Diablo 4 is $69.99.

[Santti]

Wrong. It is not standard price. They want it to be the new standard price. And if enough companies follow suit, it eventually will be. As of right now, standard price is $60. ActiBlizz just don't give a fuck.

Remember when the standard price was 50? 60 was outrageous back then.

It's going to be 70 now. You can already see it in some of the upcoming games. Why? Because people will pay for it.

[Biomega]

It's not about inflation, dude. Games have been maintaining their price for a very, very long time, far beyond inflation.

You realize you're defusing your own argument here, right? They haven't adjusted for inflation for a long time - now they have. Surprise, shock, puzzlement.

[Fencers]

Games in the SNES era cost $60+ as well. I remember paying $80 for Earthbound and $70 for FF3 (6 in reality). I paid $70 for Ultima 7 and Simcity 2000 as well. That was like in 1990s dollars too.

[PACOX]

Do you not expect video game prices to be influenced by inflation at all?

Video game prices actually havent been influenced by inflation. Don't make that argument unless you want prices to actually be as variable as inflation, or corporations to use that as an excuse.


Game has actually gotten cheaper over the last 20-30 years. Games were $30-60 dollars for the SNES and N64. I remember paying ~$40 for games as a kid. Thats $70 today. AAA games just started costed $70 and a lot high quality games still cost ~$40-50.


WoWs sub has remained consistent throughout the years, but its cost adjusted for inflation has only gone down, that goes for just about any sub based game because most have the same price point.


Consoles were INSANELY expensive back in the day compared to what they are now, and they did a lot less, you had to just live with their faults, and wasn't unheard of to have to replace on in the middle of a generation. My Playstations have been the center of my entertainment systems since the PS2 because the consoles could fill the role of multiple devices cheaper than the cost of buying each individual piece of hardware at the time while still being relatively cheaper than consoles of previous generations. Point is that gaming only got cheaper while we as gamers got more.


And I haven't hit on the wide array of deals, giveaways, services like Game Pass that we have now which make it easier to access games for cheap. People who claim gaming has gotten expensive are wild and only kill the efforts of companies looking to keep gaming accessible to all.




More on topic. I'm personally waiting until the game is on sale not to say Blizzard is being unfair. It's a standard asking price and it's up to the consumer to decide whether it's worth it or not. They aren't going above standard asking price, you'll definitely get 20+ hours out of the game, it's a high budget game, there's no reason for them not ask that price.

[Mysterymask]

Why have outrage over Diablo 4 in particular?

Because it's a blizzard game and this is MMO champion

[Fencers]

Because it's a blizzard game and this is MMO champion

Fair point.

I often forget this forum is related to Blizzard's World of Warcraft. I only came here for Guild Wars 2 and have since edited the page to only the general games and movies sections.

[Neuroticaine]

I am sorry but I looked at the first 3 pages and no one is talking about this, how did blizzard get away with this?
I understand that some game companies want to be scummy and charge $70 for the ps5 versions of the game but how come the Digital version purchased from battle.net(I initially pre order it for ps5 cuz of friends) is $69.99. IS not a physical copy of the game!!!!

While everyone is talking about the lore, the hardcore statue thing and how similar it is to D3, I feel like this has gone over the head of many of you and this is so wrong. Its thievery of the highest level. And what sucks is that if you want to play with your friends you have to fork out $70 for something that you won't really own since its not a physical copy or anything like that and its already too late to purchase a wow token cuz I haven't paid my wow sub unless someone knows of a way to have the gold on your toon from an unsub account get use to buy a wow token. This sucks. /rant over.

/edit, found a way to purchase a wow token with my unsub account. still, it sucks.

$70 is the new standard. You might not like it, but that's just the way it is. The only thing you can do is not buy them.

[Biomega]

Video game prices actually havent been influenced by inflation.

Absolutely they have. It's just that there's other factors at play as well that determine their price, and there's a complex interplay between them - things like shifting away from physical media, increasing budgets, graphics arms races, live service, and so on and so forth all play into this.

This price increase was a long time coming. Everyone expected it.

[Utrrabbit]

I am sorry but I looked at the first 3 pages and no one is talking about this, how did blizzard get away with this?
I understand that some game companies want to be scummy and charge $70 for the ps5 versions of the game but how come the Digital version purchased from battle.net(I initially pre order it for ps5 cuz of friends) is $69.99. IS not a physical copy of the game!!!!

