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Discussion (86 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It does suck, and you should join the PCMR. But I imagine this will blow over before long.
The industry and its fans are its own worst enemies. However, if you don't go bonkers over recent AAA games, gaming has never been more accessible or cheaper. I didn't buy a game this steam sale for more than $3, and each game would run on more or less anything.
The big AAA studios recycle the same formulas and push graphical quality (mostly downstream of Unreal Engine improvements) because they are risk averse. Similar to big comic-book-hero films. It's not what consumers want and it's increasingly starting to show. AAA is struggling badly while indie has been on an absolute tear the past few years.
Modern games have visually worse graphics than games that came out 10+ years ago. Beyond that, the success of a lot of games recently with non AAA budgets shows that gamers aren’t demanding anything from the industry beyond playable games that don’t treat them as a perpetual revenue stream.
My knee jerk reaction was to disagree with this, but I thought about it a bit
The Witcher 3 came out 10 years ago. So did Red Dead Redemption 2 (edit: not quite, actually 8 years. Still!)
A lot of games still fall short of those in the graphics department
I don't think many consumers (outside of hardcore games) could tell the difference between the graphics of a game from 10 years ago to the graphics from a game of today. Things have hardly moved on at all. As an example to illustrate the point: GTA:V is 13 years old.
My half blind aunt could probably tell the difference between the graphics of a game from 2016 and 2026 if you put them side by side.
Were video game graphics "good enough" for a while now? I’d say yes, with the exception of vr. But to say there has been no noticeable improvement over the last 10 years is silly.
GTA 6 is coming out soon. I’d invite you to actually compare the visuals of gta 6 vs the original gta 5 from 2014 that was released for ps4 (rather than the 2022 enhanced version for consoles or 2015 version for pc which shouldn’t be compared to non-pc gta 6, since 6 for pc will also get a significant facelift).
Lots of PC games have a $100- $200 tier where you get merch or all the DLC. That's probably aimed at people like me. The point is, if your business is games you make games for the people who will buy them. No game is more fun than a compiler, even the free ones.
> Budgets for games are skyrocketing, graphics requirements are skyrocketing
Is unrelated. AAA Gaming companies relied so heavily on technical improvements when things were new and genuine leaps in ability that when we hit the graphics are good enough instead of just making great games that are fun, they had to do stupid graphics tricks.
Did every strand of hair need to be individually rendered to act as real as possible so the one guy who is dissecting ever frame would be happy? Did that horses scrotum need to be animated at all, let alone react to the environment? Did that thing that basically no one will ever see need to be created over the course of 9 months?
These stupid, pointless things to try and chase the same technical breakthrough selling points they had 25+ years ago are one of the major things driving the development costs.
Then of course there's the, 'ya whatever, you'll still pay for it, fuck you'[1] that publishers are latching on to.
[1]https://youtu.be/vBG3OYSa3YQ?t=50
As an engineer, I worry so much about writing perfect code even when I know it is temporary script for one off job. In my home, I painted top of the doors that no one will see. But I know it is painted.
It is nice that people care about these small things.
Lots of technically advanced simulations are going on in that game to build the most advanced simulation. But people don't play a game became its simulating a city accurately right down to individual teeth in every citizen. They play a game because it's fun.
Gaming is so much cheaper than when I was growing up that I'm kind of blown away.
SNES games went for $60-70. That's like $130-150 in today's money. And they usually had less content than today's games, even if you never do microtransactions today!
In contrast, major AAA titles today are half the price, and you can find indie games packed with content for a paltry $20. Hell, with Steam sales, you can find them even cheaper than that! Some free to play games like Dota 2 make all of their core gameplay content free!
If you check when games like Quake were released, their minimum requirements were absolutely INSANE compared to today. We're talking about mid to high-end CPUs released within the last two or three years, none of this "oh yeah something lower-middle from 5 years ago is fine". Average prices for computers were much higher too (well, maybe the current RAM/SSD crisis has equalized that a bit, but other than that).
Controllers? 8bitdo and the like make highly competent gamepads for $30, which would've been $15 in the 90's. You couldn't even get terrible third-party shitpads for that little back then! It's disgustingly cheap.
