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Game prices are going to increase anyway.

Last year, EA made over a billion dollars in profits. If they aren't using that money to improve the working conditions of developers, what makes you think the solution is to give them more money?



When you look at the prices of the games themselves, they're fairly cheap today. For the last couple console generations, the cost of a new AAA game has been consistently around $60. A NES game 30 years ago could cost $50, but when you take into account inflation that's about $100 in today's money. Companies like EA seem to make up for that by selling more copies of games, having deluxe editions, and jamming in microtransactions.


Only the most bare-bones version of a AAA quality title will cost you $60; the absolute minimum of content which could still be called a game. To get access to all of the content (frequently including story content), you're looking at a $100 starting point ($70-$90 for the "deluxe" edition, $30 for a "season pass"), going ever-upwards with the more in-game content and physical ephemera you want.

And that doesn't include any in-game transactions.


>Only the most bare-bones version of a AAA quality title will cost you $60; the absolute minimum of content which could still be called a game

That's fairly disingenuous - the last game I bought at full price was Spiderman. A quick Google says the the average user on the default difficulty clears the story in about 20 hours.

Sper metroid came out in 1994 (25 years ago), and the same quick search says that most people will clear it in 8 hours or so.

Single player games today are also regularly putting out free balance patches (nioh), large free content updates(Gran Turismo) and smaller chunks of paid content that rival the size of other games for very reasonable amounts (Witcher 3).


The production value behind those "bare bones" titles is still magnitudes larger than what you had back then, while the "play time" is at least comparable.

Statistics show that most people never finish the games anyway (I certainly don't) so it's only fair that those people who must really play everything pay extra.




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