You must hate comic books then.

My complaint about user bases is that the budgets are expanding faster then the user base can account for, the move from cartridge to discs mitigated that, and that is how we had game prices come down for a generation or two, but current development needs already removed that advantage. Keeping the same demographic…

Seems you are not accounting for the massive increase in team sizes, like I said license cost and general inflation is a factor, but the expanding team sizes is the main reason of the rise in game making. We have games selling more now than ever, in the past a million games sold was a huge deal for any company, now…

Last couple of games have them and they are getting progressively worse.

Nice read, but I don’t think (you can correct me if I’m wrong) that inflation and rising costs of licences accounts for most of the rising cost of making games. We have more licenses in the present, but in the past games had in house engines with all that entails, that is why there was a move towards using licensed…

Compare NFS and Forza to earlier games in their series, the further back you go, the less grinding they had.

If demand set budgets, you wouldn’t have Squarenix complaining about Tomb Raider reboot sales. I’d say that the racing towards the ceiling of graphical fidelity is what sets budgets.

Then they should just sell complete versions and whale hunting versions of games, I will gladly pay extra for a new game if I can get a guarantee that it’s a complete and proper (not tuned to grind in order to encourage microtransaction) experience.

Honestly an SNES rom wrapped in an emulator with basic emulation filter options would have been cheaper and way better IF they have done that before the mobile version. But porting to mobile and then to PC is just garbage, you would think that doing the PC and mobile version simultaneously (as in “port” to pc/ wrap in…

Because effort = spending money.

Thinks back to the glory days of the PC expansion packs.

Hopefully they will eventually get the message that if they are upfront and fair with the price and the content, they will get better numbers. For example I tend to buy new games from companies I trust to give me a good product and wait for the GOTY/massive sale or never get games from WB, EA, Ubisoft, Activision,…

Then they will learn that they can release with microtransactions, get whale dollars and then remove them and have other people buy it. Not sure that is the right message to send.

Good, next time you cross a red light, speed or jay-walk, get ready for a citizens arrest, and by arrest I mean execution, because apparently court of law doesn’t apply in your world.

Using rising development costs as a way to justify DLC and microtransactions and accusing consumers of entitlement isn’t really a valid argument since it’s the developers and publishers that determine the budgets and decide how much to spend on what and how much to charge for it (for example in most other countries…

My issue with that sort of extra content is that it’s increasingly obvious that 15 years ago it would have indeed been part of the initial release more often than content cut for other reasons. Splatoon, Day 0DLC, pre-order crap, Season pass that starts getting delivered in a month, heck just DLC with dates annouced…

I’ll try to reply to all your comments on this single post.

Progress sometimes seems to be about 2 steps forward, one step back. When that step back is anti consumer (incomplete games on the physical media that will outlast servers, the pseudo project 10 Dollar that Revelations 2 and Bayonetta 1 have on the switch) I am definitely against it.

Zelda is fine and Mario Kart is a great way to extend a game with DLC (half the amount of tracks per half the price is a good deal), I don’t dislike ALL DLC, but I definitely dislike almost ALL of it thanks to the abuse by developers and publishers.

I am a software developer, not a game developer since I don’t like crunching, but a software developer nonetheless.