this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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Star Wars Jedi: Survivor 55% off right now (Steam)
Street Fighter 6 44% off right now (Fanatical)
Starfield 33% off right now (40%, microsoft store, Feb 8 2024)
Fairing a little bit better than the above:
Resident Evil 4 Remake 25% off right now (Steam)
Persona 3 Reload 15% off right now GameBillet
Baldur's Gate 3 10% off historically (10%, gog, Dec 21 2023)
These are just the ones I'm familiar with off the top of my head. Of them, only Baldur's Gate 3's discount levels are what I would call "healthy". 10% for Christmas and no discount since means it's doing well.
I'd say anything under 30% is simply a reflection of how high the profit margins are for sellers. Seeing as 30% is the industry fee tacked onto titles by storefronts.
Star Wars, Starfield (Not a good game at all), Resi, and Persona are all 'free' on GamePass. So they've most likely already made their expected profit from sales if going that route was the more profitable decision. That really just leaves SF6, which these days isn't that strong a franchise and fighting games are niche.
Videogames are the largest entertainment industry in the world, dwarfing books, film, and music. The industry is seeing record profits year-on-year. Add to that gaming being one of the most resilient entertainment forms during economic downturns due to its price-to-hour ratio, I don't see these discounts being a reflection of market difficulties.
Didn't DLC and MTX come about because consumers wouldn't accept a rise in sticker price for games?
I'm not saying you're wrong, either, you may very well have a point. I'm just having a hard time reconciling "We added DLC in order to make more money since we can't raise the sticker price" with "30% discounts are a reflection of how high the profit margins are for sellers"
They came out because the rise of the Internet made it possible and companies found new ways to make more money.
Horse armour wasn’t about recouping costs.
okay, i can accept that
thanks for taking the time to explain it to me
None of those games are that recent.
Discounts over time are a perfectly standard part of their pricing strategy. It's not even mildly unhealthy. Resellers don't count at all, because that's always their strategy.
The unusual part of suicide squad and skull and bones is that they're brand new games. The discounts are not huge because there's a problem with the market. They're huge because they're dogshit excuses for products and nobody is stupid enough to buy them.
every game on that list was released after Jan 1, 2023. If that is not "recent" then I have no idea what is.
3 months is recent.
A game having a significant sale 6 months or a year later is perfectly normal behavior. It tells you absolutely nothing about the industry. It's worked that way for decades. It's not the tiniest bit unusual.
Lots of those games are nearly a year old, were way overhyped vs their actual reviews, or had technical issues that may or may not have been resolved.
The Baldurs gate discount is only 10% because its still very popular but the sales have dipped a bit because their initial fan base already bought it.
Those are just bog standard game discounts that have been going on forever for common reasons. They have nothing at all to do with the industry, which is making record profits, laying off people to make even more record profits.
I literally googled "recent aaa titles" and picked the first 6~ off of the list. I don't hold any personal opinions of any of them except for Starfield, which I have seen my roommate play.
Regarding Starfield: it seemed to me that it was a 6/10 game.