Lots of productive thoughts in here and the section about the Triple-A industry coughing up blood made me chuckle.
I think for me, my brief stint at university (hated it) and getting into retro really hammered home the sheer price of a lot of modern games/gaming for me. When you can buy a Wii or a DS for £40 in the UK, often cheaper and most Xbox, PS2 and 360 games are below £5, it really puts things into perspective; I can't look at a Triple-A game now without thinking "That costs 2 consoles."
As for your question at the end about worth and what I'm generally willing to pay? If something is £20 or below I'm inclined to try it even if I have only a vague interest in it; that's a sum of money as to where I feel even a single weekend of enjoyment out of it is fair. Between £30-50 I usually mull it over for a few days or make sure there's literally nothing else I want to play otherwise. Anything above £50? I only buy Nintendo games at full price at that bracket, they aren't perfect but I find them consistently not disappointing.
Thanks so much! It's wild to imagine, but you're absolutely right about the relative value of those older devices and their hardware, which only seems to be increasing with time. The incentive structures in high-level game design were much different back in those halcyon days of the sixth console generation, and it led to a much greater density of excellent games than we get nowadays. I suspect more and more people are going to see this as an alternative to engaging with the modern AAA market.
I'm with you on the idea that public funding of game development is essential to the establishment of the medium as a legitimate artistic outlet. In fact, plenty of countries DO publicly funded grants for smaller game developers - I see the loading splash for the German one all the time. However, there are two big issues with the idea of purely publicly backed, freely distributed games.
One is that very few people now actually want to release their passion project for free - back in the day, almost all indie games were free, and had incredibly restrictive releases, where even if they did catch on, they'd be reliant on other unpaid fans working to localize them and patch them. But with XBLA and Steam, publishing to a global platform was no longer out of reach for indies, and the instant they started seeing a few of their contemporaries making numbers, most people abandoned the idea of not eventually trying to turn their work into a profitable venture. Even some of the original freebies, like Cave Story and La Mulana got re-releases to turn a buck - and those were both games that had been available for anyone on the planet to download and play for free, with more content and craft than a lot of AAA games of the time.
The other problem is best illustrated by a story. There was a developer called Tale of Tales, a husband and wife team of artists in Belgium who for a while were semi-notorious for releasing very strange, almost anti-games, like The Path, The Endless Forest, and The Graveyard. Then, in 2015, they released Sunset, which was widely ridiculed, a financial disaster, and caused them to abandon development altogether. At the time, most of the focus was on how they were another victim of Gamergate, and Sunset was simply too political, and so on, but the truth is a bit more complicated. It turns out that they had been developing games while funded by artistic grants in Belgium, and so the numbers they made with their projects didn't really matter as much as how many people got a chance to check them out. However, going into Sunset's development, it seems that the grant system got overhauled, and a specific carveout for game development in particular was added, which they then had to apply to, and it had very different requirements and expectations. The big picture is that they got less of the development costs covered, and the game was generally considered to be a product primarily rather than just an art piece. In trying to adapt, they tried crowdfunding, wound up losing a lot of their money to bad promotional hustles, doubling the price of the game, and all for something that was hopeless as a marketable product anyway.
I don't think it has to be this way, but I also think one of the things driving strong indie success is the idea that they CAN strike it big - they COULD be the next Balatro or Palworld, and they don't necessarily need to hitch their wagon to a big publisher to make it happen. On the other hand, I think more 'artistic' endeavors should probably be handled differently from commercial or more broadly gaming ventures. We deserve to publicly fund both in some way, but I don't know if the nuance is there for anyone who would be in charge of those decisions.
Yeah, the hardest part will revolve around getting the purse-strings in the right hands. As your Tale of Tales story illustrates, making a product out of an art piece can have devastating effects on its credibility as artwork. The problem is that the public agencies and private incubators of today don't want to pay to facilitate artwork unless it can be used as an instrument of profit and/or cultural power-projection, and these are anathema to the ethos that produced the likes of Cave Story and La Mulana.
It's fascinating to compare those games to Balatro and Palworld, because the former were motivated all but entirely by creative passion and the latter (especially Palworld) were commercial products above all. I suppose the best direction for the future is to financially incubate the creative passion behind these projects rather than the projects themselves, and that's probably too abstract a deliverable for the public sector. Gamers and gamers alone understand the nuance at play, so I reckon we'll have to be the ones to effectuate durable support for Indie creativity in the end.
I indulge in a full-price AAA game from time to time, but for anyone that is not reviewing games for a living there is no reason to pay full price for a game ever.
