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the next next gen: talking about the ninth generation of videogame consoles

upupdowndown

REVOLUTION GRRR STYLE NOW
(he / him / his)
the extent of the gap is likely a response to the Series S being so relatively cheap. they're absolutely selling the digital PS5 at a loss.
 

MCBanjoMike

Sudden chomper
(He/him)
Damn, I'm impessed, Sony is going for the jugular. I bet the wanted to price it higher but couldn't give up that much ground to Microsoft.
 
Maybe the trailer is just misleading but...
Everything in that trailer looked really early, and I can't imagine there's actually much of the game yet. Knowing how FF development schedules go, I'd be surprised if this dropped by 2022, and that would be generous of me. A lot of things can change between a teaser trailer now and when the game comes out. I think the lack of focus on any female characters is notable, but I also don't think it's particularly meaningful at this point in time either.

I think the main point of the trailer was to impress on the audience that 1) FF16 is happening, 2) it's gonna be a proper fantasy setting, and 3) hold onto your butts, FF14 fans
 

PS Plus subscribers get a curated collection of notable PS4 games to download and play on the PS5 at launch, so I bet that's nice for anyone who skipped last gen and was curious about this one.
 

Sarge

hardcore retro gamin'
Depends on how much old stock they have left, and whether they think they need to clear it out, I suppose. I don't know if it will be like the Wii U, where Nintendo was content to let it die and not even price it down in the face of the Switch... but I'm guessing Nintendo didn't have that many units to sell through at that point, and Sony is sitting on one of their most successful systems. So... no idea?
 

Sarge

hardcore retro gamin'
Games probably needed to go to $70 quite a while ago. They've been trying to cover those costs via DLC and microtransactions for a while now.
 

Patrick

Magic-User
(He/Him)
It's about time! Games have been under priced for a long time, and developers have been trying to make up for it with DLC and all kinds of crappy business practices. Honestly priced games is an upgrade.
 

ASandoval

Old Man Gamer
(he/him)
It's about time! Games have been under priced for a long time, and developers have been trying to make up for it with DLC and all kinds of crappy business practices. Honestly priced games is an upgrade.

Still needs to be higher, honestly. We're still going to see other monetizations models to offset costs even once 70 becomes the norm, else we're going to shift completely to a stream service model.
 

Becksworth

Aging Hipster Dragon Dad
I don’t know, if the paid DLC and Microtransactions actually went away as a result of games being $70 it would be tolerable...
 

Sarge

hardcore retro gamin'
I can't remember if PS1 games sold at $40 or $50, typically, but if the former, inflation-adjusted according to the calculator I used would make it around $68 now (from 1995), and $50 would bump that to $85. And it's not like most games have gotten cheaper to make during that time.
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
A lot of SNES games were $60. Selling new games at $60 in 2020 is wild.
Games back then were also, you know, usually finished and didn’t need huge day one patches. They also came on cartridges and later discs in packages with manuals and sometimes neat pack-ins. The increase to 70 bucks and winnowing away physical media even more isn’t going to stop bad business practices and pass the savings on to us. I’m the poor developers making the games won’t magically be paid good wages and get humane working conditions, either.
 

ASandoval

Old Man Gamer
(he/him)
Games back then were also, you know, usually finished and didn’t need huge day one patches. They also came on cartridges and later discs in packages with manuals and sometimes neat pack-ins. The increase to 70 bucks and winnowing away physical media even more isn’t going to stop bad business practices and pass the savings on to us. I’m the poor developers making the games won’t magically be paid good wages and get humane working conditions, either.

Games also didn't have multi-billion dollar budgets either. Wages/labor treatment are a separate issue other than that the added cost of game development should be going to said wages.
 

4-So

Spicy
I don't know how games should or shouldn't be priced but in the context of SNES games, I distinctly remember paying $89.99 at KB Toys for Final Fantasy 3 and $74.99 for Chrono Trigger at Wal-Mart.

Everything old is new again.
 

upupdowndown

REVOLUTION GRRR STYLE NOW
(he / him / his)
I mean, Phantasy Star IV cost 99.99 when it first came out - we had a lot of price variance for cartridge based games depending on the chips that were in the cartridges
 
Games back then were also, you know, usually finished and didn’t need huge day one patches.
The really good ones were, sure. But those were in the minority. Most games back then were buggy shovelware and definitely would have given us day one patches had the hardware permitted it. Even plenty of good games came with tons of bugs and were incomplete. Imagine getting a day one patch for Suikoden II so that the script wasn't filled with typos, the battle music actually played, and you couldn't just push gates around that played an important role in guiding the plot. Or imagine getting to play a fully realized Disk 2 of Xenogears as a DLC campaign instead of watching Shinji give his confessional during Human Instrumentality.

I do think that having DLC/patches as an option has encouraged more game studios to use it as a crutch, but the past definitely wasn't some magical place where games were free of bugs.
 

4-So

Spicy
Tried to preorder a PS5 tonight. No dice. Walmart and Target and Gamestop were snatched up fast (except for those awful bundles at the latter, but eventually those too), and Best Buy's website shit the bed hard for hours and now they're all listed as "Coming Soon". Doesn't look like pre-orders went live on Amazon yet.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
Definitely getting a PS5, but it doesn't have to be right at launch since the only game I actually want is a remaster of a game I already played. I'd probably enjoy popping in some of my PS4 games to check out how much difference an SSD makes, but, eh.
 
