Game prices for the past 30 years haven’t kept pace with inflation.
I recognise the argument that publishers are shifting larger volumes of units now, which has been a factor that has allowed the industry to keep price increases below inflation for the last 30 years.
Wages not being even close to keeping up with inflation (especially housing inflation) is the real issue here, not the $70/$80 video game.
You should be angry at your reduced purchasing power in all of society, not just with the price of Nintendo games.
(Secondary less unpopular opinion, the best games out these days are multiplatform and released at least 5 years ago, buy them for << $80 and wait for sale the new releases, when they too are 5 years old)
The fact that they’re moving more units doesn’t matter, everything, including things for which the price followed inflation, sells more units than it did 40 years ago just because there’s more people on the planet and globalism is a thing.
What matters is that that money goes to enrich billionaires and not the developers making the product people are buying.
Steam takes a 30% cut on the first $10m in sales (then 25% until $50m and then 20%) and they pay their employees a lot more than industry average and the owner is a multi billionaire with a yacht collection. Same shit for publishers, the c-suites are rich from “managing” the intermediary between the development studio and the retailers, they don’t give a crap about the product as long as it sells.
Meanwhile the devs making the games have a hard time affording housing, need to deal with crunches and get laid off once the game they were working on is completed.
And what about us, the consumers? Well we’re no better off than the developers and we’re still enriching a bunch of billionaires while most of us struggle to afford basic needs.
Both publishers and retailers could afford to reduce their cut and lower prices OR to reduce their cut and leave more money to the people making the products they sell and the impact would only be felt by a handful of people (in Steam’s case, by a single person).
Just as a sidenote here, the “issue” with steam is that it doesn’t have any real competition. Steam just does everything better than any other game launcher and that’s probably in part because of their policy.
On the gamedev side they allow you to market to a huge audience as a small creator and give you a chance to make it big (think Balatro, Signal 1, and a lot of other indie games as of recent)
On the gamer side they’ve made buying, updating and doing anything around the games so much easier than it used to be and not a single launcher has been able to do it as good as them. They’ve released one of the best VR headsets on the market that still hasn’t been beaten years later. They’ve released the first good Linux based PC handheld both giving a huge boost to that market and improving proton so gaming on Linux is actually possible (outside of games with anti-cheats that don’t allow linux)
I’m not saying them taking 30% from almost any sale done on steam is good, but at least they are able to give a service for it that not a single other company has done, they’re probably the most pro gamer company in the industry right now (together with game studios like Larian)
Also, yes devs should be paid a lot more for their work and the average person should also have a higher salary to beat inflation cause life is just too damn expensive!
Competition or not, the guy at the top still decided that being a multi billionaire was more important than the quality of life of his clients or the world poorest. No one forces anyone to own a yacht collection. No one forces anyone to be a billionaire. At any point he could have decided to stop accumulating wealth and to give away what he would otherwise gain to charities.
Remember when Musk said if he could fix world hunger for $6B he would do it and then he didn’t? ALL billionaires are guilty of the same thing.
Edit: keep downvoting guys, I’m sure Gaben will be glad you defended him