80 Dollar Premium Games Will Only Hurt the Industry

And that is likely only the beginning.

With the release of the Nintendo Switch 2 and Mario Kart World at the start of June games have reached a new premium price, 80 bucks (obviously US prices as other countries often have had them be more expensive already). This is also something that Microsoft has followed suit with The Outer Worlds 2 being 80 bucks too*. We can only assume more and more games are going to be releasing at this new price point as time goes on. This is a massive jump in game price from just a few years ago when games were, mostly 60 bucks (70 dollar games were introduced at the end 2020 and then became standard in 2021 and that is also too much but this article will approaching this as if the prices should still be 60 dollars, because they should be).

Today I want to go over why 80 dollar games is going to only do one thing for the industry, kill it. I want to go over the faults with the arguments people make for why the prices need to increase, and I want to go over how we can fight back. It's a more relevant article than I've done before but it's something I have been wanting to talk about since the announcement that Mario Kart World would be 80 bucks and then my partner and I had a conversation last week that really solidified why I needed to talk about it.

Important note at the start: I'm not trying to shame people who want to spend their money on 80 dollar games, I get you want the new thing. Especially not my fellow writers here on Substack who play the games for reviewing and such. But if you're someone who can afford it and is iffy on whether you should, just don't. You don't have to have the new thing, you probably have a big backlog to deal with or there are better and cheaper indie titles to play. Go play those.

*A week after this article came out Microsoft announced the price of The Outer Worlds was dropped to 70 bucks. So it seems that 80 dollars is solely Nintendo’s thing…for now.

Well it's inflation's fault!

Put simply, this is Bullshit. Inflation is very influential, but that's not really the main influence for this point. If you check inflation of 70 bucks in 2020 to now is 86 bucks and from 2021 to now is 82 bucks. So the cost of the games is, surprisingly, under where inflation would be a natural blame. The problem isn't necessarily inflation, as we've dealt with that many times before. The problem is Buying Power.

By this I mean that it's not the price increase that's the real issue, it's the fact that consumers can no longer easily afford the same things they used to be able to. In a standard economy inflation goes up, this is just a reality of having money. But wages are supposed to outpace inflation. When that happens consumers are happy, are able to buy things for themselves both that they need and that they just simply want to. That is good and useful for not just economies to grow but also for industries to spring up, for innovation to happen, and for people to have consistent jobs. These are all good things.

The problem is that right now wages have only been slightly outpacing inflation since mid 2023 and now have to catch up to the massive inflation that had happened prior. An important thing to keep in mind, as well, is that while wages might be outpacing inflation slightly for some (slightly meaning mostly under 1% higher which is nothing), it’s not at all for others. The economy we have in the States is currently catching some people’s wages up but leaving far more behind in stagnant or minimal wage growth. This is a problem. Stagnant wages tank economies and entire industries.

There are a lot of ways that this could be improved (increase the minimum wage, free universal healthcare to take money away from employers paying for their employees insurance and allow them to invest it back into the employees salaries, and a butt load of regulation for a lot of stuff that I don't think I need to get into because that's all very technical and really not my area of expertise)... but none would be done under this current administration here in the states (yay needless trade wars, deregulating things that really needed that regulation, and just all around making it harder to exist here as a not rich person).

Back in the day with the 60 dollar price of games that was the sweet spot for an immense amount of people to be able to buy games. This was also because the economy allowed them, and me as a teenager, to buy games with very little investment. Yet as inflation has gone on since that 60 dollar price introduction, wages haven't really increased all that much in comparison, at least in the majority of industries. That leads to us as consumers feeling like we are penny pinching more than we should be, more than we used to be. Because we are.

So inflation is, overall, something that doesn't have to be influential. Buying Power decreasing means far more for consumers all over the world than just inflation. Wages have to rise and stay ahead of inflation consistently and by more than just a percent and if they don't we are fucked.

Well it's more expensive to make games now!

This is undeniably true. But why is it so much more expensive now to develop games than it used to be? It's not all inflation, in fact much of this is because of one thing and one thing only, Poor Management.

Let me pull in some of my experience as a Producer for this point, sometimes teams will toss out ideas, develop them for a while, and see if they're working. Often this leads to a lot of iteration and trying to figure out if it's possible to do what they want. But there comes a time when someone needs to step in and just tell the team it's not working, that you can't spend years on trying to get one thing in a game to work even if it was a core part of the game. The really good Producers, Managers, Directors, even Leads are capable of doing this, but then there’s times when the poor ones are in charge.

Okay seriously though, Andromeda is far better than people give it credit for. It’s got a lot of issues but is still pretty damn good, particularly if you are looking for more Mass Effect.

For instance, Bioware Montreal, back when it existed, spent YEARS working on trying to get a planet Procedural generator for Mass Effect Andromeda operational to the point the team was satisfied¹. Not only were they working in an unfamiliar engine but they just kept plodding along trying to get the mechanic to work. But instead of management coming in after 6 months and going "hey this isn't really working, we either need to cut it or significantly shrink it's scope", they just let the team keep on going and wasting money and time causing the final game to be developed in under 2 years after management FINALLY said something.

Currently in the industry, there are so many managers who don't take this role in the games development. Instead they make wild, impulsive, and unrealistic decisions or demands. Like one of the top people at Rocksteady just all of a sudden coming in and, on a personal whim, demanding that the Suicide Squad team make a whole new driving system, something that was basically impossible in the game in the shape it was in at the time². But, after the team protested, the reputation and level of this person won out and the team started work on it. Except that after a little while the same person demanded they cut it because it wasn't working. But this also lead to a bunch of wasted time, money, and loss of employee progress on other mechanics that were necessary to getting the game out the door, further delaying the game again and again purely through mismanagement. What happened with Suicide Squad (a higher up demanding something be put in the game even though they're the only one who want it there) isn't higher ups job. It's just being a fucking asshole.

