“Gaming is becoming unaffordable” — Xbox CEO says the industry has an accessibility crisis
https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/xbox/gaming-is-becoming-unaffordable-xbox-ceo-says-the-industry-has-an-accessibility-crisisOpen linkView original on lemmy.today306
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Introducing a monthly subscription for next gen consoles and hiking game pass prices /s
Sadly that could actually happen at some point.
Already happening with cars and many things so it is inevitable
Gaming, is joining everything else at becoming harder to afford.
🏴☠️
Even past that, you can find sub-$10 quality games all over the various online platforms.
I'm old enough to remember a friend in college blowing $1200 on double-GeForce cards so he could max out specs on Oblivion. And from that perspective, gaming has always been unaffordable. But you don't have to game like this. Nobody needs to go four figures out of pocket to play Slay the Spire or Dwarf Fortress or even Counterstrike.
Hehe yeah, that is sort of what I meant. Gaming isn't what changed. Affordability changed.
High quality indie games are very affordable <3
How well is she paying her employees?
The CEO is a she, Asha Sharma.
Thanks, I assumed it was the guy on the left on the photo.
I ONLY buy games when they're on sale on steam, and they need to be like 60% off for me to even consider it
I just buy the game when it gets under $30.
Use gg.deals or isthereanydeal sites. Both show sales from a kot of 3rd party (legit) sites that redeem on steam (and others but mostly steam).
Very worth using and don't have to wait for a steam sale.
isthereanydeal can import your steam wishlist, and you can set a price threshold and other criteria on it. I have a $10 threshold on mine and there's plenty of stuff on there all the time.
"People are buying indie games instead and I'm not happy about it"
Not just indie games, every game. Every new game is in competition with every other game in existence. It’s a battle for recognition and attention, winners take all. Brutal situation.
Same goes for books, movies, TV, music.
It's not: "Gaming is unaffordable." it's "People aren't willing to give us more money."
I seriously wonder if more competent mobile gaming picks up some of the slack considering the “retro emulator” machines are starting to run PC games via Game Native app. If i didn't already have a steam deck i would seriously consider one of those devices.
I’m not convinced that we are going to see a renewed push for optimization. I think streaming will be aggressively pushed with low time limits in the forthcoming next gen to “make it affordable.” Xbox was ahead of the curve in that regard.
Perhaps making one game per decade is a losing strategey.
Edit: I heard a million excuses for that over the years from AAA industry, but my counter is just pointing to Capcom. Why can they keep up both output and quality?
A lot of games produced under the Capcom brand are merely financed by Capcom and developed by smaller studios. Like how GameFreak makes Pokemon games for Nintendo. Clover Studio produces a bunch of indie games under the Capcom banner. Ninja Theory produced several of the Devil May Cry releases. Inti Creates spun out of the old Megaman team to keep turning out new titles when the franchise lapsed. Pragmata was built by a fully independent development team inside Capcom.
And... idk about "quality". They're as prone to releasing a flop as anyone. They just turn out a lot of iterative and derivative materials. Why are there 18 different Ace Attorney games over 24 years? Because there's just not a lot going on between versions, mostly. Same reason the Megaman franchise could turn over so quickly. One basic engine could support a plethora of titles.
There was a stretch in the late 90s where squaresoft released a final fantasy nearly every year for 5 years. Now it's once every 7+ years. I don't believe it should be that hard to make games these days. There are more people working on the projects, more tools and pre-made engines/libraries available. It's purely a management/budgeting problem.
The problem is that making games (and software in general) has become more high-level, and enshittification has also gotten rid of highly skilled people. So the top studios in the industry are not capable of making resource-efficient, beautiful games anymore. Not because it's physically impossible, but because they're not geared for the processes and decision-making that would allow those games to be made.
When you switch from an artisan mindset to a mass-manufacturing and outsourcing mindset without exercising strict control you eventually become utterly dependent on service and product providers that will see to your costs going up so you'll keep paying more for less.
All the large studios will come to a breaking point eventually because it's unsustainable, and will be acquired for the franchise rights by corporations that make their money in unrelated industries. But the PC platform is also breaking down so this might be a moot issue in 10 years from now.
