this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We can't make less money! I promised Susan a new yacht^[Obviously with two heliports, olympic swimming pool, on-board beer brewery, bowling alley, crew of 20, escort yacht for utilities - just the bare necessities, nothing fancy.] for her name day!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Meanwhile I'm still enjoying Schedule I, which is made by a single dev and has "low quality" graphics by choice. We don't need AAA games left and right; we need good, fun ones with strong foundations. Games that don't demand paid DLC, or season passes, or fucking Shark Cards.

I truly understand that Rockstar is under a lot of pressure as the creator/publisher of GTA. But not every company/developer needs to be like them.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

I will wait until GTA 6 has been out a few years lol. I have a long enough backlog already. Still haven't started Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Forbidden West, and about 30 other games I mean to play. Patient gaming is the best way

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

And it's an impossible equation for most Americans to pay more. Especially if things continue to downward spiral.

Where's my eye patch?

[–] [email protected] 76 points 2 days ago (2 children)

People expect games that are ever more ambitious

Nono, people expect Good games, that doesn't have anything to do with ambition.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

People praise expedition 33, that game might as well be an xbox 360 game and it people would still absolutely love it.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 2 days ago

What a bold-faced clearly obvious motherfucking lie.

Rockstar has released only 2 full games in the past 13 years because everything they’ve done since then has been funded by microtransactions. The price of entry is negligible to them when whales pay for multiple copies of the game every fuckin month.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago (1 children)

According to SEC filings, Take Two Interactive studio made 2.241 Billion USD profit in 2024.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Did they release anything of note in 2024? Presumably the annual slog2k sports.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Yes, in fact the report specifically mentions that NBA 2k24 outperformed expectations. Other than that they're probably earning passively off of older titles and GTA V microtransactions.

[–] [email protected] 100 points 2 days ago (3 children)

That’s such bullshit. GTA5 has been a money printing machine. They would have been profitable if the cost started and stayed at $20.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I can't find the numbers online but they probably could've given GTA5 away for free and made a profit.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They did give it away for free and make a profit

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

They did both, and it could fund the next 5 GTA games for 500 years and still turn a profit if they never took another cent. Whatever this "journalism" is, delete it, block it, and forget about it. They are the enemy.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago (10 children)

Maybe stop spending nigh decades and nigh billions of dollars designing these enormous catch all games that are supposed to appeal to everyone?

I Don't want to spend 90 dollars on a game that has 400 different things to do, 200 of which I enjoy.

I'd rather give Sandfall 50 bucks for a lovingly crafted, focused game that's actually, you know, good.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I've been saying it for the last decade, there's no real "games are too expensive to make" problem. There's only studios choosing the "go big or go home" death spiral where they inflate the budget and need a hit to stay afloat. But then after every hit the budget grows even bigger requiring an even bigger hit until eventually they're going to flop and the studio goes under. They could just not do that and have a sustainable business. And I get that it's not only the game developers fault. Part of the blame falls on the publishers who most likely force budgets to balloon so they could make more money (if the game is a success). But when I say they could just not do that I mean both the developer and publisher. Both of them should be smarter than that.

But clearly even with all the major flops it has been a successful strategy, because they've been at it since at least mid 2000s. It's only in the recent years where it's really starting to strain all the AAA publishers as the budgets have grown too big even for them. These price increases are an outcome of this budget ballooning. They're feeling their bottom line taking a hit so they increase the price to mitigate the risk.

Personally I said fuck them, let it crash and let's get more studios like Sandfall, who made an exceptional games for a reasonable price.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

on top of all that; big money, be it profits or revenue, attracts parasites that start ruining the company from the inside. One can feel it on many games that developers wanted to do good but were prevented from doing so because of executives and middle management.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

Not only that, they produced a game with no major flaws with a tiny (comparable to these mega studios) team AND NO COMPROMISES.

“Man, this game is great but the music is meh” - not at Sandfall.

“Wow, I love the combat but the graphics are dated” - nope, every model is so lovingly crafted they added haircuts and outfits as secret loot

“The combat is the only weak point in this gorgeous, story driven game” not on expedition 33 it ain’t!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

If they don’t spend enough money to differentiate themselves then they risk being drowned in a sea of indie games.

Every year the number and quality of indie games increases. The ferocity of competition makes it extremely hard to get anyone to play your game, let alone survive as a developer. This raises the bar on quality to a ridiculous degree.

