The median price of best-selling new games on Steam has dropped in the past 2 years, research finds: "Charging >$25 is getting trickier, as players compare value to the $10-$15 indie titles"
6mon 24d ago by piefed.world/u/Agent_Karyo in games from www.gamesradar.com
The average has barely changed, but the median suggests a rise in cheap games
Not only that, but charging full price for a game and then charging $15-20 for cosmetic DLC is fucking wild. If I've paid you $60+ for a title, I expect the full experience. If you want to add some shit a year down the line to lengthen the life, I'm on board, but day one DLC that costs more than the base game was played out the moment Bethesda graced us with horse armor. I've gotten more joy out of Vampire Survivors than I have out of any Ubisoft and EA games in the last 20 years combined.
I was considering buying Risk of Rain 2 on sale yesterday for 9€ but buying all the DLCs costs 45€.
For what it's worth, only one player needs the DLC for everybody in the session to use it, which is pretty cool of the devs to allow that in this day and age.
That is very interesting 🤔
Thanks!
Unless something changed, players who don't own DLC can't play as the DLC characters. I believe they can interact with all the rest of the content normally, just locked to the vanilla character selection (which is still broad and fun enough, and further expandable with mods).
Yeah thats about what i expected.
This is one of my favorite games and I haven't bought any DLC, my friend has and I mooch off of them when we play :)
As the other commenter said, only one person needs the dlc to play the (non-character) DLC content. It also frequently goes on pretty big sales, though right now it's probably full price since the newest (and imo, best) DLC just dropped. Each DLC is a significant content expansion to the game, and is absolutely worth the asking price (except maybe seekers, which fell a bit flat for me on release. It's since been rebalanced).
If you wanted to weigh which DLC to consider getting, I would recommend Void if you like the idea of modified items that do cool shit, an alternate ending to the game, and some cool new mechanics. It comes with a dope sniper survivor and a void survivor that trades health for damage or vice versa.
Seekers comes with an alternate path of stages leading to an alternate (very challenging) boss. I find that the seekers boss is a severe difficulty check compared to the ease of reaching the boss, compared to the void boss which you only fight late in a run or after a different boss. Two of the survivors feel lackluster to me, but False Son is an absolute beast and the only melee character capable of truly tanking rather than using i-frames or mobility.
Alloyed Collective is the newest, and comes tons of new mechanics (free for everyone but expanded on in the DLC), a new path to follow, SEVERAL new super interesting boss fights, tons of new stages, and tons of new enemies. Overall, super worth it. The characters it adds are a drone controller (a previously unviable play style) and a loot gremlin that gets tons of really awesome interactions and A Cube.
My list would be Alloyed, Void, then Seekers. Alloyed and Void add the most to the base game, Seekers is mostly alternate stuff that won't touch your runs, though the new shrines are pretty useful early game.
Let's see, 70-100+(!) bucks for the (yawn) twentyseventh COD with a 4 hour campaign, or 20 for a game that is complete and lasts for dozens if not hundreds of hours?
Yeah, my choice is easily made.
it kinda feels like the more expensive a game is, the less value it seem to have.
That's exactly it, was looking for this comment.
The most expensive game I own is Baldurs Gate 3 (@ $70 CAD) and it’s the only game that was worth full price in my 12 years of activity on steam and over 250 games purchased. My next most expensive game was $30 CAD and I only bought a few games that high.
factorio has mods that last thousands of hours. they're free additions, and the full game with its dlc is only like 60USD. is ridiculous.
THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW THE FACTORY MUST GROW
I’ve got something like 200 hours in Vampire Survivors, and it cost me less than a fiver
The price has crept up with the paid expansions, but holy shit do NOT sleep on the Castlevania one. It doubles the base game content, and fits in great.
I’m burnt out on it at this point. In the whole bullet haven gameplay loop.
