re: Video Game Industry Stalls, Stocks Plunge. What’s Going On?

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It's difficult because the ~$50 price point has been such a notable fixture in gaming for over 30 years. But it will inevitably have to change at some point.

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I do wish things were more like they are in Japan. There's a common price for most games, but bigger games have premium price points. It's very common to see games priced $30-90 at launch and that price is set by each publisher.

I'd like that because those high priced games will still nosedive in price in 3 months.

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The biggest one being that you used to get a physical copy of the game on a cartridge, diskette, or optical media plus an instruction manual.

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Don't bring logic into this board! It's Epic's fault no matter what.

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The biggest one being that you used to get a physical copy of the game on a cartridge, diskette, or optical media plus an instruction manual.

These days, sales are heavily through digital delivery on consoles and near exclusively on PC.

From a distribution standpoint alone, that means a hell of a better bottom line for a game company since they don’t really have to make and ship a ton of physical copies for the most part.

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This.

All these arguments that games should be more expensive is negated by the massive reduction cost in production and distribution.

It is one of the reasons why I always believed that digital should be cheaper than hard copy.

Because the games being put out are crap. Consumers are tired of being called names, told to FO, and treated like shite.

Games are too complicated and the market was flooded with open world and BR type games.

Bring back College Football....

Game company stocks in general seem like an extremely bad idea, though it is a bit late in your case.

Companies bubble up into being big earners then burst into nothing with little notice.


EA and Activision are about the only two survivors from the software developers of the early 1980s. Most of those got wiped out by the 1984 crash but a number of other once thriving companies went bust quickly when the exact wrong conditions hit, either in the industry or through bad decisions by the company themselves or through new ownership.



A general example would be Infocom, the text game company behind Zork.

They were big for years but a couple of factors killed them.

One, technology is an obvious one as advances in graphics killed the text adventure. Text held its own against 4 color CGA and 16 color EGA. Not so much against 256+ colors of VGA and SVGA. Same deal with sound cards becoming standard equipment as opposed to the shitty internal PC speaker, as the only title I’m aware of which integrated sound into gameplay was Lurking Horror.

Two, they expanded into business software by pouring a bunch of money into a database system (Cornerstone, IIRC) with the idea of branching out into different fields. It underwhelmed for a few reasons, including performance issues an an inability to deliver an intuitive command system similar to the text parser of the games.

Three, they got bought out by new ownership who made really dumb changes. A big one would be them changing policy so that they stopped shipping out copies of older games to stores. This was a dumb decision because backtitles like Zork 1-3 were still big sellers, the costs of distribution were minimal, and the text based nature of the games meant that they didn’t get outdated easily. This meant they left a lot of money on the table just by not understanding their product line.


All of that added up to a profitable company getting bought out and going under in a short timeframe.

GTA 6 isn’t coming until Rockstar has wringed GTA V dry. And the fact they keep selling the game along with a ton of in game currency tells me it will be a while even though it has been out for years.

I'm amazed at how quickly and aggressively games get discounted these days.

Growing up in the NES/SNES era, games pretty much never got discounted, they pretty much stayed at ~$50 launch price point forever. I think that was largely a Nintendo thing cuz they still don't like to discount their older games even today. The players' choice re-releases starting in the SNES era was the closest thing you had, but even they were like $30.

These days a brand new game costs like $50-$60 but will be almost always be $40 within a just a few months, and within a year or two it's not uncommon to see it for ~$20. And these are major heavy hitting titles too, Bloodborne, Witcher 3, Doom, etc.

I think the gaming industry just moves so much faster these days, games from just 2 years ago are completely viewed as old news and will not move any additional copies unless aggressively discounted.

I guess that's another motivating factor for the big devs to want to embrace the live service model. They really want their investment to pay off over a longer period of time.