Management is the key here. One of the main things driving increasing costs of games isn't inflation, but actually longer development times. The way you fix this is not by increasing the price of the games and letting people "cook". No, you fix it by getting better people in management in there, getting Producers who tell people honest feedback even if that means they think large mechanics should be dropped because they just aren't working or aren't satisfying or just hinder fun (I am available).

Unlike Andromeda though, this one was still dog shit. But that’s what happens when you force a single player company to make a Live Service Game.

If we don't fix the mismanagement in the industry then nothing will change and in just a few years (or with GTAVI) we will hit 100 dollar games and, eventually, another massive videogame crash that will reshape the entire industry and lead to tens or hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs.

Well I can afford it!

That's awesome for you! But not everyone can. The industry thrived because games were cheap for a long time (60 bucks in the states), you being able to afford it doesn't change that not everyone can. If not everyone will be able to swing buying a game then the industry will suffer.

I, personally, could only afford an 80 dollar game (at the frequency that new games come out at) if I gave up buying other things that I need. I'm not alone, this is standard for most people. You being able to afford it also won't allow the industry to thrive, there's far more people that can't afford it than can.

Now of course if wages were going up and outpacing inflation at a decent percentage, as they should be, this would be a different story, but that’s not the world we live in.

It will snowball

Like I just said, this is not the last price increase that's going to happen, just 4 years ago the increase from 60 to 70 became the standard, you really think they're gonna stop at 80? Ha! That's not how greed works.

This will, 100% lead to another videogame crash like I said above and we can already see the start of that. Just a couple weeks ago a new study came out showing that younger people 18-24 are spending less and less on videogames now³. But why would that be? It's not just that we are headed towards a recession, because the industry thrived during the last one, it's that games are just too expensive to buy especially when wages aren’t going up alongside inflation, 80 bucks is just going to make that worse.

This will then lead to more people losing their jobs, which will lead to longer Dev times, which will lead to larger budgets, which will lead to another price increase, which will lead to less sales, which will lead to more and more layoffs, and then it just continues on and on.

There arrrr ways to fight back!

The most important way we can fight back is by still buying games, just the cheaper ones. Like indie games, or games like Clair Obscur. Games that don't have massive budgets and horrible managers. Games from companies that show that they know what they're doing. This is the biggest way we can communicate to the big corpos that run the industry by rewarding people with our money other than them. It will genuinely piss them off.

I’m sure there are other ways to fight back that many participate in, some while on a boat. You should look up what Reclamation is and think about how when a corporation makes tons of money off of the backs of others work and instead of sharing that money decides to punish them for not making enough money (particularly demanding tens or hundreds of millions more in profit than actually needed to survive and keep developing games), maybe the only moral way to show that corporation who's really the boss is to keep your money but find some way to still enjoy the work of the employees that pour their blood, sweat, and tears into the games they've made.

Some might say that this could lead to more people losing their jobs, but based on the state of the industry, it seems that even if a company makes a game that sells millions of copies, they are not safe from closure or from mass layoffs, so it's unlikely doing these things would really put people's jobs at risk.

The Conclusion

Listen, I know it's hard to not want to buy the new shiny game. So many are buying Mario Kart World right now and you want to enjoy that as well, I get that. But supporting an 80 dollar game price means some of your friends might not be able to enjoy that next to you. They might have to just accept that they'll never be able to afford it because Nintendo refuses to lower the prices on their games and used games are going the way of the dinosaurs.

So it might feel good to get that new game that's 80 bucks, but maybe you should take a step back and try to think about who would benefit more from that money? Does Nintendo, a company that is viciously anti-consumer or Microsoft, a company that can't help but try to monopolize entire industries, or even Sony which has invested billions in chasing the horrible Live Service Trend only to now walk that shit back after so many failures and cancellations, deserve the money you work so hard for? Or would Developers like Sandfall Interactive, Aggro Crab, DON'T NOD, CD PROJEKT Red (definitely bigger than the others but still far more deserving and consumer friendly), Strange Scaffold, Frogwares (literally working through a war right now), Larian, Too Kyo Games, Matt Dabrowski, tobyfox, The Chinese Room, Concerned Ape, Two Point Studios, Sokpop Collective, Tunic Team, Lovely Hellplace, Questline, Jump Over The Age, Zockrates Laboratories UG, Supergiant Games, or Evening Star be better companies to give your money?

If you need some people that plug indie games on YouTube or here on Substack, here are some of my Faves:

YouTube: Noodle, Dunkey, and Stephanie Sterling (usually through gameplay during the videos)

Substack: Good Game Lobby, Adventures in Indie Gaming, Margot Plays Videogames, The Besties (primarily a podcast but they do have a Substack), and Oya’s Game Hub

And here's a curator on Steam my partner highly recommends: Dominic Tarason’s Opinionation Station

Put simply, 80 dollar games (driven by greed and poor management) will lead to more job losses, more inflated budgets, more mismanagement, and more price increases and the only thing consumers can do is not participate. We as consumers have no power individually, but together? Together we can change the industry and show the companies driving for the price increases that we can join together and fight back against anti consumer actions and price increases. Let's stick together and fight for the industry.

Meow,

Cat

1. https://kotaku.com/the-story-behind-mass-effect-andromedas-troubled-five-1795886428

2. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/insiders-blame-suicide-squads-failings-on-changing-vision-and-lack-of-live-service-skills (I would use the Bloomberg article but I don’t have access)

3. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/young-americans-are-spending-a-whole-lot-less-on-video-games-this-year/1100-6https://www.gamespot.com/articles/young-americans-are-spending-a-whole-lot-less-on-video-games-this-year/1100-6532877532877