Don't forget that Fallout New Vegas regularly drops below 15$ with all the DLC
And compared to the 10 year old titles on sale that actually work well and look great on 5 year old mid-range HW...
That's another problem, even if we disregard optimizations, AAA games from 2015. look better than modern upscaled stuff, Unreal Engine seems to be easy enough to use nowadays that big vertically-integrated slop publishers replaced seasoned developers with the cheapest of zoomers.
Thing is, I can also NOT play games and spend my money on other hobbies.
i will continue buying the games and not playing them, tyvm
A person of culture, I see.
I have the time to play games. I own many games. Yet I am not playing them. Why? I used to love games. Why can I not get sucked in anymore?
Depression and anxiety, probably.
I am anxious about nothing and feel the whole range of human emotions, hope for the future, enjoyment of other things. I feel quite happy most of the time actually.
i'v heard some people say this sort of thing is likely that your subconscious or whatever just isnt being "fulfilled" by that level of activity, that you got to try something a little "higher" like creating your own game/telling your own story
Not a bad idea. I'm 90% done my erotic Star Trek the next generation fan fiction. One more graphic sex scene and it's done. I could finish that.
I used to be like that. Had a huge backlog of games and didn't play any of them. The the steam deck happened ...
That's why they add gambling mechanics in games. That way many can not stop playing.
Yeah I'm a very patient gamer, I'm perfectly happy to just play games on my Steam Deck years after they come out. If there's something I want, I'll usually just wishlist it and let it sit there until it goes down to a price that seems reasonable. Much better to get it for $15-20 with all the DLC and bug fixes than paying $80+ for an unfinished buggy mess IMO.
Yeah, especially since I know I likely wouldn't play it much.
On the other hand, if it was free (also as in money) and open-source, and I liked it, I could donate. Although I don't have much money, so probably just smaller amounts, better than the 0 I do right now by not gaming instead.
For example, I absolutely wouldn't pay $9.60 for Binary Eye (barcode/2D code scanner app) if it cost that much, but as a donation that was fine.
Well, I could make an exception for games on physical media. I like it, and it has resale value.
Buying power is down. If they want me to spend more, capital has to pay me more.
I had to drop my “under 5 bucks” rule because games don’t drop that low anymore. 10-15 is where it’s at now, for better and for worse
Yeah the subtext of the article is the more interesting point, that good quality indy games are perhaps a bit more expensive.
I’m still holding to it, but I agree, it’s getting harder and harder to find stuff on sale for less than $5. Especially if you’ve been on Steam for a long time and have a large library already.
SUICIDE SQUAD FOR $3.50 GAMERS REJOICE
/s, obviously
Almost all of the "Top 10 most replayable games" I have are Indie games, especially in the last 10 years.
They're games like Factorio or Project Zomboid which I keep getting back to a year or two after I last played so much of it that I got fed up.
Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero, worse so for games which seem open-world but are in fact linear.
Mind you, some older AAA jewels in that style (such as Oblivion) do get me to come back eventually, but it takes something like 5+ or more as I basically have to forget most of the story before it's interesting to play such a game again.
If Price matched "Hours of Fun", almost all of the AAA stuff would be way cheaper whilst many Indie games would be far more expensive.
Fallout New Vegas still hooks me in.
The developer of Barony is insane like the Stardew Valley guy, and just. never. stops. updating. I'll play the game forever at this point.
Similar to "we absolutely swear this will be the last major update!! For reals this time!" ReLogic. I still wonder how in the hell they are still making enough/any money to keep their studio working on games after all this time?
Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero
I mean, I gotta disagree, at least in part. Some of these games don't age well. But I still know folks who line up for the "WoW Classic" experience. Hell, I know people who have been playing since the game came out in '02/'03(?) and now they're out playing with their kids. I know one family who plays with their grandmother, ffs.
