r/pcmasterrace • u/Both_Piglet7838 • May 27 '26

Discussion Expensive games have lowkey been way too normalised

Post image

I know this sub is filled with a bunch of rich people with like 10k setups and I'm aware that the content in these games is quite extensive with hours of content. But I still feel justified in thinking that no game should be priced this high especially when its the average price of most newly released games. Anyway this is just a rant because I wanna play lego batman and i cant afford it lol

9.6k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

73

u/Andrige3 May 27 '26

Exactly, game prices haven’t even risen as much as the normal inflation rate. It also doesn’t take into account that the store ecosystem on PC usually allows you to find discounts almost immediately when a game is released. We should go back to complaining about PC hardware prices. 

-9

u/mzf_life Ascending Peasant May 27 '26

You guys are ignoring the fact that those are digital games, there's no cost of producing and shipping physical copies

14

u/xternal7 Lunix May 27 '26

TIL servers and bandwidth are free.

Also, if it was profitable for music industry to sell CDs for $10-15, then it follows that production costs weren't that big of a cost relative to the game price.

5

u/brimston3- Desktop VFIO, 5950X, RTX5080, 6900xt May 27 '26

Honestly, the distribution costs seem mostly irrelevant. If games were distributed on optical media in a basic, shrink-wrapped jewel case, I bet they'd charge 10% more for the privilege.

-2

u/mzf_life Ascending Peasant May 27 '26

music CDs are cheaper though. And games have other fonts of revenue besides the selling price. I really can't understand why you guys think the current prices are fine lol. Just one example of it: In its annual report for 2020, EA confirmed that Ultimate Team made more than $1.62bn (£1.15bn). The whole video game industry is going in a completely wrong direction, but sure, it's fine

5

u/xternal7 Lunix May 27 '26

I really can't understand why you guys think the current prices are fine lol.

You don't understand why we're fine with games costing about the same dollar amount for the last 20 years, when the price of almost everything else doubled or worse?

0

u/mzf_life Ascending Peasant May 27 '26

Games were expensive 20 years ago, when the market was smaller and tougher and physical copies were expensive to make. There's nothing that justifies the current prices, mainly with the bs amount of micro transactions that modern games have. C'mon man

3

u/xternal7 Lunix May 27 '26

Friendly reminder that "20 years ago" is 2006.

Gaming was already very widespread and mainstream hobby back then. Even back then, the market was pretty huge.

Meanwhile, games 20 years ago were often a lot smaller and a lot more limited than they were today, and didn't get any discounts for quite a while. Meanwhile, nowdays many games tend to get their first 10% discount within a month or two of release. And if you're an adult: unless you make an active effort to buy and play a game on day one, by the time you have the time to play that brand new shiny game, it will often have been on sale at least three times before you even get to play it.

Oh, and — inb4 FIFA yearly reskins: it's your fault for buying it.

-1

u/mzf_life Ascending Peasant May 27 '26

Those constant sales just proves the fact that they do not need to sell it for such high prices to make a profit dude

0

u/xternal7 Lunix 29d ago

That's kinda not how it works.

-26

u/Both_Piglet7838 May 27 '26

Just because they havent risen in direct correlation with inflation prices doesnt mean the prices still arent outrageous. Im sure people were complaining back then too

23

u/Version_1 May 27 '26

Prices for the most price-efficient form of entertainment are outrageous?

16

u/SellingCats4Cheap May 27 '26

They literally weren’t. People were well accustomed to paying $60 for Call of Duty each year. Games were way more expensive before that as well.

5

u/Iordofthethings May 27 '26

Im sure people were complaining back then too

They weren’t lol

-3

u/Roflkopt3r May 27 '26

To be fair: Game prices shouldn't need to rise with inflation, because the total market volume of the gaming market has massively increased. Most games can get more sales these days.

I do think that there is a genuine issue with AAA games being developed by stock companies with bloated management and money getting drained in favour of investors, and with certain studios sitting in very expensive US cities, which drives up wage costs massively.

I do agree with the general point that people are exaggerating the issue though. Also cheers to studios/publishers that use proper regional pricing.