Are you really this dense, or are you trolling me?
And, anyway, I remember new games being £40 in the mid-nineties. "games today" are anything but obscenely priced.
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Steam to start region locking games
- Thread starter opethdisciple
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Are you really this dense, or are you trolling me?
And, anyway, I remember new games being £40 in the mid-nineties. "games today" are anything but obscenely priced.
Lets solve this by giving Steam sensitive financial data about ourselves and our household, so people who want a game and have loads of disposable income pay £1000 or more for their copy.
Sounds like the tax system in the UK! Earn more, then pay a higher tax rate for exactly the same services.
Oh lawd not the "I don't like what you've said, you must be stupid or trolling" response. I thought you were better than that.
Games were expensive in the 90s, however the market was nowhere near as big as it is, even taking inflation I to account, there's still less reason now for games to be £40+, especially when you take into consideration the fact that most PC games are sold digitally which results in significantly higher margins than physical copies of the past.
I remember paying £50 + for n64 games in my youth. Paying £30 - £40 for pc games now is not a bad thing all things considered, considering the dev teams and marketing etc will cost more now than it did back then.
I don't see why people begrudge people being given something at the equivalent price for them as to us. £20 to a typical Russian earning a typical Russian wage will be a lot more to them than £40 to Joe average here.
Put it in perspective here, I live in the North East, earning much less than a Londoner for the same job, but my cost of living is much less. All and all, my disposable income is effected at about the same %.
I appreciate this is a generalisation, but you have to get my drift on this
I don't see why people begrudge people being given something at the equivalent price for them as to us. £20 to a typical Russian earning a typical Russian wage will be a lot more to them than £40 to Joe average here.
Put it in perspective here, I live in the North East, earning much less than a Londoner for the same job, but my cost of living is much less. All and all, my disposable income is effected at about the same %.
I appreciate this is a generalisation, but you have to get my drift on this
I don't want to write a full response if he's just trolling. If he's stupid, then I might make the effort
£40 in the mid-nineties adjusts to about £70 today, with inflation. Production and distribution of physical media wouldn't account for near-50% of the sale price. Steam still takes a retailer margin, too.
The market is bigger, but AAA budgets have gone through the roof - we're paying less now than we did in the past for more game, which is (arguably) the benefit of the larger market.
then why do games have a fraction of the content?
I remember a time a game would last you days maybe even weeks now your lucky to get 10 hours.
gaming was a niche market in the 90s so high prices were expected now days every house has at least one system capable of gaming if not more you would expect prices to come down.
also the manufacturing costs are almost non existent now and most developers aren't on huge wages at EA etc
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Where the hell were you shopping? lol. Maybe a Saturn/Playstation game but PC games were much cheaper, £30 was a high price back then (I remember Quake II being £29.99 on release /grr).
To be fair I almost responded with that to his first reply lol.
I don't want to write a full response if he's just trolling. If he's stupid, then I might make the effort
£40 in the mid-nineties adjusts to about £70 today, with inflation. Production and distribution of physical media wouldn't account for near-50% of the sale price. Steam still takes a retailer margin, too.
The market is bigger, but AAA budgets have gone through the roof - we're paying less now than we did in the past for more game, which is (arguably) the benefit of the larger market.
You'd be surprised at just how much production and distribution took out of an£40 game. The developers would typically see £10-15 of that. The rest were publisher margins, pressing, distribution and transport, distributer margins and then finally retailer's margins. Developers can make the same sort of money selling their games for £15-20 via Steam.
The owner/founder of Oddworld did a talk on it a few years ago outlining all the costs. This is the real reason why developers have won been so eager to go digital. Despite the talk that it would result in cheaper games, it's only resulted in cheaper production, depending on the develpper/publisher.
Of course, Steam takes a cut at about 30% at the top end, but that's still a lot less than physical copies and all the parties who want a slice of profit.
My point is that they're charging a lot more in a relative sense to the size of the market than they used to.
That's because N64 games cost 15-20x more to produce than CD based games. The blank cartridge alone cost manufacturers $20.
Yep, dead money. People just don't seem to realise that everything is marketed, budgeted to the initial sales window, and everything else is an afterthought.
Granted there's a siding scale, but when you see it rock bottom on humbles and the +50% on steams, it really is just how you call it.
That said from a selfish point of view, it benefits people like me, who buy very little and not very often.... online digital distro offers up the opportunity for that to happen, retail in no way would offer up the returns they see now... and to go out on a limb probably gets a publisher to invest in the first place knowing those dead extras exist.
X-wing, Ecstatica, Rise of the Robots... They were all £40 games (I had them in my attic with original prices on until recently). Late '90s things got a little cheaper, but were still at least as much as today's games, inflation allowing.
This isn't necessarily true. Part of it is to do with your perception of time at a younger age, and physical and mental capabilities with regards to solving the problems presented in games.
There are games I played as a kid that seemed to last for AGES, that are over in no time now if I go back to them. I remember it taking WEEKS to finish the Sonic games on the Mega drive, when really they're just a few hours long but because of the above, and higher difficulties, they seemed to be a lot longer.
That's why I said "arguably".
There is certainly more content in games now. Just a lot of it is "flavour" rather than gameplay. Scenery, plot, cut scenes, general graphical fidelity, the eco-system outside the game (spin-offs, stories, websites, cinematic quality adverts etc).
You still find "pure" gameplay in many Indie titles, and the Indie scene is a massive plus for modern gamers. The video game market has the critical mass now to support multiple tiers of games which can all thrive - and as a relative old-timer in gaming (active from end of the '80s onwards), I personally tend to prefer Indie games to the AAA releases. And modern Indies (the good ones) are miles better than the AAA games of my youth*** - just superb experiences. And they're dead cheap too.
Edit;
*** Except Super Metroid. Nothing beats Super Metroid (so far as I've experienced, anyway)
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If proof be needed that we are being ripped off for no other reason than companies knowing they can charge outlandish prices and we will pay it, the Doom 3 BFG scandal stands out, a little back story:
In 2012 (8 years after the release of Doom 3) it occurred to Bethesda that console gamers had never gotten a decent quality release of Doom 3 (as their machines couldn't run it, instead they had received a very degraded version). This was an obvious money spinner so they set about making a new console port and even included the games expansion as standard (good times).
Then they decided they could make even more money by porting their improved console port back to the PC, this is where they hit a wall: It wasn't as good as the PC original (and as it had no support for HD textures and mods either it REALLY wasn't as good). Of course that wasn't going to get in the way of their $ so they had the original version pulled from steam then launched BFG edition for £5 more, the ****s.
In 2012 (8 years after the release of Doom 3) it occurred to Bethesda that console gamers had never gotten a decent quality release of Doom 3 (as their machines couldn't run it, instead they had received a very degraded version). This was an obvious money spinner so they set about making a new console port and even included the games expansion as standard (good times).
Then they decided they could make even more money by porting their improved console port back to the PC, this is where they hit a wall: It wasn't as good as the PC original (and as it had no support for HD textures and mods either it REALLY wasn't as good). Of course that wasn't going to get in the way of their $ so they had the original version pulled from steam then launched BFG edition for £5 more, the ****s.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha- oh you were serious?
Most games today have less content than a Shareware episode never mind a full game.
Come on mate, cheap shot - quote the whole paragraph.
Most? :/
Soldato
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cant you just run Steam through VPN and still play them after this change.?
rip multiplayer