I think one thing that really gave Blizzard and Nintendo titles staying power was the choice to deliberately tack towards the cartoon-y style of art. When you're not going for that hyper-real experience, the games age better. Hard to pick up a vintage Laura Croft or Devil May Cry without feeling its age. But Wind Waker? Mario 64? They do just fine.
For me it really depends on the game and whilst the "glitzy" is often an indirect indicator of a game which is limited in its replayabiliy - I suppose because often they're games were there was much more investment in looks than gameplay - I should have added "highly curated" to that sentence since for me games with a story meant to be experienced in a certain way are pretty much "play once".
Most of the games which I keep coming back to again and again in quite short cycles have emergent gameplay elements and even the entire game area is different from play to play - not just Indie Games like Factorio, Don't Starve, The Lone Dark in Survival mode and Project Zomboid but also something like The Sims - whilst of "story" games, there are very few I go back to (as I mentioned Oblivion but also Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3) and when I do it's after much more time, I suppose because I have to forget most of the story for it to be fun again.
My impression that in the last decade AAA has focused mostly on just two kinds of games - "Glitzy AAA open-world-ish" RPGs and multiplayer battle games - and for me the first have limited replayability unless they're a world with A LOT of depth were the story is but a small part of the game, whilst I can't be arsed to play the latter ever since online battlefields were swamped by kids in consoles as I really don't have the patience to babysit somebody else's ill behaved kids (still waiting for game makers to figure out that Adult Only servers would be immensely popular).
It's not that AAA can't do games with massive replayability, it's that the AAA part of the industry seems to have gone down the route of games being either "curated experiences" or massive multiplayer were the emergent gameplay comes the actions of other players, whilst many Indies - having way smaller budgets - have gone down routes were the gameplay is "self-assembling" emergent, often with the game area being procedurally generated, which adds up to something less predictable were two runs of the game whilst sharing some similarities are in practice sufficiently different not to feel repetitive.
I gotta. The Rogue-like genre being the classic example of the indie game
As an indie dev, this article is fucking stupid.
Want to know why indie games are priced at $10 to $15? Becaue AAA has been putting everything they've made in the last decade on Steam and it's all going for $20 - $25.
Indies can't launch at that price point anymore because they're competing with AAA games from 10 years ago that have been discounted to death.
The Steam winter sale is the best example of this, where most people will buy RDR2 for $19 instead of the new mega hit indie that's $20. So indies have been lowering their price to actually get sales. That's why team cherry priced Silk Song at $20.
Basically, AAA is now just competing with the bottom part of the market they spent that last decade flooding.
They're complaining about people actually choosing where to spend their money wisely because that means they might actually have to make a good product if they want to sell a game for $70.
Terraria has always been $10. Stardew Valley: $15. Undertale: $10. Braid was $15 when it launched, and even then, people were bitching about the price. So, the price tag has always been in that range since the first indie game launched.
I think you're ignoring the incredible amount of oversaturation in the industry. Games are everywhere. I could throw a thousand sticks into the wilderness and it would smack into a thousand different game studios, all working for years on their big hit that (in their eyes) would make them millions of dollars.
But, people don't have time to even play their own Steam backlog. On average, people buy more games than they even have time to play, and that's not even counting the sheer amount of movies, music, TV shows, YouTube videos, whatever that is competing for people's time. If they are playing video games, then they are not watching or listening to other media.
It's not just the gaming industry. The entire creative industry is propped up on the backing of a 98% failure rate, or sometimes even a 99.99% failure rate. The lucky few get to spout off their survivorship biases, under the bones of former companies and individuals, crunched under the weight of oversaturation.
My dude, I'm very familiar with the 14% of videogame players new game devs are vying for. And every one of the games you mentioned launched at that price because they were developed by a single dev (two at most) who could profit off of the $10 - $15 dollar space that was below the smaller studios putting out games like Shadow Complex, or Mercenary Kings, or Shank 1+2 for $20.