The more the hardware capabilities and our expectations rise, so does the outright complexity of making the games. I’m sure some of us would be fine with less ”bleeding-edge” games if they were otherwise written and designed great, but I think it makes sense, from publisher’s perspective, to hedge the bets and try to also impress with the fidelity of presentation.
If you are looking for a sofa and find one that smells a bit off but is otherwise functional, comfortable and looks nice, you might think you’d be able to live with the smell and buy it.
You almost certainly won’t and will likely regret the choice, but the sale was made and it’s a whole thing to do returns for something so big and hard to transport and move around.
That’s what you want to go for, even if you think it might smell fine. If it looks good enough, it might nor matter if it happened to smell rank ultimately. Numbers must go up!
Hell, I still sometimes boot up old flash games that I enjoyed back when flash was around
Whose decision was it to charge 70-80 usd for a game?
Whose ai investments are buying up all the ram, gpus, and ssds?
Not consumers’…
And don't forget, everything is digital now, so that $80 game that you've completed in 2 weeks can't be traded for any secondary value.
Seriously. These CEOs need to get their heads out of their asses and open their eyes. My gaming PC is from 2019. My newest machine is lower power than that. A steam deck. And they've ruined the steam machine pricing too.
AAA games cost a lot, use basically all the same formulas from the past decade or two, and are expensive to make. They need to target less lofty graphics if they want to sell more copies. Less and less can afford bleeding edge hardware. Now is the time to double down in quality instead of fancy graphics. And this is why they're losing and indies are thriving.
Still a screamin deal as far as $ per hour of entertainment.
Adjusted for inflation, I paid ~$125.00 CAD for The Legend of Zelda when it launched on NES... For an 8 hr game...
The scale and quality of content delivered today is LIGHT YEARS ahead, and frankly, still the best value proposition in any entertainment media.
That fails to take into account the fact that the gaming was a niche hobby that wasn't particularly accessible in part due to prices. Given the far far larger market for games and the greater competition for gamer attention you would expect prices to come down.
Prices are set base on what the market is believed to be able to bare however so value per hr or cost to develop are somewhat incidental to the monetisation of a game.
Prices for games have stayed constant for 35 years. Can you think of anything else that has stayed the same price in that time frame?
For real. Nintendo 64 was not a niche hobby, and the games were still 70 to 80 bucks. That’s like $160 in today dollars. It shows, too. We got all this technology, but the care, polish, attention just isn’t there.
I disagree. You're comparing polishing a marble to polishing the ISS while it's in orbit.
An N64 game like Ocarina of Time or GoldenEye was a masterpiece, but it fit entirely onto a 32-megabyte cartridge. The entire codebase, every asset, and every line of logic could be held in the heads of a tight team of 15 to 30 people. The constraints were brutal, but they were static.
A modern AAA game is often over 100 gigabytes, that is a 3000x increase in asset data size. You aren’t managing a single, self-contained loop anymore. You are orchestrating the collision of massive, volatile, overlapping systems: real-time global illumination, dynamic physics engines, streaming open-world asset pipelines, complex AI behavior trees, and branching narrative databases. All of this has to run smoothly across vastly different hardware setups, from high end PCs down to consoles.
When people say the "care and polish" isn't there, they are usually reacting to the friction of this sheer scale, not a lack of effort. In the 90s, if a mechanic broke, one programmer could trace it. Today, a bug might be the result of a physics calculation conflict with an audio asset streaming millisecond late over a network layer. The fact that these massive digital ecosystems even boot up and run at 60 frames per second is an engineering miracle that dwarfs the entire development scope of the 90s. We aren't getting less care; we are getting infinitely more complexity for effectively half the inflation-adjusted price.
That's sort of my point... Prices are WAY down. Lower than they have EVER been. $125 for an 8 hr. game. What would that cost today?
Well no but also yes.
An Atari 2600 was $160 in 1979. Cartridges were $25-40. Adjust for inflation and that's $738.56 for a console and $115-184 per cartridge.
Also minimum wage was $2.90 ($13.39). Median family income was $19,660 ($90,750.94).
And it was new tech.
So the prices have come down. There are a lot of amazing games that are cheap that you can play basically forever. Minecraft, Dead Cells, Skyrim, etc.
