Technology

Well no but also yes.

An Atari 2600 was $160 in 1979. Cartridges were $25-40. Adjust for inflation and that's $738.56 for a console and $115-184 per cartridge.

Also minimum wage was $2.90 ($13.39). Median family income was $19,660 ($90,750.94).

And it was new tech.

So the prices have come down. There are a lot of amazing games that are cheap that you can play basically forever. Minecraft, Dead Cells, Skyrim, etc.

But our expectations have risen while our wages have come down.

So not wrong, but not right for the reasons you'd assume.

Perhaps making one game per decade is a losing strategy.

These people only care now because it's actually affecting the bottom line.

Did they care when AAA pricing was lifted to $70 (base) as AAA quality took a nosedive? Did they care when "preordering" turned into "premium"? Did they care when microtransactions made some games into spend-to-win machines?

Hell, most of these clowns don't even play games. Just more rich people putting on the hat they think they need to get away with a "hello, fellow gamers."

Maybe the industry has a C-suite crisis.

It’s interesting how people are finally starting to notice after being told for years this will all eventually come to a head.

Why would I pay $70 for shit that's super watered down to appeal to the lowest common denominator when I could pay $20-40 for something made with real passion?

There's that passive voice, striking again

"People are buying indie games instead and I'm not happy about it"

Whose decision was it to charge 70-80 usd for a game?

Whose ai investments are buying up all the ram, gpus, and ssds?

Not consumers’…

It's like they're catching onto why the urban legend about drug dealers intentionally poisoning their customers is bullshit. Turns out your sales go down when people can't buy your product.

I mean, unless you play the last four decades of games in emulation... or the couple hundred thousand indie games on steam... or the other few hundred thousand mobile games or...

Oh, you mean your company profits are in crisis. Yeah. Good.

Well Asha, maybe you should talk to your boss Slopya about that AI problem that's raising prices on everything.

That CEO has no room to talk about gaming being unaffordable and the industry ignoring the signs, when it's that very industry that made it unaffordable to begin with.

You can't claim ignorance of a problem you and your industry directly caused, Asha. You're as complicit in this as the industry you're saying is ignoring warning signs.

That's like if I broke a stick in half in front of a bunch of people, and then tried to say I didn't break that stick, when everyone saw me break that stick. Stupid analogy, I know, but that's basically what Asha is trying to pull here.

Gaming studios have the choice to make stylized visuals instead of chasing hyper realism. They just choose not to.

All the wealth is being concentrated in the hands of too few people. I'm not going to buy a $120 game when my salary is down, or I'm just laid off.

Maybe if they would stop burning through all the RAM and shoving AI down our throats...

There have an amazing catalog of affordable games that were launched over the last 25 years (or more). There's a lifetime of fun available. Gamers may chose to play those, instead of the over expensive new games or worse, subscriptions.

Plenty of good indie or AA games with low system requirements.

Or, you know, do something else than incrementing the version number on your old games while adding nothing new.

Same old games, at a higher price, this might just not cut it.

In the meantime, the Indie games are flourishing.

That's what the industry has to say, Mr. The CEO... Open your eyes.

-- Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

Every industry has an accessibility crisis. Lazy MBAs don't want to sell products that appeal to everyone if they can sell products that only appeal to rich people with less effort.

Ultimately AI is an unaffordable industry. It'll crash in time, and there'll hopefully be a whole lot of price drops on ram, graphics, etc. People will not want to stop playing games. The industry has had crashes before and always bounced back bigger than ever.

It will be bad for whoever's economy is most dependent on it though.. And any businesses really heavily invested in it. Won't it, Microsoft.