Gaming Please stop moaning about the price of games.

The original Crysis was a PC exclusive when it was first released. If anything your experience isn't an indicator of how things have failed to improve, rather how much consoles have held back graphics. To get a feel for how things have improved you would need to compare something that was released as cross platform then to something that is cross platform now. That way you account for console related gimping of game graphics.

 

If graphics have been held back then logically they have failed to improve much. The only thing is when we do get an improvement the cost on the hardware is just ridiculous. Poor optimization much?

I mean FFS we had Batman. That's how bad it's got (and plain to see how they are rinsing PC owners as much as they can now).

I'm not paying console prices for PC games. Especially when they are crap because they are console games in disguise (heavily gimped, pigging on VRAM and so on). Why on earth would I want to pay £50 for something that has the same graphics only usually doesn't work and needs heavy patching. Why would I not just buy the console if that's how it is?

I had to wait absolutely ages for Fallout 4 to -

1. Work.
2. Support Crossfire so I could get the most out of my 4k monitor.

And they wanted console money for that. Mind you, I have played it at 1080p and it wasn't a pleasant experience. It looked absolutely tragic at 1080p. I could only about stomach it once I hit 1440p (Nvidia DSR Cheesecake).

As I said before I am jaded, and that's putting it really really lightly. To save my sanity I have decided to just return to old games.

Most have resorted to playing Indie games that mostly have crap graphics. But I don't understand why I would pay £17/£20+ for a game that lasts a mere couple of hours when I could play, for example, Mario 64 for many hours for free.

When I got back into PC gaming (and I did it rather heavily) I expected things to progress. But for years I fully understood that the 360 and PS3 were holding back graphics and now that we have the new consoles they are still holding back graphics. Only now I am expected to pay £50 for a broken game, when I could get the same broken game for around £27 before.

It's taking the pee. Especially when I've spent over £2500 on graphics cards over the past 18 months and seen absolutely nothing to warrant it. Well, apart from the very odd title (Crysis 3 finally looked better than Crysis 2 which didn't look that much better than Crysis it just looked cooler because it was in NYC).

I think this The Division was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. Especially after buying BLOPS III and finding out that 4gb of HBM wasn't enough to make the game look, well, crap so I had to put up with it looking erm, "crapper".

And all because the lady loves Milk Tray, I mean, because devs were given around 6gb of VRAM so they decided to stuff the lot full of poo bloated textures.

If we were seeing dedicated PC games like Crysis I would quite happily hand over £50 for them.

 

No that's not correct. Each generation of console does hold back PC graphics, but there is still improvement with each generation.

 

I remember being told that console hardware is sold at a loss (or at cost) and they made money back on the games, because you're locked in. Unless it was urban myth.

They ramped up the price of one or two AAA titles, like GTA: Medal of Call of Duty 17, and people still paid the price. Paving the way for every bugger to follow suit.

Or maybe it's because just about everything is a console port nowadays.

My two favourite games of the past few years:

FTL: Faster than light £6

Dishonored £30

I would've happily paid console prices for either of them in hindsight. Both are well made, and have bags of replay value. Dishonored's campaign isn't done and dusted in 3 hrs like modern shooter titles who just want to sell you a map pack. FTL is designed to be over in a couple of hours, but I have 300+ hours logged on it.

Just about every other big title I've played in recent years serves up pretty graphics while you grind/craft your way to another meaningless achievement/marginally improved item - an in-game brake designed to stop you shooting through the campaign in a fraction of the time.

TL;DR

My complaint isn't about the price, but the value. Something that is sorely lacking in many big games.

 

A low price might suggest great value, but in reality a low price mostly means low quality.

 

There is? Just my unsubstantiated opinion but it seems like current gen console graphics have remained relatively similar as they now try to hit 920p/1080p instead of the old 720p, it seems resolutions have gone up but the other graphics stuff hasn't changed much.

 

IIRC at first most consoles are sold at a loss with the main revenue coming from licensing. IE - Sony say "You want to release games on our console? you pay a fee per game". IIRC that fee used to make up the difference between a PC game and a console game. Microsoft tried charging that fee on Windows but for one reason or another (mostly legal) they could not, hence the Xbox was born. On that they could charge a fee - mmm, lovely money.

AFAIK nothing has changed at all, so I don't understand why PC games cost as much as console games (Oh OK I do, sheer greed).

As I have said I would not mind paying more if more meant more. IE - if they actually worked out of the box first time. Devs know what hardware is available out there so why don't they suppport it? Crossfire and SLI have been around since the dinosaurs yet still they are being overlooked.

Maybe now that they are charging that £23 extra all of that support should be a given, only it isn't, because the state of gaming on a PC is no better than it has ever been. Games still come out buggy and broken and we still have to wait for patches and all kinds of other support, so that "license fee" they have saved is not being spent on giving a damn.

Technically the words "console port" are not true. Games are not ported. Games are written in chunks, then at the end they are compiled and put together as an installer/exe. They require things to be done in order to get them to work with a PC and some (me) would argue that they are not doing enough.

Just lately (and I mean pretty recently, say, the last four months) every PC game released (and I know 'cause I've bought pretty much all of the ones that appealed to me) has been £40 at the least. It's become so expensive that I have stooped to using dodgy code sites and have been pleased when I find the game at £30. However, as I said before for years that same game came boxed with media for £25-£30 tops. IIRC Fallout 3 was £30.

