I feel like we keep seeing this headline. “AAA studio says current prices can’t support current budgets”
I almost never buy games at $60. I buy everything on sale, and there are constantly sales and way more games than I can play. They can charge whatever they want, I personally will be paying less.
Will the market bear $80 games? Maybe. I feel like a better strategy would be to reign in scope and budget and sell games at prices most people can afford. But who knows?
The Switch Lite is exactly this. $200 handheld that runs first party games. There are android handhelds like the Retroid pocket 5 as well.
A Steam Deck Lite would be incredible. Small, cheap, linux-based, and powerful enough to run indie games and some light 3D. I think that form factor basically needs an arm cpu though.
Yeah I loved Giant Bomb back in the day, but it was all about the people. With Vinny, Brad, Alex, and Jeff gone I just moved on to their new projects and stopped paying attention to Giant Bomb. Nowadays Giant Bomb is just a name to me.
Yeah the comments about Steam being a monopoly are weird to me. Steam has a huge market share, but they don’t own the whole market and they don’t try to prevent you from buying your games elsewhere. Proton even works on non-steam games. I’ve used it to play WoW private servers on Linux.
If Valve isn’t a pro-consumer company, then I don’t know what company could possibly fit the criteria. They’re not perfect, but they’ve earned the trust they have. I’ll trust Valve until they give me a reason not to.
One of my favorite games ever. Seriously one of the best online experiences I’ve ever had.
Only if a wave hits it.
Yeah President Camacho would be an upgrade over what we have now.
The cassette cases are really cool! I keep my Gameboy games in custom DS cases. It’s really nice having all of my gba/DS games looking uniform on the shelf. I kind of wish the Switch had kept that form factor.
Yeah this whole defending cheap foreign labor thing feels kind of weird to me. I might just be showing my ignorance here, but isn’t the end-game for globalization about raising living standards around the world? By trading with developing countries, the investment develops their middle class and eventually their wages should catch up with ours.
It feels weird to see people saying that so much of the American economy is suddenly unviable when we have to pay livable wages. If that’s the case, that’s a bad thing, and it should change. Not that I think these tariffs are the solution.
I agree, sales are constant (at least on PC) so I almost never even paid the $60 price tag. They can keep cranking up the prices but more and more people may just wait for sales. I know Nintendo games don’t go on sale very often but that makes the ecosystem even less attractive. $450 is in the range of a Steam deck.
Inflation or not, prices can only go up if the market will support them. If people are unable (or unwilling) to pay the higher prices, then prices basically can’t go up.
One of the things I really like about the Switch is that I can actually buy a whole physical game that doesn’t need an Internet connection. Sure, I have to check a website first, but I can at least curate my wishlist with games that are complete on cart.
At least them giving it a new name makes choosing games easier, I guess.
I hope this works out for them. Ori is an awesome game and I’m interested in the new project. I wishlisted it because the videos of it look great but I usually don’t buy early access games. Was planning to get it when it officially launches.