But our expectations have risen while our wages have come down.
So not wrong, but not right for the reasons you'd assume.
Bonus: A game you no longer play could still net something on the second-hand market, or maybe you'd trade it with someone. I know there was a group of people at my school that collectively had like two or three copies of the various Pokemon games they'd pass around, exchanging and loaning them on the fly.
Steam Family Sharing is a thing, but not quite so trivial to set up as handing them the cartridge. Never mind about reselling digital copies of games.
Dunkey, is that you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvPkAYT6B1Q
First time seeing this, watched the whole thing, no lies detected. (Though he didn't touch on my point about income.)
These people only care now because it's actually affecting the bottom line.
Did they care when AAA pricing was lifted to $70 (base) as AAA quality took a nosedive? Did they care when "preordering" turned into "premium"? Did they care when microtransactions made some games into spend-to-win machines?
Hell, most of these clowns don't even play games. Just more rich people putting on the hat they think they need to get away with a "hello, fellow gamers."
Maybe the industry has a C-suite crisis.
That CEO has no room to talk about gaming being unaffordable and the industry ignoring the signs, when it's that very industry that made it unaffordable to begin with.
You can't claim ignorance of a problem you and your industry directly caused, Asha. You're as complicit in this as the industry you're saying is ignoring warning signs.
That's like if I broke a stick in half in front of a bunch of people, and then tried to say I didn't break that stick, when everyone saw me break that stick. Stupid analogy, I know, but that's basically what Asha is trying to pull here.
Hehe “Gaming has become unaffordable”. Continues to buy ram and other component capacity for AI data centers, while actively enshittifying every single game with microtransactions and forced game as a service bullshit. driving customers to increasingly purchase cheaper indie titles that are actually fun.
“Whatever can we do to fix this problem? “ <lays off veteran team so the shareholders can make 5 more Pennie’s a share, causing talent to look at different industries where they aren’t laid off every 2 years, causing every game to be made by devs fresh out of college>.
“This industry isn’t profitable anymore!”
A quick and controversial argument in favor of MTX: MTX allows them to extract more money from those with excess, subsidizing the game for those who can't afford to pay as much. Sure, when it's done poorly it's horrible. It can be a good thing though, like a supporter edition bundle that gives you like an icon next to your name or something.
Budget management should still be the primary option. Does your game need to cost this much to make, such that you have to have insane revenue to make up for it? Could you make something cheaper that's just as good (if not better, as limitations are the mother of creativity, or however that phrase goes)?
Except it’s a race to the bottom, MTX causes games to be designed around MTX. Instead of rewarding gameplay the design philosophy becomes rewarding purchasing. Which then leads to games designed around gambling triggers. Don’t need to make an entertaining game if you can create an addictive loop.
Which then causes people to give up on gaming and move to other past-times, which means less sales. Which means more aggressive MTX, which leads to the CEO of Microsoft bitching that gaming isn’t profitable enough because of the very problem he himself helped create.
I don't disagree, when done poorly by industry giants. There are some smaller games that have done it well, as just a way to find development. It isn't purely bad, and in a world where things are this unaffordable it can be good to keep in mind. Ethical MTX can exist that don't ruin the experience. It just isn't what these massive companies want.
Something like the DRG founder's pack, for example, is pretty good, or the Stationeers DLCs, which add purely optional ways to play that change how things work, which is only really useful to experienced players.
Edit: You've gotta love the downvotes. What is bad about the DRG model, if you disagree. If you don't have an answer, why are you downvoting?
This is it, on so many aspects. And during that they ruined the fun.
It's like shitting your pants and when everyone calls you out on it, you deny it even though they can all smell it.
Works for the president of the US
I like my 'breaking a stick' analogy better, but yeah, that too.
It's like breaking the stick and then telling the watchers they need more sticks, but they cost too much.
Why would I pay $70 for shit that's super watered down to appeal to the lowest common denominator when I could pay $20-40 for something made with real passion?
I mean, unless you play the last four decades of games in emulation... or the couple hundred thousand indie games on steam... or the other few hundred thousand mobile games or...
Oh, you mean your company profits are in crisis. Yeah. Good.
