Braden wrote on Jan 15, 2025, 21:43:
Heh. There is no f*cking way I'm paying $80-$100 for a new game - I don't care how supposedly good it might be. I'll just continue to wait for the inevitable sales discounts later on.

Has it ever occurred to anyone that developers need to charge $100 or more for a game because nobody is willing to preorder anymore. Just like McDonalds these game developers have to constantly raise prices to make up for lost sales caused by their products shit quality, and high price.

Happy to hear PC gaming is strong, this is where my interests lie. If I had to go back to the console space I would, but most likely in the eventual Steam Deck 2 variety at this point. Just preordered FFVII Rebirth on Steam last week, doing my part.

90% of the games I buy nowadays are $20 or less. Give me a $10 indie game that I can beat in 2 days or less and I'm all for it.

Peeeling wrote on Jan 16, 2025, 10:36:
Funny how all I ever hear when unfettered capitalism is criticised is how it ensures efficient distribution of resources and how competition brings down prices.

Actual economic analyst: If company A successfully raises its prices by $30 it will allow others to follow suit.

It's even worse than that.

Look at beef in the US. We're down to, if I recall, 4 main beef suppliers in the US. So to your point, they don't really compete. They have their market shares locked in, and even then, most grocers carry two of them, so they don't even necessarily compete much. If one raises their price, the others follow, as you said. Why? Because the gains they make in profit is higher that way than in fighting for market share. It's easier growth. It isn't collusion because they don't talk, it's just that it's such a stable category after consolidation that they all realize they grow best together.

But it happens on the other side, as well. Cattle is frequently auctioned. Given consolidation, there aren't many companies at these auctions. And again, they manage to cooperate without collusion. They know they each need X cattle at an auction, so if one bids, the others don't, or don't aggressively. This means that, even though it's a cattle auction, it's really more a cattle sale. They don't bid it up. If the auction starts at $20, back in the day with 30 companies trying to get cattle, they may bid against each other. With 4, when one bids, the others know they should just let it sell for that $20, or close to it, and bid first on the next one. Again, they're not explicitly colluding, but they know they benefit from not competing.

So prices at the market go up, but costs at the auction go down. All because we've had significant consolidation, which is part of capitalism - the larger (or smaller and more aggressive) company acquires a competitor to have more share, and at some point, the industry has so few real competitors that they aren't truly competing, yet they have so much market power that they can box anyone else out. If someone says "hey, I'll start a beef company," good luck getting into Kroger or Albertson's, because the companies that sell 85% of Kroger's beef will penalize Kroger if they start giving away their shelf space.

Games are weird, economically. There's thousands of them, and they're not fungible. Game A is not the same as Game B, so the cheapest price doesn't necessarily win. Hype and marketing have a huge impact on consumer expectations. If people think they'll enjoy Game A more, then they'll pay more. It's still a very competitive space, but excitement is at least as important as the price.

Which is kinda cool when indie games make it big and sell millions of copies. They've got shoestring budgets and lack the amazing graphics of AAA games, but they can generate just as much excitement through word of mouth. They usually do have to be cheaper, though, to get the ball rolling.

Funny how all I ever hear when unfettered capitalism is criticised is how it ensures efficient distribution of resources and how competition brings down prices.

Actual economic analyst: If company A successfully raises its prices by $30 it will allow others to follow suit.

Yea the poor struggling game industry, if only they could all raise their prices by 42% then they would be able to enjoy that growth at any cost wet dream.

C-suites, right? Right, Microsoft? You checked where to best conduct "small layoffs", and noticed that you could save the most amount of money with the least amount of productivity lost per person fired if you just got rid of a handful of C-suites, right? Easily pays for like 20 game studios to get rid of one of them, after all.

Zerg wrote on Jan 15, 2025, 22:14:
If my grasp of the English language isn't lacking here then "rebound" implies that somehow the video game industry is in a downwards trend.

A quick Google search shows that this isn't the case. What does the industry need to rebound from? It's definitely not low revenue or negative growth.

Still, if GTA6 would be around 100$ for the base version suckers would still buy it day 1. I firmly believe this.

According to the data this analyst presents, there was a dip in total spending post-COVID (-3.5% YOY in 2022) and since then it's barely returned to the same level it was before that. So it's not low revenue (that's still the highest it's ever been), but these professional capitalist fucks don't care about that, they want GROWTH. And in that regard, the industry is currently fairly stagnant, and falling short of even modest projections across the board. The main thing they seem to be wringing their hands over is the comparison to the industry exploding throughout the decade preceding COVID, where it averaged around a 10% increase every single year (spending totaled $80B in 2011, then $200B in 2021), which is double the rate it had grown between 1990 and 2010 and more than triple the rate of growth of global GDP.

So the rebound they're looking for is a return to something like that +10% annual growth... Perhaps we should all send them our thoughts and prayers to get them through this trying time.

Fion wrote on Jan 15, 2025, 22:36:
PC games have been selling roughly equal to or outselling all console game sales combined for years now, but especially since the pandemic.

Ya, but about half of that is free to play, and then about 2/3 of what isn't F2P is games as a service (link). Lots of micro- and not so micro-transactions going on. Consoles don't really have that model to generate revenue.

And then mobile, which is all about that model, makes about as much as PC and consoles put together.

PC games have been selling roughly equal to or outselling all console game sales combined for years now, but especially since the pandemic.

If my grasp of the English language isn't lacking here then "rebound" implies that somehow the video game industry is in a downwards trend.

A quick Google search shows that this isn't the case. What does the industry need to rebound from? It's definitely not low revenue or negative growth.

Still, if GTA6 would be around 100$ for the base version suckers would still buy it day 1. I firmly believe this.

If GTA was $200, not only would the game industry rebound, it would flourish.
There's no telling what would happen if it was $300.

Heh. There is no f*cking way I'm paying $80-$100 for a new game - I don't care how supposedly good it might be. I'll just continue to wait for the inevitable sales discounts later on.