H
hariseldon
Unconfirmed Member
So on these here forums we regularly get outrage about pricing. The current outrage is over Sony bumping the price of 1st party games, but before that we had the regular moans about Nintendo charging $60 for its games and continuing to do so for the life of the product. I'd like to present some thoughts on why actually it's not a bad idea to actually pay for stuff.
Before I get into the meat of things, I think it's relevant to briefly consider the cost of games over time. Back in the late 80s when the Atari ST came out a game would typically cost £20-25. Towards the end of its life in 93-94ish it was creeping up to 30, while all through that the big boxes from the likes of Microprose would routinely have an RRP of £35. Back then it was about 1.5 £ to the $. If we consider inflation, that £25 for a game in let's say 1990 is the equivalent of £57.25 today, which works out at $73. So the pricing is actually in line with inflation. Where things are different of course is that today we have DLC, microtransactions and loot boxes. I want to address how we got to that point.
So way back in the distant past we bought music, movies and games, news and magazines physically. We had to go to a shop and buy a CD, DVD or cartridge. Then the internet came along. Everything was free, because we hadn't really wrapped our heads around financial transactions online. People started pirating things from the interent and got to expect things free. Napster happened. The music industry didn't handle it well, and the eventual outcome was selling downloads for £1 for a single or £6 for an album vs the £4 single and £12 album they were previously selling. Then streaming happened and they got even less money.
Gamers (especially on PC) meanwhile were pirating things from Sharereactor and eDonkey, before graduating to the pirate bay. Steam came along with its convenience and deep-discounted sales and many people (myself included) were successfully weaned off piracy habits. Bundles happened, making games even cheaper. We all built huge backlogs of games we will never play and ultimately don't care about. I have a ridiculous collection of pushing 1000 games on my Steam, GOG, etc accounts, and honestly I'll never play them all, and so many are absolute trash from bundles.
Cinema was able to avoid much of this due to the experience of the theatre - by offering a physical experience that was superior to your home they could lure people in. I suspect the COVID situation will have many in the movie industry shifting nervously in their seats as some companies break ranks and push content to VOD.
So where did these developments lead us?
News shifted online, but nobody wanted to pay, so we had adverts, but they didn't work. So Google got clever and profiled people for targetted advertising. Social media came along. It had to be free to get people to participate. The problem is that with search and our communication with each other we became the product. In search this led to creepy profiling and privacy infringements, while in social this became a battle for eyeballs, amplifying rage and creating the horror that is Twitter. News became a battle of clickbait to get seen on google to collect the google adbucks and journalism was destroyed.
The music industry is basically fucked. Consider the loss of the cultural touchstone of the top 40 we once had in the UK (I can't speak of America), the shared cultural heritage of all of us hearing a broadly similar set of music in addition to that we sought out ourselves, meaning we could all discuss how fucking annoying boy bands were, or how awesome britpop was. More importantly though record companies aren't sending scouts out to gigs like they used to, the A&R departments have shrunk, and artists outside of the elite are getting less money than ever as streaming erodes income. The loss to our culture is profound as music becomes more fragmented and of lower quality.
Games have taken a slightly different tack. Publishers realised that customers had gotten used to deep discounts, many of us will chuck a game on isthereanydeal and wait for it to hit a price far below its release price. This has led publishers to seek alternative ways of making revenue, and this is where DLC and microtransactions have come in, some so nasty as to make horse armour look positively pedestrian. It's had an impact on game design too as games must be designed for monetisation. It's led to the push to multiplayer and games as a service as now selling you a game isn't where the money is, it's in getting you to spend money in the game. And now with Gamepass and similar the emphasis will be on keeping your attention to get the money from Microsoft, which means games not respecting your time, padding themselves out with busywork but trying to push that dopamine into your skull so you keep on playing, trapped like a rat in a maze.
Some companies have resisted that urge. Nintendo famously cop a lot of flak here for pricing their games at $60 and keeping them there. This gets called anti-consumer but notice how Nintendo games don't generally have microtransactions. DLC is more akin to the expansion packs of old, genuinely big content. And the games, for me, bring back that old-school magic of gaming, because the incentive for Nintendo with this pricing scheme is to sell you a game. To do that they need to get your mates to tell you how awesome it is, be they offline or online. You don't do that with bland skinner boxes. A side bonus is that the games hold their value - 2nd hand I can get very close to what I paid for any given game.