While everyone is talking about the lore, the hardcore statue thing and how similar it is to D3, I feel like this has gone over the head of many of you and this is so wrong. Its thievery of the highest level. And what sucks is that if you want to play with your friends you have to fork out $70 for something that you won't really own since its not a physical copy or anything like that and its already too late to purchase a wow token cuz I haven't paid my wow sub unless someone knows of a way to have the gold on your toon from an unsub account get use to buy a wow token. This sucks. /rant over.

/edit, found a way to purchase a wow token with my unsub account. still, it sucks.

Prices have gone down 70 is cheap. Games in the 90s use to go for over 100.

[Kallisto]

This is also not true. Prices were pretty much stable from PS2 era until today. SNES and N64 games were more expensive but that was 30 years ago.

Street fighter 2 on the SNES you were lucky to get for $60. Most places in the US it was $80 or even $90 these were not outliers, these were the base prices. It wasn't until PS1 era that $60 brand new became norm.

[agentsi]

I am sorry but I looked at the first 3 pages and no one is talking about this, how did blizzard get away with this?
I understand that some game companies want to be scummy and charge $70 for the ps5 versions of the game but how come the Digital version purchased from battle.net(I initially pre order it for ps5 cuz of friends) is $69.99. IS not a physical copy of the game!!!!

While everyone is talking about the lore, the hardcore statue thing and how similar it is to D3, I feel like this has gone over the head of many of you and this is so wrong. Its thievery of the highest level. And what sucks is that if you want to play with your friends you have to fork out $70 for something that you won't really own since its not a physical copy or anything like that and its already too late to purchase a wow token cuz I haven't paid my wow sub unless someone knows of a way to have the gold on your toon from an unsub account get use to buy a wow token. This sucks. /rant over.

/edit, found a way to purchase a wow token with my unsub account. still, it sucks.

If you don't have the money to buy something, then don't complain about it. End of story.

- - - Updated - - -

Street fighter 2 on the SNES you were lucky to get for $60. Most places in the US it was $80 or even $90 these were not outliers, these were the base prices. It wasn't until PS1 era that $60 brand new became norm.

I love that you mentioned this. My grandmother freaked out when we were at Toys'R'us after agreeing to buy this for me as a gift, only to find out with tax it was almost $80. lol

[Tommi]

I remember paying £39.99 in teh 90's for games. These days, adjusted for inflation, thats £116.

Games are one thing that never really increased with inflation. We should be thankful gaming is as cheap as it is.

EDIT: Just checked prices on an SNES at launch. $199. $199 in 1991 is worth $443.24 today. That's same as we pay for consoles now. If we assume the low end of SNES games at $40 (some was as high at $70 back then!). $40 in 1991 is worth $89.09 today.

[Spicymemer]

While i think D4 will flop hard for anyone that doesnt have 'diablo brain' and thus its price is unjustifyable (its $110/140/155 in Aus btw)
2010 to 2023 has been around ~40% inflation.
$49.99 then is $69.99 now
Get a job.

[Mysterymask]

Street fighter 2 on the SNES you were lucky to get for $60. Most places in the US it was $80 or even $90 these were not outliers, these were the base prices. It wasn't until PS1 era that $60 brand new became norm.

A lot of that can be attributed to how much more expensive cartridges were to produce over CDs. I remember the old ad for ff7 being that if it were on N64 it would cost $100

Things on said cartridges would jack the price up too

Earthbound came with a strategy guide
MegaMan X2, 3, and StarFox had a special chip so the SNES could render the wireframe
FF3 was the most technically ambitious SNES game on the market

Now before y'all go "well there's no CD or cartridge now!" Think about how much more expensive a triple A game is these days...FF4 was made by like 8 people in a basement and that covered music, writing, coding, art, marketing, etc

Now a game like Diablo 4 can fit like 4.5 x 10^7 copy's of ff4 in it. Music now has to hire an orchestra, you need actual voice actors, marketing is more expensive and now it's in a publically traded company that has to keep stockholders happy and they are legally obligated to do so.

Yeah that last part sucks but you want to fix that I suggest starting a political revolution

[zarkonan]

Video game prices actually havent been influenced by inflation. Don't make that argument unless you want prices to actually be as variable as inflation, or corporations to use that as an excuse.


Game has actually gotten cheaper over the last 20-30 years. Games were $30-60 dollars for the SNES and N64. I remember paying ~$40 for games as a kid. Thats $70 today. AAA games just started costed $70 and a lot high quality games still cost ~$40-50.


WoWs sub has remained consistent throughout the years, but its cost adjusted for inflation has only gone down, that goes for just about any sub based game because most have the same price point.


