Most forms of entertainment have seen a decrease in pricing due to technological advancements and the popularity of eBooks. However, game developers and publishers have gone another route.
Waiting a decade for new instalments in franchises as massive as Fallout and Elder Scrolls feels like a waste.
Microsoft have Obsidian but I feel it's Bethesda who just don't want to play ball as they've always said they want to do it themselves.
Once MS bought Zenimax in 2020 they should have put the Outer Worlds 2 on the back burner, allow Bethesda to finish off its own Space RPG with Starfield (despite totally different tone why have two in your first party portfolio with two developers who's gameplay is a tad similar) and got Obsidian for one of their projects to make a spiritual successor to New Vegas.
When the Elder Scrolls VI is finished Bethesda can then onto the main numbered Fallout 5 themselves.
The Outer Worlds 2 started development in 2019 so putting it on the back burner wouldn't have been the end of the world, they'd have always come back to it once Fallout was done and it would have been nicely spaced out from Starfields release once they had most likely stopped supporting it and all the expansions were released.
If they did this back in 2020 when they bought Zenimax and the game had a good, steady 4 - 5 years development, you might have seen it release in 2025.
We are literally going to be waiting until 2030 at the very earliest for Fallout 5 and all they seem bothered about is pushing Fallout 76.
"The Vancouver-based (Canada) indie games developer Blinkmoon Games are today very happy and proud to announce that their dark fantasy bullet heaven "Necromantic", is coming to PC via Steam Early Access in 2024." - Jonas Ek, TGG.
Athenian Rhapsody is a JRPG with a difference: alongside turn-based combat & exploration, you'll need to complete WarioWare-style microgames.
Because EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and other publishers are publicly traded corporations that need to find new ways to raise their revenues. They raise the price of games and then blame piracy and the rising cost of game development due to new tech. Both of these are BS statements. The price of tech stays relatively the same after slight peaks during the release of new tech.
It's the reason why a mid-level laptop today costs the same as a mid-level laptop did two years ago, and yet the mid-level laptop of today is several times more powerful.
It works the same way in just about every sector of technological development, aside from a few exceptions where natural disasters such as the Thailand floods play a role in increasing manufacturing costs.
It doesn't cost any more money to make a graphically awesome game today than it did 20 years ago during the Doom era.
The price of games could have dropped two or three years into the console generation, but the publishers wanted to make a little more profit so they kept the prices the same.
Example: Shenmue 2 on the Xbox cost 70 million USD. Gears of War 2 cost 12 million USD.
Rising cost of development is a moot point this far into the gen. The cost of development has dropped considerably, but what incentive do the publishers have to drop their game prices?
My view is that too many gamers have been burned way too many times by buying awful games that either weren't finished or never should have been put out, or just seem like a game that we've played before. Now I am hearing they are trying to do away with used games somehow with the new systems?
This article makes no points
They don't. I bought Mario 3 for $99.99 (plus tax) the day it came out. When discs came out they got cheaper, but then raise up again this gen.
Games cost about the same now that they did three generations ago....