July 27th, 2024. Game pricing is weird.

This is gonna be a short one(And everything is in USD).

Video game pricing is really, really weird though, isn't it?

You have free games with no strings attached, like Cave Story, Dwarf Fortress, and Spelunky. You have free games with paid additions(mostly live service games), like Fortnite, League of Legends, Counterstrike. You have cheap indie games, like Undertale for 10, Hollow Knight for 15, Hades for 25, Tunic for 30, Factorio for 35. And then you have full priced games at 60-70, like Call of Duty, Resident Evil, Dark Souls, Monster Hunter, Battlefield, Final Fantasy.

Whether a game is good or not doesn't seem to determine its price, but rather the labor put in and the weight class it hangs out in. Indie games with small teams create games that are perceived to be "smaller", and so have lower starting price tags, allowing more people to access their games as well. AAA games have massive teams and put more effort into things like visual fidelity, massive orchestras, motion captured animations, large amounts of high quality voice acting. At least, that's the ideal. We get loads of bad AAA games that are bloated, messy, incomplete. Suicide Squad, Cyberpunk's initial launch, Jedi Survivor's PC port, Call of Duty's short and often bland campaigns, the list goes on. None of these bad aspects changed the fact that their price tags was set to the market standards for AAA.

And we have the giants of free to play, live service games. Fortnite, League of Legends, Hoyoverse's catalog of games like Genshin Impact and Honkai Starrail. Free to step in, but if you want to be a proper player, you're expected to splash some cash. And these games really allow you to spend infinite money if you want to. The same goes for a lot of MMOs, like Destiny and Final Fantasy 14. You want all the cosmetics? Expect to spend thousands of dollars. It's like a skill ceiling, but for spending. Low spending floor, high spending ceiling.

VideoGameDunkey made a famous video on this, and I think many in the gaming landscape kind of already know how it is. The closest comparison I can think of is... technology? Like a high quality laptop with better parts is going to cost more, but a crappy old one, or the one your friend jury rigged for you, is gonna cost less. Other artforms, like movies, books, television, music, don't really follow the same rules. Especially in a world of streaming and subscriptions, price tags are relatively low for a large amount of content, and price tags are standardized for whole mediums, instead of having huge variation.

The reason this comes to mind was a mental conundrum I had when I saw the Marvel Vs Capcom Collection. It is a collection of classic arcade games developed by Capcom, featuring Marvel characters. Specifically, there are 6 games, with 5 fighting games and 1 beat em up game. The price tag of this collection is 50 dollars. Mentally, I thought, "Well that price tag is kind of high for a collection of old games, isn't it?" If you think of the price per game, it's less than 10 dollars per game, which is usually pretty reasonable. Most people will think of any game less than 10 is pretty close to being free. But bundle them together, and a price tag of 50 feels oddly large.

And how far up would this go? If you bundled together a hundred old games, how much would it cost? Also keep in mind that generally, video games get significantly cheaper over time. Modern 60 and 70 dollar games go on sale regularly, and get permanent price slashes after a few years. The original Modern Warfare 2 is now 20 dollars, for example, at 15 years old, while it was initially 60. Old games are so simple and basic that you can find them for free on browsers now, like classic Sonic, Mario, and Atari games.

So for me, old arcade games are... basically free. I could probably download a lot of these in a few seconds, super easily accessible, even if they're dubiously legal. Like, you can find this stuff on Google.

I am super happy that this Marvel Vs Capcom Collection exists. These classic older games are legally accessible, and preserved physically for the future. With new technology, like rollback, music collection, disabling screenflash, and one button specials, it should be a lot more accessible to play stuff like online and with your friends. It's just that its pricetag is both totally justified and weirdly steep.