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Gave the demo a spin. The base concept is quite good and reminds me a bit of transistor's system (which is brilliant).

However the content currently available is pretty limited and I didn't find many interesting synergies. We'll see how it matures.

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I perfectly remember one of the possible ending sentence of Monkey Island 1. Don't want to spoil, but Ron Gilbert was basically saying that even at that price they would still be making a lot of money. I trust the dev.

OFC there is inflation, but with those 20bucks back in the days, I would fill my car, buy some cigarettes, and probably even few beers to share with friends. With 90€ nowadays I'm not even sure I can fill my car anymore.

The problem is coming from people making money with video game while they don't know anything about it, and gets most of the subsidies while devs and players pay the price of their non ending greediness.

I'm almost certain outside of indie devs that 35% of the price is going to these sharks. They are the initiator of price increase because they want more from the cake to the point of ruining it in every possible manner, because then they lower the quality in every possible manner by willing to take more wherever they can, thus making life hard for the people who really loves videos game. (devs & gamers)

Never had to do it, but you could literaly phone Ron Gilbert if you had an issue with the game xD

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The base management is what turns me off from these games. :(

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I just came to the realisation that to own a really good game (like Symphony of the Night, Arcanum, or Chrono Trigger) I could be persuaded to pay 80 USD, but paying that amount to LICENSE a mediocre game? I'm sorry, but that's just not going to happen.

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Yeah so I played on Steam Deck and the controls feel pretty decent, still wish there was a way to control the music and volume via dpad but whatever, main controls seem to do just fine.

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They should get Wreckfest devs to help them do a Redux / Remaster -- they could make a lot of money and improve player experience significantly.

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=Bugbear

This was a good series and could be fine wine.

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I think the context everybody is missing is profit. Are publishers and developers necessarily making more profit today than they were a few decades ago?

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In 1991 there was not such a large selection of games
today you can wait for a big sale an play other games instead


btw CLAIR OBSCUR costs 50€. this is the standard you should aim for.

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There are a few Sol Cesto crossover tooth relics in Pyrene and I never knew what that was about... until now

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Yeah, nothing recent so far:

* https://www.gogdb.org/product/1207658693#builds
* https://www.gogdb.org/product/1207660523#builds

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Damn this doesn't include gog?! That's the version I play

Tbh my xbox controller works fine, it's only main menu and pause that I have to use keyboard for, which is abit of a pain

Other then that it works great

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I have no idea what any of that is and I love it

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@emigrant
Normally, I would have assumed that this was just to be able to submit a crash-report or otherwise report on the game's performance on different hardware, but the EULA does actually say

the User permits and COMPANY has right to automatically collect, store, process, submit to third party for achieving such purpose areas of User Device RAM used by the User simultaneously with the launch and/or operation of the Game

So, whatever passwords or other private information floating around in RAM while you're playing the game? You've just signed over the right for that information to be shared with third parties. Yeah, you're right; I won't be touching this until the EULA changes (not that it's even legal in its current state, but still).

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@Pyrate

About the screenshot: The real reason why we're so deep into this bad state for the industry, is because you have people excusing that shit. Unreal.

I really didn't find his response all that objectionable. I've seen far more arrogant stuff coming from the likes of Todd Howard or Tim Sweeney. And then there's good old Bill and his successors ...

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A lot of good observations here. I agree with a lot of them. I remember when Ultima IV for PC released back in the day. The sticker shock was incredible - they wanted $100 Cdn at launch. Higher prices were really not unusual for triple-A games with long development cycles. Back in the early nineties, low-end IBM PCs were typically $2,500 Cdn or more. Clones were often half that price for a basic PC.

I think it is a matter of perception, really. When we paid $100 for that game back in the day, we got a physical box & media. We got a nice printed manual and other support materials (medallions, coins, other booklets, etc.). RPGs such as Ultima often included a cloth map.

Compare that to a digital release. Nothing physical to hold in our hands. Nothing to give a sense of value to the purchase. From that perception of value, the consumer doesn't see that they are getting as much for the $80 US price tag on a purely digital purchase.

