Yes, yes it is.
Valve honestly did not have to give away Portal for 2 friggin’ weeks. They could have easily halved the time, or maybe limited it to only new Mac customers. Or hell! They could have just made it half off! But no, they let anybody have it for free. For all the people who were never going to buy it anyway because they didn’t want to spend any money. I think that’s good will, since they really, truly did NOT have to do it. In fact, they could have easily made money, but they chose to give away free content instead.
Remember, Valve is still run by a gamer. I don’t think many of the other AAA-title-producing companies can say the same.
You seem to ignore the 3 things that I posted valve gets out of things like that. Gabe Newell is a true gamer, he only owns and runs part of the company. He is a co-founder. They don’t just do things because they love you. They do them in that manor because they love you but not solely out of love.
Also, if this https://forums.blackmesasource.com/showthread.php?t=6380 ridiculous I don’t know what is.
Why is that ridiculous? The normal version still “only” costs $60.
Besides, nobody is forcing you to buy the game, let alone the “Prestige” version.
In fact, most people around here are probably advising strongly against it.
But then how will he show us how 1337 he is? He may even get called a n00b and totally pwned online because he didn’t get the special one!
I am sorry I should have specified what is ridiculous about it. Not that Activision is pricing it like that but that you KNOW people are going to buy into it
Doesn’t matter, my idiot friend completely forgot about it and then missed out on it
I’d just like to point out that gaming has never been a poor-man’s diversion. It didn’t get more expensive, if anything, it got cheaper. The NeoGeo was worth $600+ with games costing $200+. Granted, NeoGeo was notorious for being expensive, but other games were never too cheap. SNES games went up to (and probably over) $70, and some computer games before that were around $70.
We are probably over reacting to the $10 rise in the price of games from last gen to this one, and possibly from the PS1 generation, but gaming is by no means more expensive than it was before, especially with inflation taken into account.
I’m sure that Super Metroid didn’t have a graphics development budget in the hundreds of millions.
Games indeed cost a HELL of a lot more than they used to to make, but since they have a HELL of a lot bigger market, they make a HELL of a lot more revenue. It’s also why games are getting more bland and generally more broadly inoffensive, like Garfield. They practically all have to have relatively large production costs (though not necessarily as big as AAA titles), and company heads want to be like the others and hit that biggest market, the lowest common denominator.
Oh well, maybe we’ll have another gaming golden era, or maybe games will all just keep getting lamer until it’s all daytime TV.
Nah, gaming has simply gotten more uniform. Before games could be really really cheap or as you said crazy expensive. Average that out and its about the same.
Right. I’m not saying that games haven’t gotten blander. Perhaps they have (though there were always shitty games as well). I dislike the bloatedness of the game industry today too, but there are gems all over, you just have to know where to look. Some smaller indie games are really worth playing, and there is still a market out there for the hardcore. I just wish developers would grow more balls, and start treating games as an art form, not as the behemothic bland entertainment machine that movies have become.
Yeah, Phantasy Star 4 for the Genesis, the original cost for the game was $100.
Part of me still thinks I would pay for it at that price