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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.
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 just hope all the developers unionize. Microsoft is such a diverse company it’s nearly impossible to boycott into any type of pressure. If firing one group could cause another team to strike it might at least slow them down.
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.
I am not disputing the details of anything you are necessarily saying, what I am saying is that you are even still leaning into the lie that there isn’t enough decent work to gone around for all of us.
You need to get that out of your head, fundamentally, before we can begin to envision a humane path forward for tech work in the US, either for immigrants or people born and raised in the US.
Last part of the last paragraph, we agree.
We need wage increases across the board, not importing new workers to fill roles at lower wages because we have plenty of workers that only need higher wages to fill those vacant roles.
us tech workers paid well though, just not the visa holders, thats why these tech companies are mostly hiring them now or in the future. my bros both earn 100k+, the older one earn 300k+ which is why they laid of the highest paying ones in 2023.
Would it though?
If the requirement is “worth paying 50% more for than the average worker” then instead of picking someone worse for cheaper at random then you’re making sure that only jobs where there likely isn’t an adequate supply for due to how bell curves work,
biotech abuses the heck out of to, when i was searching like in the mid 2010s, yup you can guaranteed 1/4, would be asking for VISA help, if you need it. i feel like bio research is only kept alive because of the visas, or the current scientists they are holding onto, while refusing to hire more BS/MS holders so they can get into a proper career track and grad school.
They lowered the price from $80 to $70, but I’m sure they’ll fire more developers regardless
Just as a little treat for themselves
Any misstep, setback, or failure -> mass layoffs.
If they have record breaking success and profits though, I think we’d see mass layoffs instead. v.v
Damn, what a thin knife edge to walk, business majors are so smart!
Buzz Ness Majors, Lee Majors’s shitty cousin
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.
It was light on content IMO
Still delusional pricing that guarantees I will avoid your game for years if not forever even if it is great.
Me and Ubisoft.
I got the games for free but I’m still bitter.
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.
This is the biggest factor for me now, too. Not to go all old man Millennial, but humor me for a second:
I’ve been playing games since the NES era. The scene used to be a lot slower and while I never played every single game that came out or even owned every console, I was enough of a hobbyist that I could still follow all the major developments. These days, there’s simply TOO MUCH. And I don’t mean to imply that an abundance of choices is bad, just that it’s an absolute firehose that no one person can follow. You have to dedicate yourself to your specific interests, your specific niches. These can well be served by indies and the whole back library of games.
Because that’s the other thing, we’re starting to more thoroughly recognize games as art, as a library rather than as pure content. Unless you are absolutely committed to sucking on the end of that firehose to catch all the new content at its zenith, what’s really the point?
Fuck man, it’s time to go back to the NES for me, pick up all those games I never beat as a kid and sink 10,000 hours into learning how to speedrun some of my favorites. There’s simply no need to spend $70-80 fucking dollars on subpar, rushed, exploitative content. Fuck 'em.
It’s not even “content at it’s zenith” - AAA games nowadays are pushed out both expensive and broken, plus they come with the risk of some form of enshittification being sneaked in later (be it promised content that we’re told “couldn’t make it into the launch” being sold later as overpriced DLCs or even monetisation).
I would say that the zenith of most AAA games (in the sense of peak enjoyment) is at least a year after release once most bugs have been fixed and the threat of enshittification has passed, sometimes never (for those games that did got enshittified).
IMHO, the best value, not just in terms of fun-per-$ but also in avoidance of unpleasant feelings (such as feeling that you’ve been swindled by a game maker or are being taken advantage of) is in buying games which are at least 2 years old, or in the case of some publishers like Nintendo, it’s never.
Definitely recommend playing or replaying old games. I’ve recently put hours into replaying Morrowind and Jedi Academy.
The main game I’ve been playing lately is Mount & Blade Warband from 2010. Got it for a couple $ and have been loving it. I missed it when it came out and recently a friend had been talking a lot about how much fun it used to be.
I have played a few newer AAA games that I uninstalled after a few hours. Sure there’s some great new games, especially from small publishers or indie devs, but there’s a lot more slop like you said.
Trying to complete a Battletoads bike level is the only game you need. 😆
That’s still overpriced.
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.
And then the next storefront or launcher will come along. Or GOG/Epic start making moves that appeal to a wider demographic. Or indies publish on their own sites (Vintage Story). Or someone releases a simplistic cracking tool for Steam’s DRM.