Tried to preorder a PS5 tonight. No dice. Walmart and Target and Gamestop were snatched up fast (except for those awful bundles at the latter, but eventually those too), and Best Buy's website shit the bed hard for hours and now they're all listed as "Coming Soon". Doesn't look like pre-orders went live on Amazon yet.
Same. On several websites I was able to get as far as adding it to my cart and going through the checkout process, but always got the shaft when it came to finalizing my order. I want one at launch, but will probably have to settle for getting one later.
 

4-So

Spicy
I was just able to preorder on Amazon, if someone is still looking to get one tonight. Supposedly, Best Buy's page will go "live" again at midnight but that's just conjecture from the folks at CAG. https://amzn.to/3msqZDO
 

Zef

Find Your Reason
(He/Him)
FINALLY was able to watch the presentation that ran during work hours. Honestly? Definitely not getting a PS5 anywhere near launch, but I AM very interested in Resident Evil: Shyamalan's The Village, Spider-Miles, Horizon Zero-Two, whatever that astronaut game from the end reel was that literally ripped a scene straight out of Gravity, and, yes, FF16.

I was hoping the PS Plus Collection would include the Royal edition of Persona 5 so I didn't have to get it separately, but eh, free Dad Of Boy is a neat perk. But the make-or-break for me will be the backwards-compatibility-as in, I want to be able to either pop in my current PS4 discs, or re-download them from my PSN account, install, and start playing right away. I still have my PS3 and Xbox 360 hooked up and I literally have no more room to add an extra console so if I can put the PS4 in storage that'll clinch it.

(Also I don't have a PS4 Pro so holy shit I can only imagine what a PS5 can do to Ghost of Tsushima I'll basically take another five thousand photos.)
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
But the make-or-break for me will be the backwards-compatibility-as in, I want to be able to either pop in my current PS4 discs, or re-download them from my PSN account, install, and start playing right away.

I have most (?) of the answers for this. For disc PS4 games:

Upgrade may be offered at no additional cost or for a fee and may be available for a limited time. If players have a PS4™ game on Blu-ray™ Disc, they will need to insert the PS4 game disc to see the upgrade path, download the PS5 version and keep the PS4™ game disc inserted each time they play the PS5™ version of the game. To upgrade eligible PS4 disc titles to digital PS5 versions, players need a PS5™ console with a disc drive.

Although, reading that now, it only covers the case where the PS4 game has a PS5 version too and you're "upgrading" the PS4 game to the PS5 version. Everything else right now from official Sony sources simply refers to the PS5 having "backwards compatability" and the assumption is that you can either pop in the disc or redownload it from your PSN account.
 

4-So

Spicy
Finally got a Best Buy pre-order in. I've been dicking around with their dumbass site for six hours now. Going to keep the Amazon pre-order, just in case Best Buy decides to cancel the order for whatever reason. Otherwise, I'll cancel Amazon in a month or so. Gotta get them Best Buy Funbux.

Now I can fade into sleep trying to figure out which game to pick up at launch.
 
I keep hoping Square-Enix will bring Sakaguchi back into the fold but his name wasn't on the FFXVI trailer.
 
RE: 70 dollars... Many games could stand to cost more, but, on the other hand, if game development + marketing is currently being "overinvested relative to return", then increasing the return doesn't prevent overinvestment all over again. I guess they still could stand to cost more, and perhaps others could stand to cost less.

It also strikes me that game budgets can vary by several orders of magnitude, but obviously indie games aren't being sold as a percent of a percent the cost of other games. Put another way, you don't see AAA games sold at 1,000 dollars.

If I wanted to pass personal judgement it would be something like this:

If it's possible to invest a million dollars into certain production values known to generate a million and one dollars in additional sales, and if the biggest studios are taking these investments, then the industry shouldn't act surprised when, over time, growth at the top is both massive in size and out of proportion.

The "massive in size" part is certainly true, but I'm not actually sure if 60 dollar games are less profitable now than 60 dollar games a decade ago, or 50 dollar games 15 years ago, or 40-to-99 dollar games 25 years ago. They might even be more profitable.

I think what's going on is that most of the growth into game budgets has had diminishing returns for a very long time, but this is more than offset by fewer and fewer companies being able to shoulder that cost. So you have all these games made from the top of the budget scale, and they have all these identifiable marks of being so expensive to make (graphics, motion capture, cutscenes, involved narratives, world size, number of unique assests, trailers, marketing campaigns, IPs with rich legacies). The barrier to entry of making your own game with these identifiable marks is very high, which acts like a moat against new entrants compared to other places in the market. Existing entrants benefit by being more profitable.

I also think that what the customer is actually receiving in value for their money is not wholly defined by these identifiable markers or anything else on the disc. People are buying, in part, a slice of the cultural landscape. That is, part of the reason we are interested in certain games is because we perceive that other people are interested in it. This is a facet of more general human psychology: reward seeking is influenced by social cues, and games are heavily involved with our dopamine system motivating us to pursue (fictional) rewards. The point is that what the customer assigns a dollar value to is, in at least in this part, something that cannot be infinitely scaled up. Put philosophically, there is more to prices than what shows up on 10-K report.

To explain what I mean, imagine instead if the value assigned to a game was only determined by these social aspects. Since a game can't occupy more than 100% of the collective attention/interest of gaming culture, the dollar value of a game can't rise indefinitely no matter how unprofitable you were willing to make the game development budget. Yet, without this requisite knowledge, it would create an appearance to some onlookers that the current prices would "need" to be increased.

Whatever. It's kind of funny to think how much attention we give this subject (on forums, gaming articles, podcasts, youtube, etc etc) when I'm sure these companies did tons of marketing research -- both for the price increase right now and for all the years that prices did not increase.
 
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