Now all of those spaces are being crushed together. Mostly due to economic factors. Thats where the biggest problem really lies, in the fact that people just have less money to spend on all that entertainment. Just pointing out that it's competitive at all is obvious my dude, but the direction its going in is one in where there's less anything being made (including games) because not as many people have money to spend on anything but necessities.
That's why AAA is now scavenging at the bottom of the totem pole, and pricing their older games at $10 or less on sale, it's because the few people that have money find that price point appealing. So it's now one that not just the people who made Terraria, Braid, etc compete in. The money those devs made previously in that space is now up for grabs to AAA companies that never had anything to sell at that price before.
Theres a very tried and true formula for any business, including making games, and in the last 2 years it has completely broken apart. Mostly due to the Embracer group merger failing, combined with AI, combined with economic uncertainty, combined with AAA companies stabbing indie creators in the back (Subnautica, Disco Elysium). Your game doesn't have to be a massive hit to be successful, it just needs to have a big enough audience to be profitable. But that audience has shrunk over the years as economies have tightened, and the companies getting squeezed have been invading markets they never had a presence in before.
So it's just desperate times more than anything. But that doesn't mean you can't make a living off of making games. I know dozens of small teams funded by government grants making small games you've never heard of to help kids in hospitals learn about their cancer. Or teach kids in underprivileged schools about resource scarcity. Making games as a business goes far beyond entertainment and the hopes of narcissists. It's an artistic medium like any other, and as such benefits society by making the toughest parts of it more accessible.
There's plenty of ways to run a company doing just that - and just because the world economy is in free fall doesn't mean the entire business of making games is something for the lucky few. It's just for anyone that wants to learn how to run a game company. Which isn't easy, but extends far beyond the simplistic view you are portraying.
I don't know about the main point that you are making, meaning that it's the economy's fault.
I only have a few data points to compare, but anecdotally me and my friends have plenty of budget to buy games, but not enough time to play them as the poster above says. I have such a huge backlog of nice games that I don't care to buy a game at release time, I can wait for a discount. If it is something exceptionally good that I want to play now, i will do it, but mostly on the ~20 euro range
So I will agree with the poster above. Make something exceptionally good, otherwise it compares with my backlog.
At any given time, there's about 400 million people playing game on the planet. Of those people, only 14% play NEW games released within 12 months.
It used to be 30% 10 years ago. Now it's less for a variety of factors, but one of them is less people have the income and budget they used to.
You are in that 14%.
Which is great - but the games you buy as part of that 14% are based on your taste. Not if they are exceptionally good, only if they are exceptionally good to you.
So making games that are "exceptionally good" for an audience isn't easy because your audience doesn't even know what they want beyond a genre. I'm sure you could tell me about the games you like and prefer to play, possibly even a genre of games you love.
But if I asked you to tell me what game COULD be exceptionally good in that genre, you might not have an answer. Just other games to compare it to. And if you do have an answer, there's no telling if it would actually be popular with a bigger audience that genre enjoys.
Making "exceptional games" isn't a bar to be crossed that makes a game money. Rather a game is "exceptional" once it finds an audience that feels that way about it. Games that have broad appeal have broad audiences like Call of Duty who all feel that game is exceptional too. Many who play it would argue which one in the series was the most "exceptional" and wouldn't have a great answer for what to make as a better version of that game.
People like what they play, and exceptional games are only exceptional to the audience that plays them. So it's not so much about making something exceptional, but making something that has an audience that thinks it's exceptional.
And finding that audience is the hard part. Especially when only 14% of people who plays games are even looking at what you've made.
But it's not impossible. Just difficult these days.
If you start going over 2 or 3 people, you're not an indie dev you're a AA studio.
Based on what? Your opinion? Or is there a profit analysis and breakdown you want to pair with that to make a point?
I think you probably hit the nail on the head here. I've been holding off on MGSV because it's $20, and I'm waiting for that 50% off sale.