So, yes, there are still distribution costs behind the scenes, but it is not as obvious to the average consumer as a physical product in their hands.

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Sorry, this has got nothing to do with the question at hand. We weren't rich in the Eighties, and I could afford a game from time to time, if you were on this path.

Well, since PC as a platform was expensive like cr*p. Regular mid range PC was price of couple years old small car (at least in my country) in 90s. And since we're dealing with PC related stuff (games), I believe it has pretty much something in common.

General price of computers went down like crazy. Common PC back in the day was like 80k CZK (my country currency) and it wasn't even the top of the line, it was mid range at best. My parents bought ~3 years old car for 100k at the time and it was very expensive, they saved years and years to be able to buy it. Nowadays I can go shopping and get decent PC for 30k, and those 80k will get me basically the best I can get - nvidia 5080 with top cpu. Not counting inflation.

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About the screenshot: The real reason why we're so deep into this bad state for the industry, is because you have people excusing that shit. Unreal.

I think a big problem is that some people aren't willing to pay more for a computer game than for their takeaway coffee - and some even prefer to get stuff for free without consent of the makers instead of paying for what they want to play. (Because that's one easy solution: If you do not like the quality of a game or do not like the price, feel free not to play it.)

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Let me ask you a question: Would you buy sort of mid range PC for the price of a couple years old car nowadays?

Sorry, this has got nothing to do with the question at hand. We weren't rich in the Eighties, and I could afford a game from time to time, if you were on this path.

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One of the best games on this list is Spilled
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240080/Spilled/

super super short, but oh so good. And perfect for the Deck.

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About the screenshot: The real reason why we're so deep into this bad state for the industry, is because you have people excusing that shit. Unreal.

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Well... As far as I have heard, the distribution cost is about 30% of the game's price nowadays.

And it was much more in the 90s. Like 50% minimum, with some sources saying in extreme cases up to 90%, if my quick web search was not lying.

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... which makes the market opportunities insanely worse for publishers

Well yes, but... How exactly does price increase help in this context? Will this help "supply x demand" equation? When market is saturated you have to compete with competitive price, unless you're dealing with luxury items. Which brings me to this:

...but maybe for a great game?

Maybe? Just maybe. Once, when the game is objectively THE bomb, the hot stuff, the perfect match. In that case I might make an exception. But every C-suite thinks their game is exactly that and it justifies the higher price tag. And I don't feel like supporting this general price increase to put more money into managers' pockets is my jam. If those money were transparently going to actual developers, that opinion might change a lot. But not with this pyramid scheme. I'm saying this coming from a poor background, not being rich in any way nowadays.

But I still fail to see the SCANDAL in asking for a price that in the end is less breakfast eggs than it was in the Nineties.

Let me ask you a question: Would you buy sort of mid range PC for the price of a couple years old car nowadays?

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I think the gaming market is kind of broken in two ways. We get broken beta games on release, which can be prepurchased and early-accessed by paying more and more. The games often go on sale already six months later where they are in playable state.

I'm also one of the kids that bought the pc version of NHL '96 for 100DM (somewhere around 80€ nowadays; also funny to see you can play it on a GBA later.). It took me months to save money for the game and it was probably the only big title I bought for the whole year. Other games I had to play at friends or lend, because money...

Nowadays everyone seems to be intitled to buy whatever whenever without waivering. That is the fear of missing out kicking in, I guess.

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Compare it to now, when everyone and their cat has PC and/or console. The market opportunities are insanely better for publishers.

Yes.

But there's also much, much, MUCH more games on the market, new and old (equals cheap), than it is physically possible to play in multiple lifetimes.

... which makes the market opportunities insanely worse for publishers.

In this discussion we've seen that the situation is different from the Nineties in many aspects, sometimes allowing for lower prices, sometimes the contrary.

But I still fail to see the SCANDAL in asking for a price that in the end is less breakfast eggs than it was in the Nineties.