If you want to game these days, you can spend a very reasonable amount of money on a mid-range gaming PC* and have it last at least a good 5-6 years. You can then buy games for a steal on Steam, and get surprisingly decent peripherals like gaming monitors and mechanical keyboards for almost no money. The idea that gaming is "too expensive now" is itself laughable.
* Well, other than the memory crisis fucking things up, but before AI companies ate all the RAM, things were very reasonable
A $60 game in 2006 is also roughly $100 in 2026 dollars. I think what happened is that around then, people generally decided that "$60 is the price of a AAA game, and anything more is a sham". If I had to bet, I'd guess that that was around when a lot of the public got into gaming as something that wasn't just "for nerds".
I think that if people were willing to drop $100 up front, base price for a game, you would not find the microtransaction, ultimate edition, day 1 DLC shenanigans that you see. Companies would find it easy to say "But of course all skins are unlockable in game!"
I don’t believe you were intending to paint with a broad brush, but for others I’d like to explain where SNES game pricing was in more detail, as there was quite the range of prices depending on the game and when it was released.
———-
The plain Jane SNES game was $50 at US launch in late 1991. Normal-ish ROM size (4Mbit). This included later released first-party titles like Super Mario Kart (1992).
Prices went up with ROM size, and as there were higher supply costs starting in late 1993 and into 1994. So something like even LOZ: A Link to the Past was $60 (8Mbit ROM used, game a bit smaller). Mega Man X was $60 for the same reason. Final Fantasy II (IV) in the US was $65 at launch (again, 8Mbit ROM). Street Fighter II (16Mbit) was $70 in 1992.
Then there’s larger games still, with ROM prices going down then up. I believe Final Fantasy III (VI) was $75 USD at launch, but that was a 24Mbit ROM. Secret of Mana (16MBit) and Chrono Trigger (32MBit) were $80 at launch. Then you had Ogre Battle which I believe was $90, despite fitting within 12Mbit (8Mbit + 4Mbit).
Another reason for $70 prices were the SuperFX chip. Stunt Race FX was $70 in the US at launch because of that chip, even though it fit into an 8Mbit ROM. Yet Star Fox was $60 was the same hardware, but launched at $60 in 1993 whereas Stunt Race FX came out in 1994 where ROM prices are higher.
—-
So $50 - 90, with it more in the $50-60 range at launch, and then $60 being more common through the rest of the console’s lifecycle. Special and larger games were trending towards $70 later in the console lifecycle. Then you had the few crazy games (excluding games with accessories like Lethal Enforcers) in the $75 - 90 range.
Obviously this is subjective, but try some of that $5-10 stuff on Steam or GoG and you might be surprised how much there is to play out there. I'm playing Dread Delusion right now and it is amazing (estimate I'm 50% done but playing blind), Wicked Seed before that, Deformed before that, etc.
I play a lot less than I used to thanks to cost, game quality and time - and the PS5 will be my last Sony console, regardless of the newest happenings. It’ll be PC and maybe a Nintendo console here and there unless prices go up even higher next gen, at which point I’d be done with consoles entirely and just use Steam and probably play indie and older games only. The industry just isn’t what it used to be.
This is true for every entertainment medium. Time filters out all the crap made so your left with a few timeless hits. Especially 30 years ago and in gaming?
Though to pick on 1996 , I just looked it up, that was a pretty crazy year of games in hindsight.
1996: Mario 64, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Duke Nukem 3D, NiGHTS, Crash Bandicoot, Quake, DOA/Soul Edge, Pokémon Red/Blue, Civ II
1998: Zelda OOT, Marvel vs Capcom, Castlevania SOTN, Metal Gear Solid, StarCraft, Half-Life, DDR, Baldue’s Gate, Mario Party, Grim Fandango
I think I'm just describing mobile game studios pre-gachafication
I don't know what the answer is, but there just seems to be unavoidable bloat all around. Staff, cost, complexity, system requirements, etc.
Doom came out in 1993, all teams were "small" by 2026 standards.
Good gameplay requires taste, nuance, experience. Things that are hard to quantify if you're an MBA.
All while getting cheaper in the process. Thanks capitalism!
All while getting worse; advertisements, terrible interfaces, privacy invasions, frame gen, weird color options, etc. I don't hate capitalism or anything, but new TVs are dumb as heck.