And I can't for the life of me understand why we have had this quite recent price hike. Games still look pretty much the same as they did before the price increase, and they certainly don't work any better than they did before the price increase, and Microsoft certainly have not found a way to bend the law that I am aware of so there is no explanation AT ALL other than sheer outright greed.

Like PC gaming wasn't bloody expensive enough due to the massively over priced hardware that we are sold.

If the extra cost involved extra work and extra support I would very happily pay more for it. But it doesn't. Fallout 4 launched and then went into Beta, FFS. So they launched a broken game, then started working on it, releasing a Beta version for people to use.

Just Cause 3 - mess. Doesn't support Crossfire and never will apparently, yet I'm supposed to pay (checks his Steam) £39.99 for it. That's pretty much console prices.

Then of course there's the recent pop up of companies wanting money for games that are not even working yet, or far from finished.

It all really takes the piss.

 

Is that because you are comparing end of life games from one generation to start of life games from the next? It takes time before console graphics become absolutely maxed.

 

As a PC gamer I'll always hold the view that if a PC game is priced above £30 then it's over priced, but as a whole I think PC gaming has never been cheaper, I would even say some games are under sold.

 

Agreed - well said. A round of drinks in a bar is normally £20 or so. £40 for a game is nothing compared to this.

 

The inflation argument is compelling but flawed. You see, I don't need a reference, I'm old enough to remember, in 1987, top-tier games costing £10. According to the Bank of England's inflation calculator that's 26.43 in today's money.

Yes, the complexity of games have scaled up but all the economies surrounding it have scaled too - There are more people to sell to much more easily across multiple markets, not to mention the improved tools, standard game engines, etc.

As mentioned, today Battlefront costs £95 yet the most played game in my steam library is Dota 2, which I've never paid a penny towards.

The industry is still in flux from the paradigm shift of digital distribution. A mix of it's democratic beginnings and it's autocratic recent history. There is no normative price for games right now, which leads me to the pun I've wanted to use since starting to write this...

Rick Lane? Rick Bait more like....hurr hurr hurr

 

Yes this is a good point, its not enough to consider inflation in isolation when considering price or value now compared to the past.

 

No one is forced to buy a game. So don't buy it. Willingness to buy sends a pricing signal.

 

Like any product, games will only sell for what people will pay for them. I really don't understand any of the bitching...if it's not worth it to you, simply don't buy it. Rare is the game that doesn't drop in price by 50% (even if only during flash sales) within six months or less and then you can pick it up at a price you can stomach.

I don't subscribe to the idea that publishers are being 'greedy'... we're talking about games, not essential items. We're not talking about energy, water or oxygen. A lot of the complaining comes across as entitlement IMHO.

 

Come on people - Battlefront is not £95. Even with all the DLC. It's also damned fun if you're into the films and are happy playing online.

I've casually played the base game I bought for 25hrs so far;£35/25 = same value I got back in 1995 thanks very much.

 

Don't like launch price?

Buy it when it's on sale.

Job ****in' done.

 

It seems to me that if you want the best value from a game, in terms of hours per pound, go for motor racing games or, my favourite, open world RPGs. Many Elder Scrolls players get thousands of hours of enjoyment out of the games. I don't play as much as some but, have well over 1000 hours of playing from Skyrim.

 

The 3 biggest games by numbers are league of legends DOTA 2 and minecraft for PC gaming. They are the big 3. 2 are free and minecraft is dirt cheap.

For every massive success there is a massive failure Batman for example on PC.

The best PC games this last few years have been RPGs or Kickstarter games like Elite Dangerous and Assetto Corsa. Both cost me less than $50 on Kickstarter for complete editions.

 

There have been games where I've paid the full cost recently. Two examples that come to mind are Rise of the Tomb Raider for the PC and Fallout 4. I think I got my money's worth from both to be pretty honest and my wife bought the season passes for both too.

There's times where I absolutely won't buy a game if I feel it's overpriced. I'll wait until the price drops or wait for a sale, perhaps due to me either not having enough time to play it then, or because I'm not 100% sure how much I'm likely to enjoy the game.

I remember buying Sonic 2 for the Sega Mega Drive for about £25 when it came out. I am absolutely certain that I bought Tales from the Borderlands when it came out for roughly the same price. That was about 24 year ago. I'll probably get about the same play time out of them too.

 

Firstly, disliked this article - tone of the author on the first page particularly sucked.

Generally speaking, I don't buy a PC game if it costs more than £5, so I don't really care what price they release at - I can wait. In contrast, I've bought several full price Wii U games. I consider my console games more of a collection, whereas my Steam games are a long list of digital files I've paid for the right to have access to - I just don't have the same emotional (and therefore financial) attachment. PC's blessing - access to many years worth of back catalogue - is also its curse - PC gaming market is completely over-saturated - I don't need to ever consider paying £20+ for a PC game because I've got 200 games on Steam that cost me a fraction of full price.

On the issue of stagnation, I was looking at a bit-tech user's video of GTA5 the other day. It was completely unremarkable to me, from a casual watch there was no obvious improvement over what I could remember from GTA4. Whereas the jump from GTA3 to GTA4 was massive IMO. However much people think PS3/360 held back graphics, the graphics this generation are the most disappointing. I've not seen anything on PC, PS4 or XBone that has made me think I need to upgrade my GPU or get one of those consoles to indulge. Instead I've grown my Wii/U and PS3 collections. I'm very much about the balance between gameplay and graphics, and this latest generation really only has Witcher 3 as an example of something a cut above what's been about for years.