So, in summary, being a bunch of tightwads might seem good for the consumer, but the long term consequences are harmful. It's cost us the music industry, it's led to games that hunt for whales and disrespect our time, it's led to the clickbait mess media we see today and it's led to the social media mess polarising our society. I'm not sure the free stuff was worth it.
Before I get into the meat of things, I think it's relevant to briefly consider the cost of games over time. Back in the late 80s when the Atari ST came out a game would typically cost £20-25. Towards the end of its life in 93-94ish it was creeping up to 30, while all through that the big boxes from the likes of Microprose would routinely have an RRP of £35. Back then it was about 1.5 £ to the $. If we consider inflation, that £25 for a game in let's say 1990 is the equivalent of £57.25 today, which works out at $73. So the pricing is actually in line with inflation. Where things are different of course is that today we have DLC, microtransactions and loot boxes. I want to address how we got to that point.
So way back in the distant past we bought music, movies and games, news and magazines physically. We had to go to a shop and buy a CD, DVD or cartridge. Then the internet came along. Everything was free, because we hadn't really wrapped our heads around financial transactions online. People started pirating things from the interent and got to expect things free. Napster happened. The music industry didn't handle it well, and the eventual outcome was selling downloads for £1 for a single or £6 for an album vs the £4 single and £12 album they were previously selling. Then streaming happened and they got even less money.
Gamers (especially on PC) meanwhile were pirating things from Sharereactor and eDonkey, before graduating to the pirate bay. Steam came along with its convenience and deep-discounted sales and many people (myself included) were successfully weaned off piracy habits. Bundles happened, making games even cheaper. We all built huge backlogs of games we will never play and ultimately don't care about. I have a ridiculous collection of pushing 1000 games on my Steam, GOG, etc accounts, and honestly I'll never play them all, and so many are absolute trash from bundles.
Cinema was able to avoid much of this due to the experience of the theatre - by offering a physical experience that was superior to your home they could lure people in. I suspect the COVID situation will have many in the movie industry shifting nervously in their seats as some companies break ranks and push content to VOD.
So where did these developments lead us?
News shifted online, but nobody wanted to pay, so we had adverts, but they didn't work. So Google got clever and profiled people for targetted advertising. Social media came along. It had to be free to get people to participate. The problem is that with search and our communication with each other we became the product. In search this led to creepy profiling and privacy infringements, while in social this became a battle for eyeballs, amplifying rage and creating the horror that is Twitter. News became a battle of clickbait to get seen on google to collect the google adbucks and journalism was destroyed.
The music industry is basically fucked. Consider the loss of the cultural touchstone of the top 40 we once had in the UK (I can't speak of America), the shared cultural heritage of all of us hearing a broadly similar set of music in addition to that we sought out ourselves, meaning we could all discuss how fucking annoying boy bands were, or how awesome britpop was. More importantly though record companies aren't sending scouts out to gigs like they used to, the A&R departments have shrunk, and artists outside of the elite are getting less money than ever as streaming erodes income. The loss to our culture is profound as music becomes more fragmented and of lower quality.
Games have taken a slightly different tack. Publishers realised that customers had gotten used to deep discounts, many of us will chuck a game on isthereanydeal and wait for it to hit a price far below its release price. This has led publishers to seek alternative ways of making revenue, and this is where DLC and microtransactions have come in, some so nasty as to make horse armour look positively pedestrian. It's had an impact on game design too as games must be designed for monetisation. It's led to the push to multiplayer and games as a service as now selling you a game isn't where the money is, it's in getting you to spend money in the game. And now with Gamepass and similar the emphasis will be on keeping your attention to get the money from Microsoft, which means games not respecting your time, padding themselves out with busywork but trying to push that dopamine into your skull so you keep on playing, trapped like a rat in a maze.
Some companies have resisted that urge. Nintendo famously cop a lot of flak here for pricing their games at $60 and keeping them there. This gets called anti-consumer but notice how Nintendo games don't generally have microtransactions. DLC is more akin to the expansion packs of old, genuinely big content. And the games, for me, bring back that old-school magic of gaming, because the incentive for Nintendo with this pricing scheme is to sell you a game. To do that they need to get your mates to tell you how awesome it is, be they offline or online. You don't do that with bland skinner boxes. A side bonus is that the games hold their value - 2nd hand I can get very close to what I paid for any given game.
So, in summary, being a bunch of tightwads might seem good for the consumer, but the long term consequences are harmful. It's cost us the music industry, it's led to games that hunt for whales and disrespect our time, it's led to the clickbait mess media we see today and it's led to the social media mess polarising our society. I'm not sure the free stuff was worth it.