There’s a lot more options than you think for those who aren’t happy with the status quo. Going back full circle, on consoles, you are SOL in that situation. PC never had that issue.
Sorry, I’m not following the A-to-B on your comment in relation to this topic. Sony isn’t charging $80 for games, and even $70 games regardless of consoles aren’t doing so hot. Microsoft hasn’t done console exclusives for a decade.
I’m referring to that consoles can set the price period. You don’t have another marketplace (except for the used physical market, if you console supports it) to acquire first or third party games. Therefore, those who own the market can set the price as high as they’d like.
I remember when console prices were standardized at 60 USD during the 7th generation. On steam I’ve never paid more than 40, with the majority of my library costing under 20.
But this game is on Steam, and $80 is a price point companies are flirting with regardless of their ownership of the storefront, like Grand Theft Auto, for instance.
I bought the outer worlds for $10 on a steam summer sale. The original list price and the price a customer pays tends to be much lower on PC (many wishlist and wait), and piracy is an option.
But people forget about the DLC that is expected of the consumer to buy for the “full experience”. Some games don’t have a complete story if you don’t buy the DLC or you can’t access all the features without DLC, such as multiplayer games that don’t let you play with your friends if you don’t have that specific DLC pack.
So not only is it a $70 price up front, they also want you to spend, at least, an extra $30 on the new DLC season pass or buy the DLC separately at a slightly higher cost over time. Also not including the special edition packs with extras, either physical or digital, that add to that initial $70. Ubisoft is the biggest asshole in this space, going as high as $120 for a day 1 release.
I don’t doubt that game studio business models have gotten scummier, but I never liked the phrase “The full experience”.
There’s a few Bioware games I can cite where it was a terrible setup that added story-critical quests through DLC, but most often, a “special edition” or even the season passes tend to add very optional, often-ugly, costumes to games that already offer a number of costumes with the base game.
Saying it often makes people picture that they don’t get an ending to their story, or are locked out of abilities. There are live service games with that issue - the “hero model” being a frequent offender, but in the best of those games, the game’s base price is low and even the guide authors will acknowledge few people should feel the need to buy every character.
I think they only expect a subset of their consumers to get the DLC; most people don’t care if they got the full experience. If you’re playing with your friends, they’ve got the option to play with you DLC-less in every case I can think of. In something like a fighting game, they’ve just got a character that you don’t, or in something like Civilization, if they know they’re playing with you, they host the version of the game that doesn’t include the DLC you don’t have. The entry price exists because they know nowhere near everyone will go for their most expensive edition.
Game prices have been higher before, but the economy is kind of fucked right now (personally, as a Brazilian, buying foreign games was already fucked, but still).
How’s Brazilian regional pricing doing so far? I heard some countries are getting the short end of the stick now because of some users VPN routing to another country for deals.
Games are between 350-450 reais in my experience, which isn’t that outrageous but it’s not good either.
If the reviews are good, I’ll spend the $20 on game pass for a month.
But only if the reviews are very good.
Or some other game caught my attention.
Or I’m replaying Outer Worlds 1
Or I’m still playing Monster Hunter.
Or… I think I’ll just pass on it.
I bought GamePass just for Outer Worlds because everyone pointing out that’s it’s from the team that made “New Vegas”.
I played it for a few hours and dropped it.
It wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t good. And absolutely not preorder good.
I bought GamePass just for Outer Worlds because everyone pointing out that’s it’s from the team that made “New Vegas”.
I did a whole review of this game, and one of the first things I tackled was that it is absolutely not from the New Vegas team in terms of writing or design leadership. I completely blame the marketing for setting wrong expectations by creating that connection.
It is a good game, but going in wrongly thinking (due to misleading marketing) that it is New Vegas In Space is going to leave you frustrated.
Does it play like a higher budget game?
What a fucking waste of money. Xbox cuts are obvious.
I liked the first Outer Worlds a lot. I loved Parvati’s storyline and was so excited when she finally went on that date with Junlei. However, even I’m not paying that much for a sequel.
Just consider what you’re up against - the first one was 7.49€ (the lowest I’ve seen) and I haven’t bought it yet simply because I have too many games to play for years now. I certainly won’t pay more than 10€ for the original or the sequel and I’d never pay MS for their shitty subscription.
Wait for sale.
