Are there any Nintendo titles that cost $80 for the digital release? Digital version of Bananza is $70. I think Nintendo is the only company that’s going to weather upcoming storm just fine since they sell toys and there’s always a demand for those. ET moment already happened with Concord (scrapped entirely after spending absurd amounts of money) and Veilguard (about to be added to cereal boxes just to recoup some cost).

I mean, it's already happening. AAA games are less common, and aren't doing as well as they used to, and the AAA studios are drying up. In its place, we're getting more indie games, more games from small development companies, and they all come at cheaper prices. Consoles aren't immune to that, they're just delayed in their reaction, because the barrier for entry is higher for indie developers. But the prices that people are willing to pay on PC games isn't going up, because there are plenty of non AAA options available for less, and as that becomes normalised, expensive consoles will falter. Their flagship games will command a premium, but they won't be able to build up the game library they need to stay competitive with the PC market. And don't forget, Steamdeck and the like are out there now, which directly challenge the niche that the Switch sits in. I don't think we'll get a "moment", but I think the trend will end in a similar way

It wont. ET only had the impact it had because the industry was small. Relatively speaking. Today, production (both indie and AAA tbh) is diverse enough, that no one game could ever taint the whole industry to that extent again.

Just a correction, AAA games aren't less common. We are getting more and more indies, but we are also getting more AAA games than ever. It's possible that percentage of AAA games compared to indie games has changed, but that is because of increased indie output. Don't have any official stats, but as someone who keeps an eye on upcoming games, there are tons of AAA games coming out pretty much every year.

Yes. Currently announced / released games with $80 price tag for digital: - Mario Kart World - Tears of Kingdom - Switch 2 Edition - Super Mario Party Jamboree - Switch 2 Edition (I think this also has new content) - Kirby and the Forgotten Land - Switch 2 Edition (also has new content)

The E.T. moment is overhyped and a US phenomenon. It never happened in Europe or Japan, for example. Everybody seems to think that the video game crash of 1983 nearly killed the video game industry and that the NES was responsible for reviving it while Europe had a vibrant home computer scene on their Commodores, BBC Micros, Sinclairs and others with games that were better than everything on the 2600. So what you might see is a crash in certain segments of the market and that happens quite often: There is nobody really releasing new MMORPGs anymore. Single Player FPS have crashed hard and now see a small revival by indie devs. For a while nobody did classic Point'n'Click adventures. Do you want a prediction? The current cost of graphic cards will crash the classic PC gaming market. There are some enthusiasts who are buying cards for thousands of dollars or building 4.000€ computers. But the majority of gamers will stay on their laptops or might go for cheaper devices like the SteamDeck. But if your game needs more power, needs a modern graphic card and a beefier PC, there are fewer and fewer people who can run it and many people can't afford it. So devs will target lower system specs with to reach the bigger audience

It's happening, but for Hollywood.

Well, that sucks. At least with those you get an option of physical release at the same price. I thought they’d be doing what they did with Banaza which makes sense - those new carts have a non-trivial cost so charging less for digital seemed fair. I was wondering how they got around retailers pushing back against digital being cheaper but I guess they didn’t.

Pre-ordering is dead, live paid alpha testing is booming. There are so many games in development (alpha or beta testing) which can be bought. And as soon as the game is in the ballpark of "finished" it get's the v1.0 mark. And way before that, there are already DLC's available for an unfinished game.

What crashed and brought back was gaming consoles. No one releases MMO’s? anymore? Dune’s MMO just dropped last week.

I'm assuming it was hyperbole, not literal.

What I mean is that they are trending towards being a smaller part of the overall market year over year.

But Nintendo’s isn't anywhere close to having a monopoly on gaming? Also, I'm totally willing to pay $80 or more for a game I actually want to play. This really is only a problem for the people that need to buy a new game every week.

> Do you want a prediction? The current cost of graphic cards will crash the classic PC gaming market. There are some enthusiasts who are buying cards for thousands of dollars or building 4.000€ computers. But the majority of gamers will stay on their laptops or might go for cheaper devices like the SteamDeck. But if your game needs more power, needs a modern graphic card and a beefier PC, there are fewer and fewer people who can run it and many people can’t afford it. So devs will target lower system specs with to reach the bigger audience Also, there's not as much value in high-powered GPUs right now because these days high-end graphics often mean Unreal Engine 5. UE5 is excellent for static and slow-moving graphics but has a tendency towards visible artifacts in situations where the picture and especially the camera position changes quickly (especially since it's heavily reliant on TAA). These artifacts are largely independent of how good your GPU is. Unlike in previous generations, going for high-end graphics doesn't necessarily mean you get a great visual experience – your games might look like smeary messes no matter what kind of GPU you use because that's how modern engines work. Smeary messes with beautiful lighting, sure, but smeary messes nonetheless. My last GPU upgrade was from a Vega 56 to a 4080 (and then an XTX when the 4080 turned out to be a diva) and while the newer cards are nice I wouldn't exactly call them 1000 bucks nice given that most modern games look pretty bad in motion and most older ones did 4K@60 on the Vega already. Given that I jumped three generations forward from a mid-tier product to a fairly high-end one, the actual benefit in terms of gaming was *very* modest. The fact that Nvidia are now selling fancy upscaling and frame interpolation as killer features also doesn't inspire confidence. Picture quality in motion is already compromised; I don't want to pay big money to compromise it even further. If someone asked me about what GPU to get I'd tell them to get whatever they can find for a couple hundred bucks because, quite frankly, the performance difference isn't worth the price difference. RT is cool for a couple of days but I wouldn't spend much on it either, not as long as the combination of TAA and upscaling will hide half of the details behind dithered motion trails and time-delayed shadows.

I assume you're referring to stuff like Tarkov or Star Citizen? These games basically work the same as live service games, except they pretend to be "in development". But I'd hardly call it a boom. There's only a couple truly big money makers, the rest are grifts that don't really go anywhere, but might have small vocal cult-like fanbases. Then there are games that really do use the "Early Access" model to fund getting the game made. It's not really like kickstarter, or preordering, because you do get to something in exchange for your money, immediately. And it hss brought us games like Satisfactory, DRG, Hades, Subnautica, Everspace... Even Baldurs Gate 3 was an Early Access title. You could buy and play it for YEARS before "1.0" dropped and became the explosive success it is today. Those games got made because they were able to sell copies to fund their development throughout the process. And instead of trying to please clueless investors, they had to please _the players_. I don't really see why you'd be salty about this psrt of the trend. Obviously some stuff is not worth buying, but that's true whether a game is finished or not.

We used to have 1-2 "wow killers" every year. The last one that tried was new world in 2021, afaik. So I'm pretty sure they were referring to MMORPGs, not MMOs in general. Altho even those are fewer nowadays than before, I feel.

The thing is there are a ton of MMOs that are coming out. Their claim makes no sense if you look at the slated releases.

Concord was the biggest flop of all time and people already forgot about it.

The Atari crash was just Atari. In North America - and *only* North America, things were quite different elsewhere in the world - Atari was virtually the entire game industry at the time, but that isn't the case today. We already do see individual developers and publishers crash the way Atari did. All the time. But for every flop, there are a dozen hits. The industry is big, and it is not a monolith. And the audience is far far far larger. People will always be buying games. It's not possible for the entire industry to crash the way Atari did. It'd be like expecting the entire music industry, movie industry, or book industry to crash.