Buuut, that didn't stop my from buying silksong at full price. Or Factorio. :)
Thanks! 🙂 Appreciate you confirming that. We actually changed the price of our latest game to $10 (from $20) because we launched last December and got buried by AAA selling for $15.
Almost every dev team we talked to this year felt the same about the $20 price. That is, it's much better to go out at $15 or $10 as a LOT of people see indie games at that price as better than modern AAA. (All while still holding out for classic AAA that go on sale for $20.)
And that being said, I'm totally cool with losing a sale to MGSV or Witcher 3 😁 Just wish the $20 space wasn't getting so crowded. It's making it rough for the smaller teams to compete at that price too now.
Honestly, if an indie game is promising, I'll gladly pay full price. Pacific Drive, The Forest, and Inscryption (small sale) were all games that I picked up because of interesting trailers, premises, and very positive reviews :)
If you asked me to name a major gameplay innovation in the last 5 years, I literally couldn't. Clair Obscur won a fuck load of awards for doing basically what Final Fantasy did 15 years ago, but not completely losing the plot. Hollow Knight blew everyone's mind for making a decent Metroidvania game. Balatro made a game where you make a series of combos that people have been making for over 200 years. You don't need fancy gimmicks anymore to be considered good, you just need to be good. Major publishers waste their time because they don't know how to put "be good" on a spreadsheet.
I would argue Expedition 33 is a lot closer to Legend of Dragoon released 26 years ago. Its claim to fame was the active turn based system pulled right out of that game.
Metroidvanias standard was set 28 years ago in SOTN. It has n
That crazy now that you think about it.
I would not put Balatro in the same category. While it isn't mind blowing. Nobody put the pieces together in the same way that Balatro did. I would still call it innovative.
I know of a major gameplay innovation in the past 5 years, though it's incredibly unpopular to many.
AI2U features NPCs that are run by Azure AI. The goal is to make the ChatGPT NPC do what you want so you can solve the escape room.
This gameplay feature hasn't really caught on, but I've only seen it be used recently.
I for one can't wait for them to stop playing their Azure Bill or run out of credits.
Charging anything is tricky.
I'm comparing it to what I could be getting for free, either with torrents or emulators.
Most games being released aren't even worth my time, let alone my money.
This, I think, is the big open secret about the push for consoles to move towards pure digital distribution.
It’s easier to not have to compete against your back catalog for gamer attention, if you cut off end-users ability to access it!
Rockstar already tried something like this, when they released the Definitive Defective Edition.
It failed successfully, in no small part to the remaster being absolute garbage, but for the AAA publishers, it’s merely a small setback that they will try again in the near future.
Most games being released aren't even worth my time, let alone my money.
I dont think you are in their target group then.
Piracy is free. If you're charging 70usd for a game, then I'd rather just spend the time and pirate it. If it's 10 bucks, Im just lazy to do a Google search and pay you for it.
That plus so many games that are genuinely good and I have lots of hours into are in the $5-20 range.
So much truth
Plus those 70$ games invest so much of that $ in fucking you with DRM.
Oh fuuuuuck the DRM. I purchased CIV5 for my phone and it requires an active internet connection or it boots you out. I only play on an airplane. So I ended up downloading the pirated version so I can play the game I purchased.
It seems you fly a lot. Are you a pilot?..
No, I have a business that requires I fly a ton.
Aka the market has rejected your overpriced bullshit. Adapt or die. Welcome to the free market.
It doesn't matter if you're a mega corporation and previously had the winning formula. You adapt to meet evolving market demand or you die.
These c suites got too comfy doing everything to only please their shareholders. They forgot that pleasing their consumers wasn't optional. We are your money supply. If you lose us, it all comes crashing down.
CEO and C-suite bonuses are the biggest budgetary fat that never gets cut and is fundamentally what the excessive costs are paying for. If you want better sales, cut the wage and bonuses to said roles who do the least work and reap the most reward.
