Sounds AWSOME! :\

Thing is, no one was jumping up and down then, as there were fewer games to chose from then, and we waited for any new game to come along.

These days gamers are basically spolit for choice, so much so that they have become exceptionally picky and demanding of developers.

I certainly would not want to be a developers in todays market, that’s for sure.

Must say that I would trust their oppinions over yours.
And what the hell, someone on your site is allowed to have an opinion with out you guys jumping all over them.

Shareholders you say, WTF do they have to do with it. Well, without them EA, Ubisoft, Naughty Dog etc would not have the future funding to invest in games like Mirrors Edge, Dark Space etc as new IP’s, let alone the follow-up iterations that help keep the money flowing to keep the shareholders happy and thus re-investing in the companies. EA lost $US1 billion last financial year (google it) . . now do the math on that and ask yourself, if you had shares in that company, would you keep those shares there, or move . . .

Take away that return for the investors, and they move on to greener fields. The publisher goes belly up, you lose the games you want to play.

Basic mathematics at play mate. In an “ideal world” they’d love to spend more time, deliver a finely polished product that could well take 5 yrs or more to develop. But it’s not a perfect world, consumers consume 10 times more now than they did even as little as 3 yrs ago, and it is only getting worse, not better. Hence the length of games getting shorter to match that turnover. Again, back down to basic math.

Games only 8 yrs ago were $100 or more and you could NOT bargain your way down from that. That was the RRP, and that was that.

Now, while we have a RRP, barely any store actually follows that RRP as their actual sale price, unless of course a customer simply walks in, grabs the game and pays for it like a nilly.

Games have remained universally stable over the last 10 or more years with nothing more that a $10 rise or fall on each end. BUt now, we can walk into say JB Hi-Fi and walk out with a normal $99.95 game for $79.95 or less, or trade in 2 games and $10 and get the latest game, or trade in 3 games and get the game “free” . .

None of this was available even 5 yrs ago. Sure – you had secondhand games, but NOT to the scale they are b=now, and definitely not exploited like they are now by the gamer. Do some research on games for the earlier consoles, the cost of the consoles etc and you’ll be staggered at the prices they were asking for them at that time. And at a time the Aust $ had more power than it does now, making them even more expensive when compared to other store items of the time.

The first Playstation 2 sold for over $700 and even more at high-end stores. The difference now is, numbers – pure and simple – numbers exceed the levels they did even 3 yrs ago. Thus it has a smaller window of purchasing periods between games, and thus gamers want more games, and thus spend more on said games.

Its sort of a false over-spending as it were. Earlier on, one game would get released per console every few weeks or so, not like now where you have possibly 10-20 games on a bad month being released for the huge number of consoles available. ALmost 1 game every 1.4 days. That’s almost insane.

So yes, you DO end up spending MORE, but on more games, an dthat way it feels more intrusive than it did before. It was easier for me to buy and keep a huge number of 1st-gen xbox games, without too much hassle or financial burden at the time. Now, I’m lucky if I can buy many games at ll due to the high number being released. Yet the prices for the games has only risen $10 across the board, and has been around that figure (and more in earlier years) for over a decade.