I haven't paid over $20 in 5 years. I honestly can't justify spending more than that on a video game. I don't care how good: price will drop eventually, and I will wait.

Same here, only exception: Baldurs Gate 3, because i loved the mindset of the devs and i knew from their prior games that they deliver quality. That was more about supporting Larian with extra cash.

I buy a ton of games a year after they release or so. I got the benefit of the expanded edition or whatever and it's just as much fun for me as it was for everybody else a year or two ago.

Now I play a lot of single player stuff, so your mileage may vary.

I limit myself to one or two "new full price" purchases a year, and it's usually games from known devs i want to support that I'm excited about.

Unfortunately, some genres struggle going indie because they're too expensive to develop and aren't guaranteed to sell well. There is a reason PlatinumGames can't afford to make Bayonetta if Nintendo doesn't put up the money, for example, and almost every indie studio that attempts a similar feat has to spend years and years in early access.

The Genokids developer has been working on the game for +5 years and has only 2 chapters to show for it. Mahou Arms released on Steam in April 2020, and is still in early access today.

The world has become too expensive for some things to comfortably exist, or exist at all, unfortunately.

This... Put games on your wishlist, set your wishlist to only show sales, and sort by price. Then only buy games from that list when they go on a significant sale. Plenty of decent games out there regularly go for $5-10 or less. With very few exceptions I refuse to pay more than $20-30 for a game and, even then, only if they're like 50% off and not likely to come down.

Also... stop pre-ordering games. They'll still be there when they do go on sale. You don't need to play them as soon as they come out. Conquer that FOMO shit and develop some integrity.

I set a rule not to buy any game util i finish what I already have. I have not bought anything for the last two years. Any game that interest me is going to my wishlist for now.

You don't even have to be that patient these days. I got Arc Raiders 3 weeks after release for 60% off, it was like $18.

And, not buying immediately you get to know if the shiny is real or is just a painted turd. Or if it disappears after a couple months.

Basically do the same thing. Until a game hits $20 or less, I won't purchase it. For $70, I would rather buy something useful like new shoes.

Counterpoint: It's just so much fun when you are starting on release day, not getting spoiled, no one has a clue where what is there is no meta and a lot of community interaction.

E.g. Elden Ring, we started together at 12 am when it launched, killed the first couple of bosses. Then the next few days forums were filled with posts, people had different theories, NPC questlines were being discovered. It was the same two years later with the DLC. A friend of mine bought it finally and started playing last week. But he is .missing all of that.

On that note, Dark Ages was probably my favorite game I played last year and was worth the cost new as well. For half price, it's absolutely worth it even more.

How much of that money goes into marketing, and executive pay checks?

Well, many complex games have no budget on graphics, that's why you can have one-man army dev making a monster of a game like Aurora 4x.

Yeah, and then the game made by a small team ends up being much more successful.

And the Son, Emulation?

I just played Escape from Ever After. Every bit as good and polished as the old Paper Mario games. $25. They cost $50-$65 back then.

My friend, let me tell you about this thing called “Pre-order.”

There are plenty of “gotta have it first” people out there. Doesn’t matter if it’s a new phone, game, see a movie on opening day, whatever. Plenty of gamers want to be in Alpha and Beta tests (which FML they do nothing but bitch about as being unplayable) and shell out money for skins and early upgrades or level up packs. Vloggers and tiktokkers too or whatever who want to pull in the views as they play the new games.

These are the people the studios cater to. Not the patient gamers who wait for the product to go on sale 90 days down the road after the initial rush is over.

So as long as the people in the first paragraph exist that’s what the studios will charge.

Atari 7800 Game Devs knew what's up lol

Its the best way. Its cheaper, you have plenty of user reviews to check first, and you get a completed game, without bugs.

I rarely buy games on release. Recently, ghost of yotei. While I enjoyed the hell out of it, it was shorter than I would have liked and had a very predictable ending. I didn't feel burned, but I should have waited. The other was the new dragon age. I didn't pay full price but it was still a lot and I knew within a few hours that it was going to be ass. I pushed through for a few more hours but the soulless writing and lack of weight behind conversations turned me off. I decided to forget it, and play inquisition yet again. Lastly there was forbidden West that I got with my ps5 which was a gift. Don't regret that one, though it's not without its flaws. None of them, however, did I find buggy or unplayable.

A fifth thing for your list: formulaic and predictable af

Why are 90% of AAA games a dude with a gun? How many iterations of dude with a gun can we possibly get?

Except Nintendo. And the mentality is spreading, I've never seen sekiro below $40

Is it? What game requires any of that? Even the most microtransation heavy games lile NBA 2k and Fifa are perfectly playable without micro transactions. You'll still get a top team you'll still get 100s of hours out of it.

