MudMan

I do think fighting games are a special case because the DLC is so obvious that the seasonal microtransaction stuff is not as much of a focus.

But hey, SF6 did add a battlepass, so… it’s moving in that direction. We’ll see.

Sure.

And the natural conclusion of that is why have the up front charge at all. You do the 2XKO thing or the Multiversus thing and just let people play and charge for the characters. Of course that may mean being online for purchase authentication, right?

I don’t like where that goes.

I think SF in particular is pretty sure it can pull a decent chunk of cash up front and not impact sales too much, so that’s better for them, since they’re monetizing all the casual players, but sitll. It’s a dynamic that’s in play and I don’t like it.

You already spend more than 100 for Street Fighter and always have. The full roster for SF6 is currently 100/110 bucks. Not counting MTX and extra cosmetics.

Sure, you didn’t pay it all at once, but that’s no different than me buying SF2 and then Super SF2 the following year, each for seventy-ish bucks.

Sorta kinda. We moved to 69.99 for major releases a while ago. Late 2000s in some territories, later in others.

In the US it was 59.99 for the CD era, but it was higher before when cart costs were a massive chunk of the retail price. I bought games that launched at 100 (or its local equivalent) in the 90s, particularly on SNES and N64.

But it’s true that prices have been super stable while moving from expensive carts to cheap CDs and then trivially expensive digital releases. Now there’s no way to cut costs on distribution (you’re already subsidizing storage, it’s just down to bandwidth, which is paid by the retailer anyway). So now inflation is catching up, since none of the money is going to making boxes, stamping CDs or shipping games in trucks. Now when inflation hits there’s no longer a way to hide the pricing impact, so it goes to sticker price.

And people are so used to that stability that they immediately rage on the Internet, if this thread is anything to go by, so the only answer is to hide more of the cost in MTX and dump the sticker price altogether.

Kinda argued against myself there. The real answer isn’t prices will “evenutally” go up, it’s that they will go down to zero and traditional gaming will become mobile gaming. That’s probably more likely.

Who the hell are the developers clamoring for this?

Gonna guess the tens of thousands getting laid off who are anxiously waiting for money to come back to the business so they can get hired again.

VERY educated guess, there.

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.

I mean… yeah, give it a long enough time and it will be. Kinda how inflation works. “Eventually” is a pretty expansive word.

I’ve heard tell of mystery tech to make the water heat pumps make cold. I’m sure I’ll be more tempted to investigate further when summer comes.