I'm sure that plays a role. But it might also be worth noting that the market is absolutely saturated. You don't need to go out and get The Latest New Game to enjoy yourself. There are titles that are 20 years old and can stand up to anything the AAA titles will put out next week.
The marketing budget is what's driving a lot of the prices of these bigger titles. You see a Superbowl Ad for the new Call of Duty or GTA game? That's $5 of the sticker price right there. Sometimes firms are spending 50-100% of the actual production cost of the game to tell you to buy the game. Other times they're just going out to the gaming mags/influencer groups and leading you with "The game is coming!!!" news articles for years at a time, hoping to build a critical mass of pre-orders to fund the next title in the pipe.
Once the game is out, though, its done. Anything you can flip it for is free money for the owner of the property. So why not re-sell the SquareEnix back catalog for $10/ea? Tune up the graphics a bit, maybe spring for a few new cut scenes. You can take a title that landed on shelves in the mid-90s and turn it into another eight-figure release just by hyping it back up again.
I've got to be honest, the price of a game is probably the least important factor on whether I make a full price purchase.
I'm not going to rush out and buy something I've no real interest in. I can count on one hand the number I've made this generation. On PS2 I'd be grabbing something every week or two, but now I just can't get excited for the latest and greatest updates on old formulas. Half the time I buy just to encourage them to make more games like that, like I did with Talos Principle 2, Astro Bot and Split Fiction.
I might pick it up later if I feel inclined, or see it on a decent discount. Like Clair Obscur, that I picked up for £29 in a sale just because I remembered it existed and fancied something to play over the winter holiday.
I just started waiting as long as I needed to, years if necessary, for the games I want to drop down on a sale to under $20. I really don't care how long I have to wait. There's enough games out there now to keep me busy.
Best example of this is the borderlands franchise. Wait a year or two and get the game + dlc for 80% off.
25 bucks? That‘s cute. AAA studios are charging $80 for remakes or $250 for DLC packages. They‘re out of their minds.
Because youre overinflated executive and managerial budgets dont justify the fucking price when games like Hollow Knight, Jump Ship, and Stardew Valley are 10x better.
Yeah I pretty much almost never buy AAA games anymore outside of some very specific creators/franchises. Price is definitely a part of that, but the bigger things are creativity and business practices. Indie games are where all the new ideas are and where you get honest expressions of the artist’s intent. And you generally don’t need to put up with bullshit micro transactions, DRM, etc.
I’m not gonna pay $60+ for Call of Duty 500 when I can find full, fun, inspired indie games for less than $30. I will still buy the handful of more creative AAAs that do come out sometimes.
Same here. The last AAA game I bought was probably Diablo III, and I barely touched that piece of junk. I’ve learned my lesson and either pirate it to try it out first or wait for sales on Steam. My most prized games in my collection are the indie ones anyway, so I’m not rushing to buy AAA anymore.
The game must be a GOTY contender or I'm not gonna pick it up at full price. I have no issues paying up for a new, unique experience that sounds exciting. Games I know I like, but rehash an old formula land on the wishlist until they are 30% off. Games that look cool, are recommended, but I'm not sure I will like them land on the wishlist and need to be below $20 when I buy.
With these simple rules I still have too many unplayed and unfinished games in my library, so... yeah.. you gonna have to take some risks to win big.
I don't have the time anymore, the price isn't really the factor. Anything new has to compete with my existing library and backlog, and other things on my wishlist. It's a problem that's only going to get worse, games aren't really aging out of relevance at the rate they used to.
And if I DO want a triple A game, I wait a couple of years and then for a Steam sale.
i almost never buy games on steam itself anymore..Even on the steam sales. The sales are a poor imitation of the great values that they were 10+ years ago, and quite frankly..the quality of games coming out isnt what it was 10+ years ago, either.
I subscribe to Humble Monthly and, eventually, get almost every game I've ever wanted.
