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potatomonster12346 t1_jaekm1t wrote

Reply to comment by Hanzo_The_Ninja in Why are games so expensive nowdays? by PythonEntusiast

While i agree that the purchasing power of the average person has deminished, i disagree that game prices hardly increased. Many games in the triple A industry have hidden additional costs. Microtransactions, DLC, Pre order bonus etc.

For example Tekken 7. To get every character in the game and all DLC, you have to pay 120 dollar. That's long after the release of the game. If you bought it seperatly, you would have paid a lot more (every season pass is around 25 dollars on release, except the final one which costs 15). Therefore you would have paid 60 for the game and 115 for season passes which doesn't include extra stuff like frame data, Tekken bowling etc.175 dollar to get all characters. That's just one example of many.

Games have become much more expensive. You can get it cheaper by avoiding such things and only buy the "basic" versions and/or ignore microtransactions. But that's not the full games price. Hence, full game prices are a lot more expensive than before. Most just don't notice it.

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Hanzo_The_Ninja t1_jaeoyt4 wrote

> For example Tekken 7. To get every character in the game and all DLC, you have to pay 120 dollar.

That's a $20 increase from the $49.99 price of Tekken 1 on the PS1, released in 1994, once adjusted for inflation. And Tekken 7 allegedly cost 50 million yen, or $370K USD, per stage, which is probably more than the entire budget for Tekken 1, even after adjusting for inflation. If anything, the Tekken example illustrates how the increasing number of sales over the past few decades have subsidized significant increases in development costs.

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IncognitoSlug123 t1_jaemqd6 wrote

That isn't that big an increase. Games have been 50-60 for decades, and expansions were always expensive when they required their own disks and packaging. You did usually get more from them (but not always).

I really dislike the predatory micro transactions, but I still don't think prices have caught up with when I bought Metroid for $30 in 1980's money.

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