- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.zip
- gaming@lemmy.world
- gaming@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.zip
- gaming@lemmy.world
- gaming@lemmy.ml
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$69.99
That’s cool, I’ll continue not buying your shitty, overpriced games!
If you happen to make a good one, maybe I’ll buy the fully patched DRM free version with all the DLC for $5 in a few years.
That’s still overpriced.
A sequel to a game that was worth 25 Eurodollars at release? Yeah, well…
I was just wondering that, too. Wasn’t the first one almost like an indie title? Not sure, how much I’m mixing it up with Outer Wilds, but Wikipedia tells me their teams were around a similar size anyways…
First one is an AA game I guess. Better production value than an indie title, but far from Skyrim or GTA.
Still delusional pricing that guarantees I will avoid your game for years if not forever even if it is great.
The developers are already paid and are gonna get laid off regardless if game does well or not. You could give it away and I wouldn’t bother to get it at this point. I hope MS rots.
I’m just glad my backlog of games is so long I’ll never need to pay full price for a game again. These prices are too steep for me.
We were already seeing this at $70: the market is largely unwilling to support games getting any more expensive right now. And even though we had $90 SNES games back in the mid-90s, without adjusting for inflation, I think we can also say quite definitively that the market expanded exponentially as prices got lower, relative to inflation and in absolute terms, in subsequent years. Increasing prices further is pricing out those people. Plus, we’ve got tons of low-cost options that can often be higher quality than the games charging $70+.
Consoles are a walled garden - the only reason they can do what they do is because of the lack of options for the customer to use their hardware.
PCs are the only gaming platform (apart from perhaps smartphones) that have an open framework untouchable by publishers or game platforms. You don’t have to publish with Sony and Microsoft, and the majority don’t.
Unless your console has homebrew, you will always be screwed by the platform holder.
open framework untouchable by publishers or game platforms
Splitting hairs here, but Steam is a pseudo monopoly at this point. Sure, one can not publish a game there, but that’s hard. And on multi-store releases, I don’t think publishers are allowed to undercut it on other platforms.
Which is fine since (even though 30% is not cheap) Steam is behaving and working well…
For now.
and steam is going to keep behaving well because they are very aware that they are replaceable if they dont, cant replace sony on my ps5 tho
Are they?
They crushed other storefronts pretty good. They have a loyal following.
Maybe they won’t go full GFWL, but I fear they could enshittify substantially with the critical mass they have now.
Oh do these high prices mean they will hire more developers back after all of Xbox and Microsoft’s cuts?
Microsoft fired 15,000 people in the last year, and applied for 14,000 H1-B visa.
They are cutting costs and improving productivity by taking advantage of people from other countries who have the threat of deportation hanging over their heads to keep them compliant.
Good thing programmers were smart and organized into unions inspired by other industries instead of naively thinking they were too valuable to the ruling class in the US to be betrayed.
…
If CS tried to unionize, they would get replaced with AI and H1-Bs so fast at this point. They should have tried that like 20 years ago when they were in hot demand.
Yes and no.
Yes because this is why there is a massive body of leftist academic, philosophical and political writing on the topic… yes because this is why organizing is a skill and unions can be good or bad. It is hard and you are gonna need all the help and tactics you can get.
No because there is or at least was a prevalent belief in US tech culture circles that being an expert in programming by extension made you an expert or a soon to be expert on everthing else. An expert on education, an expert on health care… just the damage from those two categories alone to the wellbeing of US citizens…
Far from me to say there isn’t a basic beauty to aspects to programming that speak to logic and math… but no… the world is full of a million different kinds of craftspeople because every form of genius has its own peculiarities. Unfortunately however this delusion reached a degree of popularity that I think undermined the ability of tech work culture in the US to establish a fertile substrate for effective organizing and unionizing to grow from.
I am not saying that this is unique to tech workers, simply that the demographic reached a critical point of naivety that corporations were able to solidfy their power.
It could have happened to Plumbers or Electricians (I mean they tend to be decent jobs in the US I think), the only thing unique to US programmers/tech workers is that for a brief moment they were existentially valuable to the empire and thus it had to suffer decent working conditions for programmers/tech workers. Though, in this respect programmers/tech workers aren’t that unique in the story of the US empire, the obvious reference here being New Bedford and the way the whaling industry briefly centered the nexus of power there to abandon it just as abruptly for another city… Silicon Valley for awhile but how much longer?.
https://www.whalingmuseum.org/
https://www.nps.gov/nebe/learn/historyculture/whalingheritage.htm
https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2022/03/huge-architecture-mills-of-new-bedford.html?m=1
Many tenants in New Bedford have been forced to spend more of their income on housing, Census data shows. In 2021, nearly half of New Bedford’s renter households were considered “cost-burdened,” which means they spent more than 30% of their income on rent.
https://newbedfordlight.org/barely-making-it-in-new-bedford/
The amazing scifi TV show Severance can be seen as a sort of Tech Culture Gothic that attempts to reconcile with the futility of experiencing late stage capitalism as a tech worker in 2020s US. Severance can be seen as a gothic work that is grappling with the growing realization that the fall of tech workers from the bourgeoise petit class or whatever you want to call it has been cemented by the torpor of US tech culture towards organizing to protect the future of their careers from the ruling class. Scifi and fiction like Severance will be interpreted by future academic analysis as a touchstone to begin an analysis of why US culture in general was so blind to the obvious systematic violence of tech corporations that reached an unsustainable peak in the 2020s.
An echo of a decrepit shuttered massive brick mill building in New Bedford Massachusetts, a strange monolithic monument to a power long gone. Towering mill window aclove after alcove filled with cinderblocks for want of unshattered glass echoed by empty floors of office cubicles and an insect like ghostly parking lot extending radially around The Holmdel Complex like a carapace.
The H1-B visa is fundamentally broken (or working exactly as intended, depending on how you look at it) though, so you apply for just under 10x as many as you need and end up with the number you want.
It’s not Microsoft’s fault the US Government is actively encouraging importing cheaper, average employees by using a lottery rather than filtering based on “you must earn n% more than the median income in that sector” or a similar metric to avoid reducing wages for Americans and companies using them to cut costs…
Adding mandated wage requirements would undermine the whole H1-B program, which is great. I don’t think we should allow H1-Bs for jobs that we have adequate domestic supply for and it should be a pain in the dick to get.
Ok I have an idea, why don’t we just pay a living wage to US tech workers whether they are immigrants or they were born and raised in the US?
They are generally paid well over a living wage for a position that a citizen could occupy at a market wage that is even higher. Median tech job income is over $100k, twice the national average.
Hiring a citizen costs more, so profit chasing dictates hiring an immigrant that can be paid less than market rate. Hiring an immigrant under an H1-B not only is cheaper in wages, but also gives the company more power over the employee because they can fire that person and then they get deported for not being sponsored.
Hiring an H1-B at a cheaper rate also suppresses wages for citizens.
Unemployment in tech is like 3%, we don’t need H1-B visa for tech jobs. We don’t even need H1-Bs for the industries with the highest unemployment, they need to increase wages to attract the nearly 7 million unemployed in the US, and there are even more people that are underemployed or have given up because wages are too low across the board.