Paying for an expansion to a game you like doesn't seem like it belongs that list. DLC from the Souls games (Bloodborne included) adds a ton to its respective base games.

Where are these statistics from?

Though it's really confusing to set up.

Btw, do i have to manually unsubscribe games i unsubscribed/bought on Steam and GoG? Synch is set up.

The price of new games isn’t a problem for me as they are still cheaper than what they were when I was a kid. In my country Switzerland, an expensive new game is stll less than CHF100.- when some Nes games were CHF120.- thirty years ago. Back in the Playstation 1 era games were around CHF89.- and now most Playstation 5 games are around CHF79.-.

And that’s not taking inflation into account!

Gaming is one of the few things which has become cheaper in my lifetime, especially now that I get a lot of old games on my Steam Deck and only racing sims on my Playstation 5.

For me the problem is that you can pay such an amount and still be subject to many popups begging for your money (microtransactions) or DRM’s (always online or others).

Or that, thanks to digital games, you’ll soon not be able to resell an expensive game that you didn’t enjoy enough to keep.

And also the fact that games aren’t really prettier than 10 years ago but that you still need better hardware to play them.

I think game companies really need to have a look at why their games are becoming so expensive, because I don’t think it’s because they are treating their employees better.

Comrades, I think we found AG bondi.

Video games were way more expensive when I was a kid

They still are, for a kid.

Inflation this, inflation that, but the free money a person has has not increased. It has been going down for quite some time.

Also I'm pretty sure no one in the world is gonna look at a game and go „well if I buy this I'm gonna be homeless for 2 months, but if I plot an excel graph from 1990 to 2026 the price is down so I'll buy it”

Fucking ag bondi logic if you ask me

Also, micro transaction exist because the poor CEO wants his 23 million salary.

In Nintendo world, games are generally more expensive in the online store compared to physical cartridges, at least that was the case when I bought my games

Remember Gamefly?

Gamepass wasn't a bad idea, and it was actually pretty cool when it first came out. It was basically Microsoft's Gamefly.

Don’t microslop and friends peddle some game pass and similar subscriptions? Game rental with extra steps.

Im tired of early access hell, most games never reaching roadmap goals, never leaving early access

AAA games are significantly cheaper in real terms than they were in the 90s.

30 CAD in 1993 is about 58 CAD today, and those weren't even the most expensive games in the flyer you saw then.

Especially console titles were expensive by modern standards, the main titles like Mario games retailed for something like 150 USD in 2026 dollars.

Do you know how inflation works? Cause good God this statement....

The games have never been easier to make and the market bigger, fuck their margins

My rule of thumb is $1 per hour of gameplay. So if I don’t expect to get at least 70 hours out of a game, I’m not paying $70 for it. I don’t consider it a bargain until I get down to significantly less than a dollar per hour.

Any excess profit due to higher game prices will go to shareholders anyway.

That's why you make good products that people cannot resist buying. Too much boring slop out there right now

Games were more than $60 in the 90s.

But video games were limited by physical copies back then. Supply was limited, and it cost the publisher multiple dollars, sometimes in the double digits, to manufacture the physical goods to sell. But with that you got a usually complete mostly bug-free game (as in, if there were bugs they usually were not commonly found in normal gameplay), as patches werent really a thing and making physical revisions was expensive. You also got the entire game that you paid for, all the content in the game was available to you from your one purchase. You can lend it to a friend if you want, too.

Nowadays we get sold half of a game that barely works for $70, so you can get the other half by buying the next 14 $20 battlepasses and playing only that one game for the next 5 years to finally get all the content of the game. You also cant let your friend borrow the game.

I don't need to pay for a dev team that is overbloated with too many people, a marketing team that thinks every ad needs to have a Beatles song, and an executive that just demands more profit. Dev teams need to get smaller, marketing budgets need to shrink, and executives need to be less greedy. They already make record profits, they do not need more.

Just to really put it into perspective: if a Nintendo64 game sold for $55, the developer would usually see a profit of about $6 or $7. Compare that to the immense profit that happens now. Its not even close.

60? Maybe. 70? Never until now. 80? Definitely never until now.

Have they? I've seen many games costing up to $100 or more if you want the complete game.

Many standard editions of triple-A games have been chopped to the point where even the proper ending is part of DLC that requires a season pass.

Some design their games in such away that they can sell quality of life features or some kind convenience for players. (Basically subtle form of P2W)

Some have turned their games to billboards for DLC, micro transactions, season passes and even other games.