So, with all of these rising costs, we need to have a talk. This goes in with a lot of what I've written previously on this topic, both recently, and a while ago, but one thing I notice is people keep 1) appealing to the 1990s as the standard of what stuff should cost, and 2) believing that omg these developers have rising costs and we need to keep up with this standard theyre imposing on themselves.
So...on the 1990s. People keep talking about how expensive games used to be back then. First of all, gaming was still a relatively new tech back then. It has since become more established and standardized in terms of costs. And people are backlashing against increased costs. It's one thing if moron's tariffs are the reason for it, but again, a lot of it is just greed.
Here's the thing...new tech is expensive. Computing was expensive in general in the 80s and 90s. Like unaffordably expensive. i didnt get a computer until like 1999-2000ish. I had consoles, but consoles were a lot cheaper. Computers, even basic ones, cost like the equivalent of thousands today and were obsolete within 2-4 years. We had high costs combined with explosive growth. And in a way it evened itself out. If you wanted the bleeding edge you'd be spending THOUSANDS but then yesterday's bleeding edge was tomorrow's obsolete and the price of that stuff NEVER held value. New tech is like that. You know a new TV back in the 1940s cost liike $200-600? Yeah that amounts to $10k after inflation. Now we got cheap 720p LCDs for like $99, or we did until trumpleforeskin screwed everything up with tariffs.
Point is, stuff got cheaper. And that's good for consumers. Because more consumers can buy mre stuff. And yeah, gaming costs went down from the 1990s to the late 2010s at least, and that's been a good thing. And now we're regressing. Not just for legitimate reasons, but also nebulous "inflation", which is mostly corporate greed.
I get that with trumpism people are mad this stuff has come at the cost of our manufacturing industry with its high labor costs, but that's why we need to focus on getting more money in peoples' pockets in other ways, like a UBI...jobs arent the answer. The point of the economy is to get the most stuff done as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Which itself isnt always good for people when peoples' livelihoods are tied to such a system and its ruthless efficiency, but that's why we need to operate outside of that.
But back to this. So...gaming was more expensive back in the day. It was also far less accessible. Most of my friends were too poor to afford their own gaming systems. I only got a couple games a year and my parents flat out said no to stuff like gaming PCs back in the day due to the insane costs and low value.
And when you had a new generation of games, like the N64, which is a common example....the tech was so revolutionary at the time that it radically changed gaming. I cant underscore how massive the jump was from say, 2D super mario world to 3D super mario 64. It was MINDBLOWING. Generational leaps back then were generally mindblowing. The new games were such a huge jump in fidelity and gameplay that it was worth the insane premium, given how immature the tech was. In the 2000s, the leaps became smaller. Gen 6 was a huge leap over gen 5, and 7 was a large leap over gen 6, but the returns were diminishing somewhat. Gen 8 still managed to lead to an era of larger open world games. But gen 9...what has it offered? Ray tracing? Again and that's only on PC if youre willing to spend THOUSANDS on the best of the best.
So...as gaming developed, we started developing a diminishing returns problem. Each generation, the gap became smaller. That happens as technology matures. Most low hanging fruits happen early on in the process and gaming becomes more iterative. It's polygons. 100 vs 1000 polygons is a massive difference in detail. 1000 vs 10000 is smaller, but still significant. By the modern era we get fallout 76's "16x the detail" and it's just "bro, this is just larger scale fallout 4. Fallout 76 is a good example of why progress isnt always better. While I will die on the hill that FO76 was underrated it felt very iterative to fallout 4 and it was riddled with bugs at launch and even for years after release.
The fact is, extra detail often isnt worth the extra hardware costs. Or the development costs. Also consider computing is doing the same thing. Moore's law is slowing down as we reach the physical limits of what silicon can do. We cant grow forever. We have the pro infinite growth ideology in these gaming markets and it's not working. Much like eventually youre gonna reach a physical constraint like "peak oil", we're now at "peak gaming" where we're reaching physical constraints in terms of what hardware can do, what graphics can do, and it's just leading to higher costs.
And yeah, game developers keep going on about rising costs. I had someone who claimed to work in the industry droning on about higher costs. BUT...this is a self inflicted problem. These businesses still think that we can continue to grow infinitely, as easily as we did in the past, when we can't. The new switch 2 is $450. This is in part because they decided to go the "game gear" route in terms of designing their handheld. They crammed the most powerful chip they could into it for the largest generational leap they could muster, but in doing so, it came with higher costs, it came with a large size, less battery life, etc. Basically, past handhelds were more like a retroid pocket 5. Maybe a fraction of the power, but a fraction of the price, with a much higher battery life. If I were nintendo looking for a switch 2, I'd be aiming for a $250ish level handheld with like a snapdragon 865 level chip in it, or maybe at most a $300 Odin 2 level handheld. I wouldnt be competing with the STEAM DECK. Again. Nintendo in the past went for cheaper, more affordable tech that was further behind, but the low price point often led to overwhelmingly high sales volume.
Or even take the current gen consoles. $500 at launch aint a bad price these days, but $600-700 still is painful. I went that much with my PC upgrades to match those consoles in terms of graphical parity and i did it over a few years. I didn't buy all at once. And $80 games, forget it.