Consoles were INSANELY expensive back in the day compared to what they are now, and they did a lot less, you had to just live with their faults, and wasn't unheard of to have to replace on in the middle of a generation. My Playstations have been the center of my entertainment systems since the PS2 because the consoles could fill the role of multiple devices cheaper than the cost of buying each individual piece of hardware at the time while still being relatively cheaper than consoles of previous generations. Point is that gaming only got cheaper while we as gamers got more.


And I haven't hit on the wide array of deals, giveaways, services like Game Pass that we have now which make it easier to access games for cheap. People who claim gaming has gotten expensive are wild and only kill the efforts of companies looking to keep gaming accessible to all.




More on topic. I'm personally waiting until the game is on sale not to say Blizzard is being unfair. It's a standard asking price and it's up to the consumer to decide whether it's worth it or not. They aren't going above standard asking price, you'll definitely get 20+ hours out of the game, it's a high budget game, there's no reason for them not ask that price.

Back, half the cost was for chip holding the game in game card, ps5/xbox/steam/epic all have 15 to 30% cut from retail price of 70, so when blizzard sale at the same price on their store, its 100% to them

[jackofwind]

Why do people think that video games will stay unaffected by inflation forever?

It's honestly astonishing that new games are even being sold for $60-70 anymore, considering they were roughly the same price 30 years ago.

[Tech614]

Wrong. It is not standard price.

Sounds like cope. The only major publishers still holding out at $59.99 are Capcom and Bamco. It's the new standard.

[CasualVader]

The increase in price is most likely all the based ''goodies'' such as WoW mount and few more that shouldn't been offered in the base game option.

They should've made a buyable option that is purely the game with no side goodies.

My friend bought the game yesterday and felt like ''WHY do I need to have the WoW mount for a game I do not play?''.

So going to be interesting to see how things moving forward.

[Hitei]

I continue to wonder why nobody else seems to remember the era of gaming where you would go to the store and games would range in price from as low as $30 to as high as $90 just for the game itself - no special editions or add-ons, just the game in a box.

This. Remember in the 90s when SNES games sold for 80-120 bucks EACH? If anything, pricing has gone DOWN drastically.

People remember this era, it's just a really dumb argument to present

It's like saying "Well it's reasonable that this plane ticket is overpriced, because back in the day plane tickets were an extremely expensive luxury!". Video games used to be very expensive because they were much more expensive to produce and selling to a niche customer base of upper middle and upper class families. That has not been the case for decades. It is especially not true in an age where post development cost of production is as low as server costs, because for a game like D4 most of their sales aren't even producing physical copies that need packaging shipping and licensing to be sold at third party vendors, they are just downloads.

It is not """thievery""" (bit of a strawman for you to take this so literally) it is just unapologetic price hiking because they believe they can get away with price hiking. Their customer base is larger than it has ever been, and they have like four monetization models in the game.

It's not $70 because "inflation!!!!" or because dev costs have gone up enough to warrant it, or because that's the standard price for console games (it isn't), or because games used to be expensive.

It's $70 because their monetization team sat down and went "Diablo is a very strong brand and it's been a while since the last one, we're confident we can do DLC and season passes and MTX and also charge $10 more for box price and it will still sell well out the gate, and then a couple months in we can put it on """sale""" for the normal PC game price of $60 and push even more copies."

It's unabashed corporate greed, and while I'm all for people buying the game if they want to, it's pretty silly to pretend this as some "well we haaave to, because um, the console generation is starting to sometimes charge that!". Especially after the last three game launches out of Blizzard have either had price increases (DF) or really, really slimy monetization (D:I and OW2).

[Biomega]

The increase in price is most likely all the based ''goodies'' such as WoW mount and few more that shouldn't been offered in the base game option.

They should've made a buyable option that is purely the game with no side goodies.

My friend bought the game yesterday and felt like ''WHY do I need to have the WoW mount for a game I do not play?''.

So going to be interesting to see how things moving forward.

While I understand and feel for the sentiment, the reality is that many products - not just games - have features or perks that you don't want or need, and they're rolled into the price. It's kind of like taxation - well maybe *I* don't ever use the fire department or whatever, so why am I paying for it? Because it's part of a collective deal we engage in for simplicity, and we accept that we overpay on some things but also get more than a proportionate share out of others.

Why was I paying $15 in WoW to support PvP when I never PvP? Can't I just get a $10 plan that doesn't let me queue for Arena or BGs? I'd love that! But there's no end to this. At some point you just roll things into it and accept that there's small disproportionalities in the way that your money translates into what you are getting.

That doesn't mean D4 did it perfectly by any means, but the principle of the thing is just a very mundane business practice with reasonable justification.