I don't even do humble monthly anymore. They've had periods of months and months where I don't get anything I want to play or some obscure game that isn't interesting. Its cheaper just to get the monthly bundle when I do see a game I want. Humble monthly was more than worth it maybe 10 years back.
i mean.. you can pause your month and skip the shit you have no interest in..
I think in 10 years of being subscribed I've only felt the need to do it like...twice? i think
For me I've had to do it for more than 5 or 6 months so to me pausing isn't worth the time.
yeah, if you're interests are super narrow then yeah it wouldnt be good for you.
Megabonk, my beloved...
Better to say, they are compared to good games priced at 10 to 15.
Good
AAA games aren't worth $60+
Would be interesting to see the stats for revenue by game, price by volume. If someone charges 300 for a game that no one bought. Then it shouldn't count, hypothetically.
I work in market research. Data at this level of granularity (price band view) is extremely expensive.
Around 300K per year and that would also likely only include a few retailers GameStop, BestBuy, Walmart. I don't remember off the top of my head, but I believe Steam data wouldn't be included.
It's very likely Valve doesn't share the full dataset with anyone. Maybe partial data with some of their biggest partners.
Always compare value and price.
More often than not, AA games seem to come with a AAA price tag.
Thing is, anything under 20 gets purchased, anything above that will be pirated (quite easily)
No it's the users that are the problem get more jobs idiots
...until GTA6 comes out, then all bets are off.
I wouldn't be so sure, matey! Yaarrghh! ⛵🏴☠️🦜
Each year there are only a few new AAA games that are worth full price. People be buying indie or older games on discount.
Why buy new bugged COD when you can pick up fixed up No Mans Sky?
No Man's Sky was an indie released at AAA prices and was a pile of dog shit. Feel like there are other games you could've picked...
It was another example of what is wrong with the industry today. It never should have been released in the state that it did. And despite Hello Games extensive efforts - we are still missing features that Sean, on record, stated would be in the game at launch.
I chose NMS cause it is a perfect representation of AAA project that was dogshit on release but got fixed up to a promised game much later in it's life. It fits like a glove into "don't buy unfinished crap on release" category.
Yah but the amount of shit games charging 3 dollars is insane. Really dragging down the median.
Pretty much only play free to play games and never buy anything.
is there a way to tell what is indie and what is slop? i really think it’s getting like the ebay days of the 90’s. just .. something feels off. repetitive. odd.
Indie and slop are not mutually exclusive. Something can be both.
If it has the AI content flag, it's most likely slop.
I like some Indy titles but I’m getting sick of the side scrollers
tbh i can buy a game for 30-60~ usd,but preferably i want them to be cheaper + it makes buying more games easier.
My rule is I'm only willing to pay a dollar for every expected hour of play, so you can imagine I buy few things at full price.
The last two games I paid full price for were Elden Ring and Mandragora. I am far more likely to pay full price for an indie title that I'm excited about than anything else, because as an artist myself, I fully understand the impact of a pre-purchase on an indie studio.
I would also generally consider £1/hour of gameplay to be pretty terrible value tbh. Truly good games are more like £0.10/hour or less
If you only look at $/hr, there are some 70 hr games which milk your time and should have been shorter, like Assassin's Creed, and then there are short, story rich games, like Outer Wilds, which are absolutely worth it even at more than a dollar an hour.
Prefer games like Factorio or Rimworld that you can get many 100s of hours from.
That's fine. I don't agree with you.
People spend like $20 to watch a 2 hour movie, $1/hr isn't that unreasonable
Not to mention that not all gaming hours are equally fungible.
There can be shorter narrative games where a given hour is worth more (to me), so the higher per hour cost is justified.
Agree 100%. Played Dispatch last week and had a blast. Very short, but worth the money imo
To you perhaps. Cinema is less than half that cost here and even then I go less than once a year because I don't really feel like most films that come out are worth bothering to see given the combined effort and cost.