Like...the game developer guy lecturing me was talking about how massive studios are and how high costs are. Well...they need that many people to make games more complex than past games. it's a growing problem, and if every generation requires exponentially more resources to make the games more realistic and this can't be solved through technology like generative AI or something, well, at some point we're gonna hit a wall. That isn't a sustainable model. What these game devs are doing with the modern generation is biting off more than they can chew on costs and then passing them onto consumers, all while acting like we should be grateful for it and be willing to spend more on games.
As a consumer, I don't really care about stuff looking better than last gen any more. I'm over it. As far as I'm concerned, we've been getting increasingly incremental in graphics upgrades since the mid-late 2000s. The last console gen leap that wowed me was the xbox 360 when i got one in 2006. Crysis came out a year after and had graphics so good it took the rest of the industry until 2011-2013 to catch up with it graphically. And you know what? That's okay. Because if we pushed for crysis 1 level visuals in 2007, it would have exploded hardware costs, software development costs, and made crap too expensive. The market has to conform to a certain price range for their business model to be sustainable. You can make games for bleeding edge hardware that costs a fortune to buy, but most people won't because they can't afford it. It's not sustainable. The reason games and gaming have gotten cheaper throughout the 2000s and 2010s and stayed cheap was that was what people were willing and able to pay. Anyone who tried to charge more would be punished if they went too far. Even DLC, which basically stealth raised the price of games to $110 with DLC and season passes, wasnt sustainable. Their data shows most people didnt buy that and it just split the community.
So now we've moved to live service games and stuff and microtransactions to pick up the slack. And I know gamers complain about things like lootboxes, microtransactions, etc. I think it's dumb to do so. So you cant make your super special character a certain shade of blue without paying another $5-10. Can you play it? Yes? Are you at any major in game disadvantage by not having access to a certain shade of blue? No? Then shut up about it. The fact is, to some extent, maybe I should throw shade at gamers since it seems like many of them complained about live service stuff and microtransactions, claiming they WERE willing to pay more, and quite frankly, this is just zoomer brainrot. I have mixed thoughts on live service as a whole as it has just led to less content at times, and it just leads to exploitative and addictive business models that thrive on FOMO and people investing hours a day just to keep up in games, BUT...if I had to choose between that and higher costs, I'd choose that. It's the lesser of the evils.
The fact is, when you charge more for stuff, you're excluding price sensitive gamers, and as one video I watched recently pointed out, if you are price sensitive, the subtext here is "get a new hobby". Which is why i myself am so passionate on this subject. I am someone priced out of the market with these increases. I'm not gonna spend more on the hobby to stay in it, I'm just gonna consume less. Honestly, I hate the 2020s. Everything is just corporate greed. You gotta pay for anime now as crunchyroll got bought by sony, games and hardware costs are rising. Everything is more expensive, and it's not really making things better for people. it's enriching the already wealthy while squeezing the rest of us for what we got, and at some point, we gotta break. I'm reaching my breaking point due to being on the lower income side of the gaming spectrum already, where I always wait for the best deals. And if those deals dry up and things cost more, that means i just buy fewer games, because I'm being priced out.
Honestly, the one decent thing about the american economy in the modern era has been that it has such cheap goods. ANd now we're losing that. The job market has been a dumpster fire almost all of my adult life. And hoenstly, I know I've previously said I'd be willing to pay more for stuff, if americans made more money through things like a UBI, or higher wages, but we're NOT. The structural changes to the economy that would do such things havent been implemented. As such, living standards are lagging and now the price of everything is going up. And people with their stupid market logic just expect everyone to adapt. Well, that's the problem with markets. People dont always adapt. Sometimes people are just priced out of living. It's social darwinism at work. Instead of making a system in which we have to adapt to, we should make the system adapt to us.
Honestly, for gaming, the answer is simple. Temper expectations, dont chase progress at all costs. Stop insisting on infinite growth in an era where moore's law is slowing down, and it's far more labor intensive to make games to achieve a higher level of fidelity. Games look good enough. They've looked good enough for a while. We're squeezing blood from the stone at this point. Again, it's the "peak gaming" problem. It's like peak oil and what it means for the future of growth. Eventually we're gonan reach a point we cant just get more oil. And if we cannot find new tech to replace oil, our economy just isnt gonna grow, and prices are just gonna rise. And the people at the top will try to maintain that growth at all costs, but you can't. You reached the part of the ketchup bottle where it is harder to squeeze it all out. That's where we're at with video games. Again, we need to curb our expectations out of better graphics and stuff, if we're gonna overcome this. The answer isn't to force people to spend more, and then spending more on developing better looking games, and passing those costs to the consumers. The answer is to reach a point where we just go "nah, things are good enough as they are, let's stay here for a while." We do that, and there is no problem with rising costs. If anything, as we get more efficient, things get cheaper to make. Game and hardware prices should go DOWN. After all, it's not like we aren't growing at all, we're just doing so more slowly where by rights, generations should last longer and have more incremental upgrades when they happen. Growth still happens. It doesnt stop, it just slows. Again, the problem is trying to grow too fast where it isnt sustainable.
And again, this is also an analogy for the larger economy as well and my human centered capitalism. it's not anti growth, it's just not growth at all costs to the point of forcing people to adapt to an economy that is at this point artificially hostile to their existence. The reason life is still such a struggle to survive is because we value growth at all costs. If we instead focused on efficiency, ya know...maybe we wouldnt need everyone working, and we could work less, and life would be easier for people. Again, it's our institutions that do this to us. We act like that's just how it is and it's inevitable when in reality, it isn't. All we need to do is change our outlook and what we value a little bit.
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