All but a few games go on sale for 25-50% off only 6-12 months after their release. This is also enough time for all of the worst bugs and balance issues to be fixed, so in effect you’re getting a better product for less money. Win-win.
If one only buys games on deep discount then those high prices don’t matter as much. But, as you pointed out, you still have to watch for overrated and mediocre games.
I also have a policy of never buying early-release games and that saves me much frustration as well. The only time that I made an exception was for Deep Rock Galactic Survivor and I don’t regret that at all.
The quality we've gotten lately from indie gaming is really astounding. Personally I find myself with more money than time since having a child and too many quality games to get to. That's a problem I never imagined I'd have back in the mid-2000s when I had to beg my parents for $50 for literally any release.
Just in the last six months or so I had major updates from Derail Valley and Sailwind, new DLC from Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, release of Blue Prince. I don't think any of these games cost me more than $30 (though some increased in price later on) and yet amongst them 2025 has been one of the best gaming years ever for me. And that's what I could manage to actually get to! There are over 100 games on my steam wishlist that I hope to play one day.
To me the shocking thing about games like the ones I listed above (Blue Prince excepted, since it's a new release) is how long the developers manage to support them. Workers & Resources and Derail Valley were both released into Early Access in 2019 in states that would've passed for a completed game 20 years ago. Here we are 6 years later still getting new content for both, for free in the case of Derail Valley.
I'm not unwilling to pay high prices - like I said, I have more money than time right now - but I just don't have to. The best quality seems to be in the $30ish range.
Arts funding for gaming is an absolutely inspired idea, and one that I've never heard floated before, but it really should be. I suppose the fact that it hasn't been discussed already is indicative of the continued dismissal of video games, the very problem we'd like to solve.
Another thing that I kind of wonder about which could have a massive impact on the future of gaming (especially indie/solo developers) is UBI. Obviously, this is highly speculative, and the future is so uncertain right now that such a policy could be seriously considered this decade, or ignored for another 100 years. We just don't know.
This study argues that UBI is actually far more affordable than people think, and the benefits for people involved in financially risky ventures such as making art are obvious. Of course, it would be vigorously opposed by landlords, employers etc., because if we had an actually good safety net they'd have to start treating people like human beings, and they don't want to do that.
Lots of productive thoughts in here and the section about the Triple-A industry coughing up blood made me chuckle.
I think for me, my brief stint at university (hated it) and getting into retro really hammered home the sheer price of a lot of modern games/gaming for me. When you can buy a Wii or a DS for £40 in the UK, often cheaper and most Xbox, PS2 and 360 games are below £5, it really puts things into perspective; I can't look at a Triple-A game now without thinking "That costs 2 consoles."
As for your question at the end about worth and what I'm generally willing to pay? If something is £20 or below I'm inclined to try it even if I have only a vague interest in it; that's a sum of money as to where I feel even a single weekend of enjoyment out of it is fair. Between £30-50 I usually mull it over for a few days or make sure there's literally nothing else I want to play otherwise. Anything above £50? I only buy Nintendo games at full price at that bracket, they aren't perfect but I find them consistently not disappointing.
Thanks so much! It's wild to imagine, but you're absolutely right about the relative value of those older devices and their hardware, which only seems to be increasing with time. The incentive structures in high-level game design were much different back in those halcyon days of the sixth console generation, and it led to a much greater density of excellent games than we get nowadays. I suspect more and more people are going to see this as an alternative to engaging with the modern AAA market.
I'm with you on the idea that public funding of game development is essential to the establishment of the medium as a legitimate artistic outlet. In fact, plenty of countries DO publicly funded grants for smaller game developers - I see the loading splash for the German one all the time. However, there are two big issues with the idea of purely publicly backed, freely distributed games.
One is that very few people now actually want to release their passion project for free - back in the day, almost all indie games were free, and had incredibly restrictive releases, where even if they did catch on, they'd be reliant on other unpaid fans working to localize them and patch them. But with XBLA and Steam, publishing to a global platform was no longer out of reach for indies, and the instant they started seeing a few of their contemporaries making numbers, most people abandoned the idea of not eventually trying to turn their work into a profitable venture. Even some of the original freebies, like Cave Story and La Mulana got re-releases to turn a buck - and those were both games that had been available for anyone on the planet to download and play for free, with more content and craft than a lot of AAA games of the time.
