I don’t have any games consoles in my house, as I generally lack the time to sit down and play games these days. However, my partner has recently wanted to play Just Dance. This has made me start looking for a console, but it appears everything has changed. It’s been a decade since I regularly played games on one, so it’s made me wonder what the hell happened?
I recall for my birthday, my parents buying me a Nintendo DS, and two games, for approximately £100. This felt like a fair price, as my games held value, and I would be able to sell them later for a reasonable price. On top of this, I was able to share my games with my brother, who eventually got his own console.
As I gaze upon the scene of consoles in 2023, I note that physical media is going away (or completely gone for some consoles already). How did it suddenly become acceptable to charge £90 for an incomplete, broken game, which is primed for another £100 worth of downloadable content (DLC)? Additionally, it’s scary that I can’t sell this fully digital garbage, and I can’t share it with my family or friends.
Fully digital games are no cheaper than physical games, despite these drawbacks1. In fact, it appears that a lot of costs have been offset onto the consumer. Internet and bandwidth prices (to download your day one 100GB patches - they peddled you a broken piece of software after all), storage space, paying for DLC which would normally be included in the game. “Surely these saving should be passed onto the consumer?” I hear you cry, hogwash, that would hurt their ever increasing profit margins. Where did expansion packs go? Rather than sell a big, fully featured expansion pack, it’s now seemingly sliced and diced into many small DLCs. This then raises the question - how the hell did DLC become normal? Because more profit.
The state of things feels absolutely dystopian, and it is worrying that the public has allowed these business practices to become normal. More worryingly, what is the next ten years going to look like? A scary thought is that people will likely look back on the current state of things a decade from now and wish they had it this good.
With the rate things are going, the distinction between DLC and actual games is getting blurred. They’re all “downloadable content”, which I take to mean overpriced shit you don’t own. Even more egregiously, many console platforms now offer game subscription services, where you own absolutely nothing, but cough up every month for the ‘privilege’ of using their software for a little bit of time.
There is a line that has been crossed, and companies are now just wringing you for money. It’s going to get worse, it’s probably not going to get better.
Playing games on my computer feels more fair and healthy. Whenever I find time, I like to play roguelikes, and this scene seems (so far) reasonably ok. I’ve not pirated any games on my computer due to fair pricing.
Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft with their consoles? They feel far out of touch with reality. As I write this, Zelda games on the Nintendo E-Shop are £59.99, which means that an average under-30 can afford two games per week, if that’s what they choose to blow all their cash on2.
I fully respect the developers and support them, but I won’t tolerate when the industry nickles and dimes me so a shareholder gets a larger dividend (there is no chance the money will go to the devs). Unfortunately I think I have to show my hand: if I elect to buy any console, I will modify it to pirate games.
When it comes to media, if I can’t own it, I will pirate it. Someone figured this out already, that piracy is an issue of service, not price. If I was able to sell, transfer etc digital downloads I would be fine, but that’s the reason why I have only encountered this problem now when looking for a console.
Sadly I’m not hopeful for the future here, I think companies are just going to get worse in their nickling and diming, and I think that the public will continue to lap it up and thank them for the privilege of doing so. Hopefully I will be wrong.