I don't strictly adhere to it or anything, but I think it's a good reminder sometimes when I balk at the price of a new game that I'm liable to spend hundreds of hours playing.
It all depends on what you're looking for. I've put hundreds of hours into games and gotten way less than $1/hr, and I've also had a great experience paying significantly more.
So I don't see games in terms of $/hr, especially these days when I'm more limited by time than money. Instead, I look for unique experiences with cost being a much lower factor. Generally speaking, I spend much less than $1/hr since I buy a lot of older games, but I've spent far more ($5-10/hr) on particularly interesting games.
But yeah, generally speaking, I'm willing to pay more for indies than AAA titles because indie games are more likely to offer that unique experience.
I like some of the early access development styles used in things like Enshrouded and Satisfactory, so mostly ive been spending on games like that. I like the idea of collaborating with a player base to create a game together I think.
Oh definitely. I've enjoyed the experience of helping devs mold a title into something better in exchange for a lower price.
I like your dollar an hour rule though, I might use that in the future. Its funny though, my most played game was free and I have 2000+ hours in it!
Edit: I forgot rocket league was 30$ originally! Still a good deal!
Yeah, the games I've spent very little on I've put a ton of time into, like Vampire Survivors, Noita, and Dungeon Defenders.
That's generally how I follow it also. Though I add the stipulation that they're enjoyable hours, and it's not hardline. I know not every game can be measured that way. If it's a particular genre or series, l might take the dive anyway. For indies, it goes even further than that. Some I track for years before release, so I pre-order as soon as it becomes available, just to support as much as I can. So $/hr is a good baseline, but it's deeper than that.
I'm totally ok paying $30 for a ten hr game, I appreciate shorter games. But if it's boring or unfun for a whole hour in, I'm getting a refund.
Who has money for games?
As much as it’s great to shit on triple A games, this is quite bad for the industry as a whole. Devs cannot price their game above $15 without being held to an absurdly high standard, which makes budgeting for game development extremely difficult for smaller studios. If we want the AA scene to expand and give us more great games as we’ve seen in the past few years, that’ll need to change.
Arc Raiders launched as a feature complete game, mostly bug free, well optimized, with a sufficient amount of functioning servers, and with genuinely innovative game design.
It sold incredibly well at 40 dollars. I've bought it 4 times myself.
Expecting every game to meet those criteria is not "absurd". It used to be par for the industry and it still should be.
AAA games from publicly traded corporations are just absurdly underwhelming. They want us to think these standards are absurd so they can keep their minimal effort bullshit gravy train running. It's not going to work anymore. That's the free market. Adapt or die.
If we want that, we’d just pay for it right?
What's that? Capitalism fixing problems?
Checkmate atheists.
Capitalism isn't fixing anything here. In fact, it's showing that the companies mindlessly following market inflation to keep profits up are doing worse.
Why buy AAA slop when indie gold cheaper?
Checkmate juden.
“gAmeS aRe tOo ExpEnsiVe tHesE Days!” paid $70 for a major release in 1999, also paid $70 for a major release in 2025
Games were released as complete games in 1999.
Maybe you did, I bought used games for 10.
paid $70 for a major release in 1999,
Aha
The difference is back then, I didn't have to wait 2 years (give or take) for games to go on a proper sale to enjoy it. I'd just wait until a month or two has passed and ask around, go into Gamestop/EB Games, rent it at Blockbuster, find used games at yard sales, etc. and buy them for cheap (or potentially barter for them or be lent the copy).
We pay $70 to not play at release due to server issues and critical bugs. We do QA for most major gaming companies - while paying for the privilege to do so. We pay full-price for incomplete experiences that we are misled into believing are complete experiences, as well.
Most games I purchase at release (or pre-order) are just in limbo on my account while I wait for a playable product. By the time it's playable, there is usually $70 worth of DLCs for me to buy.