So, would I pay $80€ for another generic recycled gearbox schlock? Lol, no.

...but maybe for a great game?

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with modern tech you have basically 0 distribution costs;

Well... As far as I have heard, the distribution cost is about 30% of the game's price nowadays.

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Games usually costed 100 Deutsche Mark in the Nineties. 100 DM in say 1995 would be - inflation included - 88€ nowadays. That's 100$. How come people know that stuff get's more expensive over the decades, but do not accept when computer games do... just the same?

Well, yes, but actually no. Computers in general were expensive as hell in 90s. It had some "exclusivity vibe" and since computers were basically just for rich, those could also spend that amount for a game (or pirate it like everyone did in those times). Also less computers equals narrow market, hence the price of the games also being ridiculous.

Compare it to now, when everyone and their cat has PC and/or console. The market opportunities are insanely better for publishers. But there's also much, much, MUCH more games on the market, new and old (equals cheap), than it is physically possible to play in multiple lifetimes. So, would I pay $80€ for another generic recycled gearbox schlock? Lol, no.

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The market for video games is the largest it's ever been, there are permissively licensed libraries available for everything under the sun, and with modern tech you have basically 0 distribution costs; yet game developers remain underpaid. Clearly there is a huge inefficiency somewhere, and as the saying goes: a fish rots from the head down. Instead of making games more expensive maybe game devs should fire the C suite and get some actually competent people in place.

EDIT: as an addendum, on the topic of so-called 'review bombing': people have the right to leave negative reviews when they are not satisfied with something about a game. If that something is 'the developer said something stupid on xitter', then you can shout 'death of the author' until your face turns blue, it remains proper use of the review system.

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Are the regression no more in Proton Experimental? No more games failing to start as opposed to Proton 9?

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Games in the 90s were that expensive because it was a niche market. As the market grew so did revenue with economies of scale. Today we are probably nearing saturation and the only way to make line go up is to increase prices.

The video card market I think paved the way for these price increases. First it was bitcoin, then covid, and now AI forces on the video card market that showed manufacturers that people were willing to pay nose-bleed prices. Sadly now that the lamp has been rubbed I don't see video card prices ever coming down. An article yesterday about the 9060xt called it "a budget beast" at $350 fake MSRP. $350, even today is not really budget. $250, maaaaybe $300 if you squint, but not $350.

As long as enough people pay these prices - and they obviously are - there is no going back. I'm always suggesting boycotts on this kind of stuff. If people won't pay then prices will come down. I personally am a patient gamer (excluding a few new indies) and will gladly wait years to get games for $5 or less.

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At the time, the size of the market and the physical item production were completely different from today's "download a file that can be replicated an infinite amount of times basically for free".

Well... it's not that easy, while at the time the cost was mostly upfront, i.e. you developed, marketed, published and distributed X copies of a game, everything was smaller. The dev teams were smaller, the market was smaller, etc, that meant that you couldn't, probably, get discounts on cartridges by quantity and so on. And you had to talk to a lot of distributors for different markets, handle a lot of currencies and so on. The upshot for us was that games didn't need 0-day patches and so on, what you got was what you got and that was it (even if it was bad and you would play it because it was expensive as hell).

Skip forward to today, you have (excluding small indie titles) large teams of everyone and a pair of boots because there's a focus on making that new fancy hardware push pretty pictures to your large 4k screens in HDR and what not. Games ship whenever it fits corporate schedules and not when they are ready (god forbid they have actually passed through QA). As for the download file part, the infrastructure to hold the files (and patches) and specially the bandwidth and CDNs for you to get said files at a pace faster than a snail is not cheap and you will have to maintain it for as long as you want to support the game (or, to put it plain terms, for as long as you require it to recoup the investment). For games that keep on getting updates, you will have to keep on paying those people (devs, support people, qa, marketing, managers, etc). On the past once a game was released that was it, you moved the team to next game.

We have been spoiled with large quantities of games at cheap prices. I have now more games than what is practical for me to actually play them, and I guess most people will be like that.

Anyway just my 2 cents.

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