The other problem is best illustrated by a story. There was a developer called Tale of Tales, a husband and wife team of artists in Belgium who for a while were semi-notorious for releasing very strange, almost anti-games, like The Path, The Endless Forest, and The Graveyard. Then, in 2015, they released Sunset, which was widely ridiculed, a financial disaster, and caused them to abandon development altogether. At the time, most of the focus was on how they were another victim of Gamergate, and Sunset was simply too political, and so on, but the truth is a bit more complicated. It turns out that they had been developing games while funded by artistic grants in Belgium, and so the numbers they made with their projects didn't really matter as much as how many people got a chance to check them out. However, going into Sunset's development, it seems that the grant system got overhauled, and a specific carveout for game development in particular was added, which they then had to apply to, and it had very different requirements and expectations. The big picture is that they got less of the development costs covered, and the game was generally considered to be a product primarily rather than just an art piece. In trying to adapt, they tried crowdfunding, wound up losing a lot of their money to bad promotional hustles, doubling the price of the game, and all for something that was hopeless as a marketable product anyway.
I don't think it has to be this way, but I also think one of the things driving strong indie success is the idea that they CAN strike it big - they COULD be the next Balatro or Palworld, and they don't necessarily need to hitch their wagon to a big publisher to make it happen. On the other hand, I think more 'artistic' endeavors should probably be handled differently from commercial or more broadly gaming ventures. We deserve to publicly fund both in some way, but I don't know if the nuance is there for anyone who would be in charge of those decisions.
Yeah, the hardest part will revolve around getting the purse-strings in the right hands. As your Tale of Tales story illustrates, making a product out of an art piece can have devastating effects on its credibility as artwork. The problem is that the public agencies and private incubators of today don't want to pay to facilitate artwork unless it can be used as an instrument of profit and/or cultural power-projection, and these are anathema to the ethos that produced the likes of Cave Story and La Mulana.
It's fascinating to compare those games to Balatro and Palworld, because the former were motivated all but entirely by creative passion and the latter (especially Palworld) were commercial products above all. I suppose the best direction for the future is to financially incubate the creative passion behind these projects rather than the projects themselves, and that's probably too abstract a deliverable for the public sector. Gamers and gamers alone understand the nuance at play, so I reckon we'll have to be the ones to effectuate durable support for Indie creativity in the end.
I indulge in a full-price AAA game from time to time, but for anyone that is not reviewing games for a living there is no reason to pay full price for a game ever.
All but a few games go on sale for 25-50% off only 6-12 months after their release. This is also enough time for all of the worst bugs and balance issues to be fixed, so in effect you’re getting a better product for less money. Win-win.
If one only buys games on deep discount then those high prices don’t matter as much. But, as you pointed out, you still have to watch for overrated and mediocre games.
I also have a policy of never buying early-release games and that saves me much frustration as well. The only time that I made an exception was for Deep Rock Galactic Survivor and I don’t regret that at all.
The quality we've gotten lately from indie gaming is really astounding. Personally I find myself with more money than time since having a child and too many quality games to get to. That's a problem I never imagined I'd have back in the mid-2000s when I had to beg my parents for $50 for literally any release.
Just in the last six months or so I had major updates from Derail Valley and Sailwind, new DLC from Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, release of Blue Prince. I don't think any of these games cost me more than $30 (though some increased in price later on) and yet amongst them 2025 has been one of the best gaming years ever for me. And that's what I could manage to actually get to! There are over 100 games on my steam wishlist that I hope to play one day.
To me the shocking thing about games like the ones I listed above (Blue Prince excepted, since it's a new release) is how long the developers manage to support them. Workers & Resources and Derail Valley were both released into Early Access in 2019 in states that would've passed for a completed game 20 years ago. Here we are 6 years later still getting new content for both, for free in the case of Derail Valley.
I'm not unwilling to pay high prices - like I said, I have more money than time right now - but I just don't have to. The best quality seems to be in the $30ish range.
Arts funding for gaming is an absolutely inspired idea, and one that I've never heard floated before, but it really should be. I suppose the fact that it hasn't been discussed already is indicative of the continued dismissal of video games, the very problem we'd like to solve.
Another thing that I kind of wonder about which could have a massive impact on the future of gaming (especially indie/solo developers) is UBI. Obviously, this is highly speculative, and the future is so uncertain right now that such a policy could be seriously considered this decade, or ignored for another 100 years. We just don't know.
The most convincing case I've seen was made here:
https://www.microsimulation.pub/articles/00286
This study argues that UBI is actually far more affordable than people think, and the benefits for people involved in financially risky ventures such as making art are obvious. Of course, it would be vigorously opposed by landlords, employers etc., because if we had an actually good safety net they'd have to start treating people like human beings, and they don't want to do that.