Unfortunately, some genres struggle going indie because they’re too expensive to develop and aren’t guaranteed to sell well. There is a reason PlatinumGames can’t afford to make Bayonetta if Nintendo doesn’t put up the money, for example, and almost every indie studio that attempts a similar feat has to spend years and years in early access.

The Genokids developer has been working on the game for +5 years and has only 2 chapters to show for it. Mahou Arms released on Steam in April 2020, and is still in early access today.

The world has become too expensive for some things to comfortably exist, or exist at all, unfortunately.

I buy a ton of games a year after they release or so. I got the benefit of the expanded edition or whatever and it’s just as much fun for me as it was for everybody else a year or two ago.

Now I play a lot of single player stuff, so your mileage may vary.

Games were more than $60 in the 90s.

But video games were limited by physical copies back then. Supply was limited, and it cost the publisher multiple dollars, sometimes in the double digits, to manufacture the physical goods to sell. But with that you got a usually complete game, as patches werent really a thing and making physical revisions was expensive. You also got the entire game that you paid for, tall the content in the game was available to you from your one purchase. You can lend it to a friend if you want, too.

Nowadays we get sold half of a game that barely works for $70, so you can get the other half by buying the next 14 $20 battlepasses and playing only that one game for the next 5 years to finally get all the content of the game. You also cant let your friend borrow the game.

I don’t need to pay for a dev team that is overbloated with people, a marketing team that thinks every ad needs to have a Beatles song, and an executive that just demands more profit. Dev teams need to get smaller, marketing needs to shrink, and exectuives need to be less greedy. They already make record profits, they do not need more.

Have they? I’ve seen many games costing up to $100 or more if you want the complete game.

Many standard editions of triple-A games have been chopped to the point where even the proper ending is part of DLC that requires a season pass.

Some design their games in such away that they can sell quality of life features or some kind convenience for players. (Basically subtle form of P2W)

Some have turned their games to billboards for DLC, micro transactions, season passes and even other games.

AAA games are significantly cheaper in real terms than they were in the 90s.

30 CAD in 1993 is about 58 CAD today, and those weren’t even the most expensive games in the flyer you saw then.

Especially console titles were expensive by modern standards, the main titles like Mario games retailed for something like 150 USD in 2026 dollars.

The price of new games isn’t a problem for me as they are still cheaper than what they were when I was a kid. In my country Switzerland, an expensive new game is stll less than CHF100.- when some Nes games were CHF120.- thirty years ago. Back in the Playstation 1 era games were around CHF89.- and now most Playstation 5 games are around CHF79.-.

And that’s not taking inflation into account!

Gaming is one of the few things which has become cheaper in my lifetime, especially now that I get a lot of old games on my Steam Deck and only racing sims on my Playstation 5.

For me the problem is that you can pay such an amount and still be subject to many popups begging for your money (microtransactions) or DRM’s (always online or others).

Or that, thanks to digital games, you’ll soon not be able to resell an expensive game that you didn’t enjoy enough to keep.

And also the fact that games aren’t really prettier than 10 years ago but that you still need better hardware to play them.

I think game companies really need to have a look at why their games are becoming so expensive, because I don’t think it’s because they are treating their employees better.

Comrades, I think we found AG bondi.

Video games were way more expensive when I was a kid

They still are, for a kid.

Inflation this, inflation that, but the free money a person has has not increased. It has been going down for quite some time.

Also I’m pretty sure no one in the world is gonna look at a game and go „well if I buy this I’m gonna be homeless for 2 months, but if I plot an excel graph from 1990 to 2026 the price is down so I’ll buy it”

Fucking ag bondi logic if you ask me

Also, micro transaction exist because the poor CEO wants his 23 million salary.

Too bad companies seek exponential profit due to line having to go up, so pricing games higher wouldn’t lead to killing off microtransactions even if priced at $200.

Companies don’t hit a point where they go this is enough money. They became companies because their mentality is this isn’t enough, and its only the a mount consumers are willing to pay that keeps price from inflating more like companies want.

Counterpoint: It’s just so much fun when you are starting on release day, not getting spoiled, no one has a clue where what is there is no meta and a lot of community interaction.

E.g. Elden Ring, we started together at 12 am when it launched, killed the first couple of bosses. Then the next few days forums were filled with posts, people had different theories, NPC questlines were being discovered. It was the same two years later with the DLC. A friend of mine bought it finally and started playing last week. But he is .missing all of that.

This… Put games on your wishlist, set your wishlist to only show sales, and sort by price. Then only buy games from that list when they go on a significant sale. Plenty of decent games out there regularly go for $5-10 or less. With very few exceptions I refuse to pay more than $20-30 for a game and, even then, only if they’re like 50% off and not likely to come down.

Also… stop pre-ordering games. They’ll still be there when they do go on sale. You don’t need to play them as soon as they come out. Conquer that FOMO shit and develop some integrity.

Remember Gamefly?

Gamepass wasn’t a bad idea, and it was actually pretty cool when it first came out. It was basically Microsoft’s Gamefly.