I had the somewhat surreal experience of balking at biomutant's asking price just now. It's $60. I couldn't tell you why that's a high asking price to me, I think I just expect the things which interest me these days to not have AAA pricetags.

although tbf, $60 is too high an asking price anyway, and always has been. Games are not worth $60 when the company selling them has a wide install base. You can damn well make up your dev costs without price-gouging the life out of your customers.

but that's not why I recoiled.

I think it's because it looks like an indie game, some weird experiment that no AAA publisher would touch, or at least, would see as a side-income, and I'm used to those being $40 at best.

$40 is a reasonable ask btw, especially if you have marketing power.

but it makes me ask

...what are game prices gonna be like in a few years?

I mostly play indie games because indies make what I'm interested in.

but I mostly BUY indie games because I can afford them.

if it starts being ok to charge $60, or even normal for $40, I'll be reliant on steam sales.

which... games don't get good discounts in those until YEARS after launch, so I'd have to treat indie games like I treated 6th gen console games.

only buy the ones I really want, probably 1 game every year, and that'll mean skipping anything that isn't an instant sell.

I think the really shitty part of this is that, this isn't me being stingy and thinking indie work is worth less than AAA. (again, AAA is overpriced.)

this is me saying I can't afford games if a fair asking price is consistently $40-$50 as opposed to $15-$20.

and this is me, I guess, admitting that games are hard to afford. Being about to be a gamer who follows AAA today is a huge amount of privilege. Games have to be your main hobby, or you only need to like 1-2 games, for that to be the case.

now take someone like me...

my childhood was spent digging in bargain bins for games 2 generations behind, and later, learning to emulate and pirate what I could not afford.

I learned to use kega fusion when I was 15 and play old sega games because I COULD NOT afford a modern console or games.

this was back when $60 was the new normal asking price.

and I guess to get a bit crass about it, indie games do actually sell to the ghetto a bit.

because ghetto people can't exactly afford what AAA considers "fair" today.

and guess where I grew up LUL.

I think what sucks about this is that indies probably should sell what they make for more, because their install base is smaller and they almost never make up dev costs.

like, morally, that's what I think, I doubt I'd put up much of a fight about it if that actually happened.

because it's not really *about* getting mad that some guy sells a thing worth $15 to me for $25.

I just don't... buy that thing, I wait for a sale.

it's nothing personal to that guy.

this is more thoughts on how expensive gaming is at all really, and sometimes I notice it.

like with a game asking $60, making me think about what a "fair" price for games is for me.

my answer is "what I can afford" which is... not $60 lul.

I'm stressing out rn because I want tetris effect at launch but know it'll be a HUGE chunk of my money.

and that I have found ways to afford gaming when I grew up in a poor family is a miracle, and also lucky on my part.

like, I have the kind of PC I have mostly through charity of others and luck. No joke. Couldn't afford it otherwise. It's not a mundane thing to me.

so it's more that an indie's idea of a fair asking price would, rightly, be "what makes up my dev costs"

and I do feel like a lot of them probably undercharge that, maybe because they know a lot of people like me.

or maybe they don't think their work is worth more which is sad.

anyway I really wish the hobby I picked up as a kid was something within my income bracket and not a thing I need to backend to enjoy lol.

but I guess all of them are expensive.

poor people kinda gated out of a lot, honestly, even by corps which can afford to include us.

I guess this thread is less fearmongering about indie games being too expensive and more a "fuck AAA" thing in the end, it's not like I don't buy indie games at their asking price already even if it is a lot.

or just wait on sales.

but, seriously, fuck AAA. They have no excuse.