Here’s a suggestion for 2025 to game companies: bring the prices down. This isn’t about cheap consumer playing less, it’s about supply and demand. A recent article here that expands on not even the complete number of games: With 270,000+ games, Gamers are hopelessly outnumbered. That is more than sobering.
The whole move to $69.99 for AAA games was stupid and wrong-headed. Most games are digital, even the physical copies are mostly just installation discs. Games are being delisted and servers are being shut down making their value and worth even more volatile.
If you’re getting a little sense of deja vus, it’s because this is a topic that has come up before, see: Game Publishers, Quickest Way to Kill Your Game Sales is Overpricing. What’s different here and now is it’s the start of a new year, a chance for game publishers to look at the games landscape and understand why gamers are playing more older games vs. new games.
A recent analytic shared on Steam found that only 15% of Steam users played games in 2024, leaving 85% that played games from 2023 and into the past.
“Another reason is that Steam has over 200,000 titles released over the course of decades, compared to the relatively paltry 18,000 games released in 2024 according to SteamDB. So naturally, more users will spend more time playing older games versus recent ones.” – Only 15% of Steam users have played games released in 2024, but why? | TechRadar
The reality is there are already way more games than not just you, but everybody you know personally cannot possibly play in their lifetime. This means we’re hopelessly outnumbered and as gamers it’s more about where and when to spend that finite game time than just buying and playing everything because it’s “new.”
Speaking for myself, I enjoy games that are creative, innovative, offering something unique or different. There is still room, after all these gaming years, for game developers to explore more games like these. Maybe it’s a unique control scheme or game mechanic that we haven’t seen. What is vastly less interesting are clones of popular games.
And there are ton of also rans, clones and bad imitations of older, better ideas. I don’t want to focus on those games, really, no. So, hoping in 2025 I spend proportionally less time checking out those and playing better games. That doesn’t mean I won’t keep checking out some new games, but at the end of 2025 I’m hoping to look back and find more joy playing longer amounts of fewer games than in prior years.
Here’s to hoping in 2025 we see more creativity and innovation along with game prices that reflect the massive amount of supply. What do you think of current game prices? Do you think new game prices should be reduced? Or are the current new game prices good and this author’s perception is wrong?
Bob
This makes sense from the consumer point of view but from the game developer side, they are spending more money. Overall, the dollar has lost value and prices everywhere will only go up. $60-70 today is not what $60-70 was 5 years ago.
Any business deals with supply and demand. If you have too much supply, a la the music industry now, especially with the explosion of AI, there will be less consumer demand. The answer isn’t to raise prices, it’s to lower prices. It doesn’t matter what it *costs* you to create the content and then you must charge accordingly, it matters how many people will pay for that content. This is the problem that content creators need to evaluate and say, “hmm, the demand for this content is at *this* level, so I can charge proportionally to this demand.” They aren’t in the video game space, except in the sense of inflation, they have mostly been eating that cost, as you rightly point out.
The move from $59.99 to $69.99 is, in part, the answer to recoup some of those costs, but if you sell dramatically less games for $10 more than you would sell for $10 *less* then logically pricing it lower will lead to making more money. What I’m saying is the game companies need to do the math and see what they will make.
The reality is they only launch the game at the higher price, as we all know, they do lower the prices through sales and discounts. You can get any “new” game at 30-90% off within a year or two, except for some first party games like Nintendo. Everybody else, for the most part, does lower the price. They just try to get the extra $$ at launch, taking advantage of what they hope will be impatience demand. What I’m suggesting is by lowering that price they will get even more impatience demand, because the price is lower.
A perfect example in October 2023 of this was the game Lethal Company that launched at $9.99, a very fair price and clearly took advantage of impatience demand — and they made a ton of $$$ in the process, see: https://playgamesmore.com/lethal-company-horror-game-launched-october-2023-has-18000-overwhelmingly-positive-steam-reviews/
Waay to many overpriced games especially when they are moving to all digital. You own nothing and they can take it away anytime. All digital makes it very convenient but also disposable. It makes me not care.
Hi Todd!
I did buy some heavily discounted beat-em up games and basic Elder Scrolls Online for my nephew. None of the current games had any great discounts.