Skip Navigation
122 comments

  • Just a reminder that no one's forcing you to spend $100 on the game. If enough people refuse to do so the base cost of the game will go down again. Icarus is my most recent for example, I've had it on my wish list for almost a year and a half now, because I wasn't willing to spend $35 on what that game provided. It's currently on sale on Steam for $9.

    God of War 2018 is currently $20 on PSN

    I got Elden ring for $30 a few months back despite the fact that it's still selling full price at 60.

    If y'all are patient and wait they stopped making money on the game which means that they lower the cost to try to incentivize people to buy it.

    Plus the first year of sale of a game is The Game's most important release window, because companies generally will use the first year to decide how popular it was. If enough people refuse to buy the game at their original price point it will destroy their sales metric for the first year which will make it harder on the studio to justify to their parent company that it's worth making another game, which means that they're more incentivized to lower the base cost of the game within the first year of launch.

    The rate of this is significantly slowed down if everyone is just like oh okay I guess it's $100 now and then buys it anyway, have patience and hold out, especially a game like GTA 6 where they're going to gain more money off microtransactions then people actually buying the game. Honestly GTA 6 probably should have just been sold as a free to play because they operate like one

  • Playing lots of RPGs and Jrpgs has trained my Patience. I never buy a game at full price, regardless of how much I want it. I simply wait for a sale until it's below 35 euro.

  • how incredibly american to phrase learning they can get away with fleecing people for $40 more as being "inspired".

  • Rockstar I would say is one of the few that can demand that price. I would pay $100.00 bucks cause Im going to play it for the next decade. We could be on GTA15 but rockstar dont roll that way.

  • AAA games are already $90CAD here with deluxe/special editions going for $120-$160. I can't remember the last time I actually bought one of those games because most of them are trash designed to exploit the player as much as possible. There are a lot of other hobbies I'd rather drop that kind of money on that respect my time heaps more than modern games.

    I think Tiny Glade is the only game I play regularly that is an actual new release. Everything else is 5+ years old because I got them on sale for good prices. Also means they're already patched up and usually perform better instead of having people pay $90+ to beta test broken garbage.

  • This is some weird reporting.

    For one thing, I'm not American, baseline game prices here took a similar hike during the PS4 era, so I'd be curious to see if or when US game prices adjust and whether that comes with a local price bump. Although looking at recent releases maybe they already did.

    For another, it is kind of insane how much lower the baseline price of what used to be called "retail packaged goods" games has gotten, adjusted for inlfation. As I write this, Civ 7 is the best selling full price game on Steam, going for 69,99USD. That's 48-ish USD in 2010 money, the Internet tells me. The previous release to even get close to the best sellers list at that price (and it sold pretty terribly, as far as I can tell, at least on Steam), was Indiana Jones, for the same price. Everything else is much, much, much cheaper, with the list being dominated by games anywhere between free to play and thirty bucks.

    That's two conflicting pushes. Games are dirt cheap now. You can't even sell them at the sticker price that was normal in the 2010s anymore, and even if you did, that's 30% less inflation-adjusted money than before. The average game developer salary has gone from high 90K to 115K in 2025 in that period as, again, the Internet tells me.

    So basically GTA or no, I don't see how you get anything BUT GTA sequels and Call of Dutys going forward. It's MTX-fests or nothing. It's pretty messed up, IMO. I like splashy, good-looking AAA games and would take them any day over, say, a Marvel Rivals. But spoiler alert, Marvel Rivals is going to make all the money and you'll be lucky if you ever see a Ratchet sequel again, let alone a third party big single player game.

    So... pick your poison, I suppose.

122 comments