Topic: General Xbox Series X|S Thread

Expand

@BAMozzy Yeah, the $10 fee on console has been around, and a pretty fixed fee, since at least the early Steam era (even when PC games were still also physically distributed.) At the time it was mostly about the licensing fee from the console vendors being passed to the consumer directly. Then it was supposedly about physical media and used game sales vs. PC which had none. But it's been a pretty fixed $10 as long as console has been running PC's games. I can almost understand that, when primarily PC publishers started just bringing their PC games to consoles instead of making separate games for consoles I can see the temptation of "wait, so the vendor wants $10 in royalties? We're not eating that!"

But the online sub is sinister. I'm not sure who came up with that, but the blame sadly falls on Xbox for introducing that blight.

The awards shows are a weird set of Hollywood wannabe critics at the start. Most award shows gave the prize to TLoU2, because as the most cinematic game, it's naturally the best game! GoT got forgotten in TLoU2's shadow because....while also cinematic it's not Naughty Dog, and it's not as "edgy" in it's narrative, which promotes the later in the minds of said wannabe Hollywood critics (that's a whole other rant.) I'm curious once Hades is available on GP though what it's like. Nothing I've seen of it without playing it seems like anything worth all the praise it's received, and the internet, where indies are concerned, is full of hipsters that latch onto the "big thing" and rant about it being the best thing ever until the next big thing comes along. But I haven't played it because I'm not interested in buying it. I'm curious if my opinion changes after I try it.

But yeah, Sony has this rarified air about their output that, even where other games like Gears 5 can match them in terms of technology, story, etc, one thing Gears is is a video game. It may have a decent story and cutscenes and look detailed, but it never stops being a video game first and foremost, while Sony's cultivated, justifiably, a niche of movie-games that "put players inside the movie." They have a template that makes games a game second, and a movie you are in control of first. That does seem to resonate with people, especially critics these days, for better or worse. But where it gets weird is, among the fans and critics, the notion that film is somehow more cultured, more erudite than video games, and thus the more player agency is removed, and the more the game becomes a guided studio lot darkride, the higher the perceived quality and value of the title.

Like with many things, the fandom makes me cringe more than what the company does. Yeah, Sony's disastrously out of touch with all but it's hardcore fandom and the clueless portion of the mass market. But I see, business-wise, what they're doing with the $70 increase. Fans argue "inflation" which is a silly argument. All products don't get to jump in price "because inflation". Least of which entertainment products that are both under intense competition, and suffering from people having less disposable income due to said inflation (or stagflation.) True luxury/designer goods (goods aimed at the more well to do) can do that, but then that comes back to Sony trying to move their games up-market, products made for the financial upper tiers instead of the masses, their traditional market. Surely that market has grown, and its discretionary spending is off the charts as the economy bifurcates, but that still indicates Sony trying to move into being a "luxury brand" instead of a mass market product.

And that's where we get to that weird part of the market that sees it as premium to gatekeep, The high price must mean it's a superior product, exclusives for those with more resources and finer taste. The excessive sticker price is part of the appeal to said ego. The same reason Mercedes doesn't offer a budget model.

And I think Sony's playing that part of the market intentionally. But....that's not their whole game. They infamously drop their game prices on deep sales. They've backed off it slightly, but not fully. They know their sales model is the boxoffice model (Ryan even directly mentions it often), they mostly only care about "opening week" sales, and after that it doesn't matter much (exactly like film), they get that premium market on day one demonstrating their fine culture and taste.....and then it rapidly depreciates to mass market prices. TLoU2 is hilarious, they dropped it, permanently, to, what, $45 a year later? Game of the year, indeed! They couldn't give it away at that point. They're so heavily dependent on opening week sales they struggle to sell at all after they get the faithful to purchase. Which is also why they can't consider a Game Pass like solution. Their entire economy revolves around intense blasts of sales at excessive prices, where any attempt at offering more value will devastate their planning and financials. It's also an achilles heel as competitors are promoting value, and they feel like the RIAA when it was digging in and trying to prevent MP3s from overtaking full price record sales.

Oh...wait...they WERE the main component of the RIAA that did that.....

Nintendo isn't so different in that they've cultivated the image of superiority in different ways, but they hold their prices permanently with almost no exception. If Sony's aiming to be the Mercedes of video games, Nintendo wants to be Apple, and they're succeeding in building a similar user-cult. An innovative, disruptive, but somewhat noncompetitive console that launches at $300 in 2017 is $300 $350 in 2021. A game that launches in 2017 at $60 is $60 ($55 on occasional sales) in 2021. And more fun, a game that launched at $50 in 2011 is.......$60 in 2021. And it's celebrated that such amazing and timeless quality makes it worth those prices compared to all those other games. Sure they're great games, and they are timeless. But the idea of technology products or even any media product holding launch value, or worse, appreciating over time, is one that works only in their bubble.

It's been said in many a Metroid Dread conversation where the idea of a 2.5D sidescroller selling for $60 is laughable, that MS should have charged $60 for the Ori games. Maybe they could have gotten away with it. They're fantastic games. But....that goes back to premium pricing being celebrated as a feature, and viewing the quality of a product through it's price tag (or through celebrating the board room success of the vendor.) We may have moved on to a new era of hyper-capitalism where donning the colors and cheering on your favorite publicly traded corporation to victory has replaced team sports.