The amount of money the industry blows chasing PR with the tiniest minority of whiny "core gamers" is going to be the downfall of AAA.
The problem is that investors are brain-dead, so Forbes picking up on negative sentiment from 500 neckbeards can legitimately tank a publicly traded publishers stock.
The vast, vast, VAST majority of gamers don't identify as gamers, don't play 50 titles a year, and sure as hell don't engage with gaming media or online discourse about gaming. 95% of games industry revenue is coming from people who don't give a shit about gamer "hot button topics".
The problem, like with most industries, is the speculative commodification of the companies themselves instead of just their products.
Yar har fiddle de dee
Paying these prices is bullshit, you see!
They don't deserve all your hard-earned money!
Come be a pirate!
Well Asha, maybe you should talk to your boss Slopya about that AI problem that's raising prices on everything.
Maybe if they would stop burning through all the RAM and shoving AI down our throats...
I’m surprised they haven’t come up with a mandatory paid service where AI finishes your game for you. Just pay for the device. Pay for the game. Pay for online access. Pay for the mods. Pay AI to finish the game…Pay extra for a summary of your achievement's.
There was an article like a month ago about an AI assistant to play the hard parts for you.
A cross-game AI coop player that doesn't suck would be kind of cool tho.
Even shitty video game "AI" outmatched human players 20 years ago. 90% of video game AI development is dumbing that shit down enough that it's fun, but still convincing.
That’s what Elon does already.
Lmaoooooo
All the wealth is being concentrated in the hands of too few people. I'm not going to buy a $120 game when my salary is down, or I'm just laid off.
Problem is becoming a platform where you cant just buy the game anymore. You can obtain a digital licence that they can revoke at any time. So it’s more rent the game. And the price is up. And they have interfered with the studio and development. Plus you also have to pay for gamepass to even launch the game you ‘paid’ for.
This feels like a setup so they can present, “cloud gaming” as a solution. That way they can sell cheap hardware and yearly subscriptions for consistent revenue.
Reminds me of the Sim City 4 launch. The game was always online. People couldn't play it because their servers couldn't handle the load. One hiccup in the connection or servers and you're out of the game. It was single player but you couldn't play on laptop on a train, or plane.
It's a not good experience. And if things are like with Stradia you still have to buy the full game and pay the subscription for access. And because you're paying a subscription, people try to get their money's worth. That goes against the profit model that assumes you pay full price but only game a few hours per week. So companies start limiting hours per day, add premium tiers, that kind of thing. That'll cause a lot of resistance, especially with the young crowd with no money but lots of time.
I think you are confusing SimCitys. SimCity 4 came out in 2003. Where there was a SimCity that came out in 2013 that had had those issues. I got a free game out of it, BF3 maybe. But imma be real I don't remember the SimCity 4 launch, I do recall the SimCity 2013 launched and it was bad. Haven't bought an EA game since.
Might be. The sim city line and EA are dead to me too, so I don't remember the version numbers exactly.
I’m not In that category and don’t begrudge gaming funds…but I still resist as it’s a form of enshittification.
I’ve been expecting this for a whilst. It’s what they did for business users. Most office workers pretty much have a glorified tablet.
That's also a problem, yes. DRM free is best. I'm extremely reluctant to pay for a game I can't play offline as much as I want. (Barring MMOs and the like, I guess. Don't play a lot of those, myself)
I have enough that I could go out right now and drop $5k on a new PC build and not have it affect me.
My last mostly full build was in 2016. I'm still on ddr4 ram and just 6 months ago I upgraded my system to a used AMD R 5 5600x processor I got for $150 and an AMD 6600xt GPU I paid $200 for.
I'll play one of the million older games I haven't played yet before I ever spend so damned much on a new build or $900 on a console.
Gaming studios have the choice to make stylized visuals instead of chasing hyper realism. They just choose not to.
Stylized games always age best
There's that passive voice, striking again
Every industry has an accessibility crisis. Lazy MBAs don't want to sell products that appeal to everyone if they can sell products that only appeal to rich people with less effort.
It’s interesting how people are finally starting to notice after being told for years this will all eventually come to a head.
