this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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Satisfactory
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Inflation applies to games that are actively being developed for sure. Games don't program themselves. You need people to do it. Those people need wages to pay rent/food/utilities. If the prices of those things go up they'll need higher wages which will usually come from higher prices on the game that in this case, they continuously develop.
No, no it doesn’t. The cost of a game getting patches and updates isn’t the same as the cost of making the game in the first place.
Inflation affects physical goods because you need to make the product from the ground up every single time. And those materials cost money, and rise with inflation, so making the product from scratch each time gradually costs more as time goes on. Hence why they need to raise the price of the finished product - otherwise they'd literally lose money on each sale.
Digital goods don’t work this way, once the product has been made it can freely be distributed without having to be remade again and again.
Yes, it costs money to patch and update. But that’s not comparable to rebuilding the product from the ground up like with physical goods.
By your logic all movies, tv shows, and all other forms of digital goods should actually increase price with age, not decrease. Team Fortress 2 should be like $100 by now. After all, servers aren’t free.
Also, their wages come from sales. If they no longer have money to pay their employees then they should look towards developing new games, dlc, or merchandising. Artificially inflating the prices of existing goods isn’t the answer. There’s a reason that not even EA or Activision have pulled this.
They've been developing it actively continually you fungus.
They’ve been developing No Man’s Sky for even longer. Should it cost $100 now?
Edit: And it’s in Early Access so… no duh?
If they think people will pay it, sure. It's not food or housing; games are a luxury. Nobody's forcing you to buy it. Do you have a job? Would you like a raise because food and rent cost more than they used to? Yes? Cool. But you're not here to debate. You're here to whine and bitch and moan about the price going up $10. That the price of lunch (or less) at most fast food joints. So if you can afford Subway and a Coke, you can afford an extra $10. Or you can buy it before the same ends. Or when the next sale comes along. But you're not going to. You're just here to be a jackass.
If you unironically think No Man’s Sky should cost over $100 now I can’t help you. The fact that it doesn’t, the fact that no game released over a decade ago does, should be all the evidence you need.
If EA or Activision genuinely thought your take had any weight they’d be charging over $100 for all of their older titles. Thank god not everyone is as braindead as the Satisfactory fan base seems to be…
This isn’t about the price going up. This is about the explanation as to why. If it were due to the amount of content added since it released into ea, or due to an upcoming official launch, that’d be fine. But using the Factorio “inflation” excuse isn’t it.
Not only material costs go up with inflation.
Those materials have a price because you need labor to obtain them. The cost of everything is driven by the price of labor. The price of labor goes up with inflation.
There is no product that is unaffected by inflation.
So you’re saying that because of that, all things must also rise in price, just inherently?
By your logic any movie released decades ago should cost far more now than it did back then, right? To rent or buy, it should be infinitely more. What about games from the 90’s or 00’s? They should be far more expensive.
Why don’t I have to pay 100’s of dollars every time I watch A Clockwork Orange? Why doesn’t it cost hundreds of dollars to play the original Half-Life? After all, counting for inflation they should all cost far, far more than they currently do. Actually take a second and think about it.
Why do you think buying a digital copy of something is cheaper than buying a brand new, physical copy? Because each physical copy had to be built from the ground up, taking all new materials to do so, whereas the digital copies can effectively be infinitely reproduced. They’re not affected in the same way.
Inflation is not the only factor in the pricing on products. Otherwise a potato would cost 1000x what it does.
Even then, all the things you mention are media that was already produced, and the only cost associated to them now is licensing and distribution. Satisfactory is still in production, which costs orders of magnitude more.
The costs of updates and bug fixes, ie maintenance, aren’t equivalent to building the game from the ground up.
Satisfactory is released!!!
No, still in early access. I'd guess this price hike aligns with 1.0.
I wish that were true but according to their video it’s due to inflation, not due to any official release.
He explains that there are some guidelines on online stores like steam and EVs that they cannot just talk about that requires them to do it now, even though they feel the price point is better represented by the final release. So they wished they could do it then, but this is an issue.
The team has had a split dev track the past 2 years, where one part developed the 1.0 stuff that will be added and was kept secret, while the second team did the early access part.
After the last major release they found that they now needed to merge the 2 branches and stop EA updates to work towards final release.
So there areany changes coming to what we saw in EA and there is also new content coming that we so far only saw parts of (like the summer sloop and mercer spheres).
These guys are like the gold standard for keeping their fans in the loop and explaining their dev proces. The hate is unwarranted. They even put the game on sale at the old price point and gave everyone fair warning. I think 40 euros is a good and fair price for the final game if you want to wait.
Fair enough, maybe I’ve just become jaded after seeing what the Factorio devs pulled.
I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, I’ll take your word for it. I’ll be really sad if they decide to increase the price even further on the official launch though.
Tell me you've never tried to maintain/update software without telling me...
Are you unironically saying it’s cheaper to make a full game than it is to make bug fixes and minor updates?
Dude I love you but you’re delusional.
I am unironically saying that, as a career software engineer, fixing bugs and adding new features to an existing product is about 80% of a programming job.
While it’s certainly true that some classes of bugs are very easy to fix (“oh shit I forgot to apply the correct style”; “I mean to use this method whoops”), many bugs that exist in later-stage games require pulling a bunch of shit apart to figure it out. They’re in the same pool of difficulty usually as performance optimizations or balancing new functionality. Getting a successful test case can be difficult even if the bug is readily apparent. Getting the regression test to pass is the subject of a plethora of literature. It can be hard and difficulty often scales with codebase. If the bug was obvious and easy, it would have been done before.
If it was obvious and easy and wasn’t done before because of time constraints, devs can still charge more because their wages should have gone up. This whole thread OP is kinda nuts (not the commenter I’m vehemently agreeing with and expanding on).