Take any AAA game from the 1990s. Today that’s a single person project which can’t even compete with the most basic of indie games out there. To actually make money and support yourself as an indie developer is ridiculously hard!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

Came here to say this. Stop trying the build the whole universe in a game.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The company made over 5 billion revenue and spent over 2 billion cost of operating in 2024, I don't think this has anything to do with affordability.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Look, the CEOs already have the fifth cheapest yacht chef available on their payroll, what are they supposed to do? Source the caviar themselves?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 days ago (1 children)

GTA 6 is just going to be client app to a universe of micro transactions. They should probably just give it away free.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

I don't even wanna know how much money they made or make with shark cards. Because of the dumbasses who buy that, they know exactly what people are willing to spend.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 2 days ago (4 children)

He says that like big budget studios are barely scraping by. Piss off. AAA games are massively profitable. What he really means is that endless growth is the most important thing for investors/shareholders and that we should all just shut up and accept it.

They could get the regular £50 from me for the game, but their greed means they'll get £0. I'll just pirate it (if/when it releases on PC). And I'm sure there will be a lot of people with the same mindset.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Some AAA games are massively profitable. If you want to see which ones weren't, look at the studios that got shut down or went through massive layoffs in the past few years. But if they're not selling that many copies at $60, the thought that seemingly never crosses their minds is to stop spending $200M on a single project that's make or break for the studio.

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 2 days ago

Absolutely no way Take-Two can afford anything less than $5B in profit every year. The stock market was a mistake.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

If you really want me to pay $100 for a game, you gotta raise the bar to the fuckin stratosphere compared to what we're getting now.

And get me a damn raise.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 days ago (3 children)

And also knock it off with the fucking microtransactions and shit. I wouldn't mind games costing something appropriate for inflation if we were getting complete, high quality games without the expectation that we spend even more money afterwards. As it stands, they're complaining about the low cost of games while also milking players for every penny they can on top of the purchase price. Fuck these guys.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 days ago

Shame on Harvey Randall for platforming executive bullshit:

The problem, he puts it, is inflation. Which is an unerringly boring but also correct answer: "We live in contrasting times, where inflation is real and significant, but people expect games that are ever more ambitious and therefore expensive to develop to cost the same. It’s an impossible equation."

They're not responding to the expectations of the people; they're responding to the expectations of their investors.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago

Heard the same crap when they moved from 60 to 70 just a few years back.

Heard how video game development is too expensive while publishers posted record profits.

Heard all about how the same 50 dollar game "back in the day"would cost hundreds now, disregarding how gaming was so much more niche back then too.

Heard the same crap about how these "full price games" would lessen the need for egregious microtransaction

This will again, do nothing to lessen any of that, just push more record profits as gamers won't be able to resist rewarding the gaming industry for their bad behavior.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Look. I think all AAA companies should do $120 base price for all games. Piracy would have such a boom. Better platforms. many more seeders and good reviews and more freaks hell bent on cracking DRM.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago

ROFL the more games go $80 to 90 dollars for a base game version, the more I wait for sales. 70 dollars was bad enough in my opinion, but this greed fueled jump is going to put off more potential buyers than it will bring in. It's my genuine hope that this blows up in their face and will force them to price games reasonably again. Perhaps if the money they made in sales wasn't mostly funneled into their overpaid CEOs and shareholders, perhaps they'd have more money to cover development costs and keep game prices stable. Sounds like a personal problem to me.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago

Yeah? I’ll buy it when it’s on sale for $35 and they’ll profit, so it’s all good. Patience is a virtue and all that.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 days ago

They'll charge whatever they think people will pay, and I'm pretty confident that many millions of people will fork over the $80 - $90 at launch. Prices come down when people stop buying.

[–] Skyline969 11 points 2 days ago

Go ahead. I’m back to piracy where needed and patient gaming where possible. These clowns played themselves. AAA games are unreasonable nowadays.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

if rockstar really wanted to win over all gamers, even the ones not planning to play gta, they announce base gta 6 at 50. and then have the 'early/access-10 min early-uber shark complete edition with a unique purple skin at 100 or whatever the fuck they think the whole things worth.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Eh, this game was never in the cards for me anyway. I decided years ago to never give Rockstar another dime when they didn't release any single player DLC for GTA5. Fuck that noise.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Wut? We're mad now about not getting DLC? GTA V was a great game that's still a blast today. I spent many evenings in front of my PS3 playing the single player for years, never touched GTA: O once and never felt the need to and still believe I got my $60 back in 2013 out of it.

Similar story with RDR 2. Unless GTA 6 is a huge step down from both those games in single-player playability (I'll wait for reviews obv), I'm not going to lose much sleep over spending $20 more than I spent 13 years ago for the previous game.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Lmao who would believe that gta 6 is not going to make an absolute bank? They could give it away for free and still make more money that they could spend.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

As of a year ago, GTA 5 had made over $9,000,000,000.

That's a billion with a B.

Mostly off micro transactions to children.

They don't need to charge $90, but if people will pay it, they'll charge it.

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