There have an amazing catalog of affordable games that were launched over the last 25 years (or more). There's a lifetime of fun available. Gamers may chose to play those, instead of the over expensive new games or worse, subscriptions.
Ultimately AI is an unaffordable industry. It'll crash in time, and there'll hopefully be a whole lot of price drops on ram, graphics, etc. People will not want to stop playing games. The industry has had crashes before and always bounced back bigger than ever.
It will be bad for whoever's economy is most dependent on it though.. And any businesses really heavily invested in it. Won't it, Microsoft.
I’m looking forward to the oversupply of RAM and SSDs in 5 years from now. Painful at the moment though, I’m praying that my PC survives
This, too, Shall pass
It's like they're catching onto why the urban legend about drug dealers intentionally poisoning their customers is bullshit. Turns out your sales go down when people can't buy your product.
Is it though? I feel like there are a ton of indie games these days that are reasonably priced and run well without using a fuck ton of resources.
I don't really care if GTA 6 is $100+. It's the best of the best, maximum effort, no expense spared tier of video game making. I might eventually get it and I might not.
Keep in mind that Super Nintendo games were $60 or $70 in the mid 90s. Games have come down in relative price recently and are only now starting to creep back up, but that's because gaming has become a massively popular hobby and a lot of people want huge masterpieces like GTA 6 or Elder Scrolls 6.
It's honestly shocking to me looking back that we were able to afford new games back then. I saved up literal pennies to buy SMB3. The lady at Toys R Us was visibly pissed at me, and more pissed at my mom for letting me pay that way. We weren't rich, though we were slightly above the middle of middle class. But even my lower middle class friends could afford to buy video games back then.
It helped that there were used and rental markets for relatively "modern" titles that are now almost entirely non-existent.
Conversely, games had little to no resale value back then despite self-evidently coming with the entire contents right there on the cartridge. Basically everything in my NES library when I was a kid except, perhaps ironically, SMB3 came from yard sales and so forth where I bought them for a quarter or fifty cents or whatever.
It's probably never been a better for indie games.
Life is unaffordable because of them and now they’re crying about a lack of consumers to buy their stuff.
Middle class exists only by virtue of subsidies. It was an artificial creation invoked by FDR. Then Reagan started a destruction of the middle class that never ended with him. And now we are here.
I'm sure the AI agents will buy all their stuff /s
The arms race inherent in the world of computer gaming is reaching a point of unsustainability. I started thinking that way back when I could donate cpu time on my ps3 to protein folding simulation.
And, like most of our field, it’s a ratchet that only goes up. Efficiency and clever engineering to create an accessible experience is almost always lower down the list of priorities for these big corporate AAA publishers .
They’re more interested in swinging their dick further than the other guy. A lot of the time this doesn’t actually buy something more fun, popular, or playable. But the mind of an exec beholden to shareholders is obligated to invest in bloat. meanwhile I’m having a delightful time running clever little indie games on my steam deck.
Plenty of good indie or AA games with low system requirements.
Or, you know, do something else than incrementing the version number on your old games while adding nothing new.
Same old games, at a higher price, this might just not cut it.
In the meantime, the Indie games are flourishing.
That's what the industry has to say, Mr. The CEO... Open your eyes.
-- Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
I though "accessibility" in video games meant, like, color blind mode and shit.
Says the company charging a minimum of $10/mo to play online (Game Pass) when you can do it for free (with the same game) on the PC.
PS6 and Xbox whatever aren't going to come out for a very long time.
There was some recent reports estimating 2028 or even 2029, probably because you can't make a device better than the ps5 at current prices.
Either new technology needs to come along or prices need to drop and that's not likely for the next year or two.
Emulating is becoming Easier.
They're talking about their own "industry", not the entire gaming industry, right? Riiight?
There's plenty of affordable stuff. But I'm not the target audience for their 50 or 60 € release titles. And my backlog is long enough either way.
If things going like this long enough, people won't be able to play pirated games too.
It's not affordable because of the indie games competition and no market regulations. Where in software there are plenty of regulations and competition is not existent because Office is given for free to schools so children are learning to use Microsoft products.
Hopefully they sell WoW, Diablo, Halo and any of the few good IPs they own (directly or indirectly) off
They will sell it to another big studio that will milk it dry