So long story short, if Sony goes digital only, I will go back to retro and pc and I won't feel like I'm missing out that much if at all.
It really comes down to the next PS6 exclusive, would people buy a console just to play Dark Souls 4? That's the billion dollar question
GOG is the alternative. It sells DRM-free games
Discounts are more common, also.
Used to be pretty 'PC Master Race' but then life got in the way.
I do miss stuff like modded Valve games and keyboard & mouse, but can run them somewhat on my laptop.
Serious question.
Xbox is fine, it updates itself (firmware/OS updates only take about 5 mins) and the servers are fast enough. There's basically no maintenance. Can be annoying if it's a game you wanted to play at the moment updating but then Steam is the same.
Child, six, seriously considering running away from home after parents refuse to serve dinner on dinosaur plate.
People realize that Steam doesn't use physical media, right? The real issue is the lack of consumer friendly regulation, not the medium.
On the other hand, I know for a fact that sony will do the worst possible thing over and over again every time they have the chance to.
Remember that time Sony took away features from the PS3 that were advertised selling points? Remember when modders added the features back and Sony sent them to prison?
Steam has issues, and you certainly can't (legally) trade or sell your library, but nearly no single player games on the platform have DRM. Thus, you can have as many off-Steam backups as you want (which can't be remotely deleted/disabled), and you could certainly "give" the game to a friend (but don't copy that floppy), or otherwise preserve it for posterity.
Last time I checked, the ps6 hasn't been announced, there probably won't be a Xbox one X/S/pro/whatever successor any time soon, and PC hardware is expensive or hard to get right now.
Just stay the road for 6 months and see how the market shakes out.
I actually rely on this quite a lot, indirectly. Beat Saber is a fun game, but it doesn't support a lot of fun features, like walls with boundaries that aren't aligned to the coordinate system. There are mods to add those features, but they haven't all been ported over to the new line of the game since it upgraded the version of unity it's using. So I use one of the mod managers that supports, among other things, maintaining multiple versions of the game in parallel so you can choose what you want to do when you start a game. This feature very explicitly relies on downloading older versions from Steam. Because that's a thing you can do with Steam.
In the same week that Sony announced they'd be ending production of optical media, they also removed hundreds of movies from user libraries that they'd lost the right to sell. I don't really care if they have yet to do the same with games - they've demonstrated they're willing to remove access from paying customers for their own reasons. And there's nothing the owner of a locked-down console can do about it.
Steam exists in a different universe than digital-only games from PSN. Conflating the two because they use the same method of delivery is ridiculous.
1) Sony ending physical disks
2) potential high price of next gen.
1 is hilarious, even games that come on physical disks are already mostly useless without internet. I had a ps4 and bought "Last of Us" and the game is literally unbeatable without an internet connection. It has a game breaking bug that isn't patched on disk. Many other games are crap or broken without patches. Also jumping to PC where there hasn't been physical media in ages and 99% of games have DRM is just out of the frying pan into the fire. based on the market share for GOG I can assure you only a small fraction of gamers actually care about "owning" their games.
2 is kinda stupid, they mentioned a price point of $1,000, not sure you can build a next-gen-console comparable PC for that price. My current computer's GPU cost more than that by itself and anything but a pittance of RAM will too.
I mean go for it, more PC gamers the better (it's my chosen platform) but if you weren't already on board years ago not sure anything has really changed.
I already know for a fact that Sony won't do the right thing because they have always done the worst possible thing at every chance.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/another-xbox-price-increase-is-co...
https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/the-ps5-is-getti...
That's one of the main problems of current gaming. Games have become just "content". And as such they are disposable. Why replay (and appreciate) something you liked? Just play something else.
For goodness sake, this is literally useless. It tells us nothing.
Even a games website should be embarrassed of it's journalism trying to run this as a story.
That doesn't mean anything at all. The i7 is a family of CPUs which can be anything from a 2009 i7-860 (with DDR3 support only) to a 2023 i7-14700k (with DDR5 support). Insane performance difference.
As long as you give the older CPU enough RAM, an SSD, and a good GPU, it probably is sufficient unless your doing sim-heavy games where you want the simulation speed to be maxed out (e.g. HoI4 later years max speed simulation)
Honestly buying a 15 years old CPU is just an own goal when it will be outperformed by any modern budget i3