew valley is gonna miss my $10 that much.
it's small business cult shit
if i didn't pirate whatever i wasn't going to pay for it either, there's too much other stuff to do for free
Every game should have a demo, even just to check if the game runs well or not in your pc/deck.
if you have a pot of money set aside you can use steam's 2-hour refund thing for this, even if you're just gonna pirate it afterwards
I wonder if that's had a hand in devs not bothering to make separate demos
It's a steal alright: the game publishers are stealing from the gamers. The gamers!
Deadass the last time I bought a $60 game full price was like... Dark Souls III nearly 10 years ago (:aware:)? Even the few times I've bought AAA games on release since then I've always got something like a 5-10% discount on Fanatical or similar stores
former playstation exec should take a long walk off a short pier
I guess I'll carefully choose to not spend my money on your garbage lol
I can't hear youuuu! 
i steal $80 games
this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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