Prices are insane

How is it off topic in a thread about prices and whether the new game costs more than the old game after considering inflation?

In any case, I responded to the claim that wages have not kept up with inflation. Last I checked, 0.3% is a positive number. You might wish that it was higher, but regardless, it's a positive number. Therefore, wages have kept up with inflation in the US and in fact have been very slightly better than that.
Because wages haven't kept up. If I'm using my wage increase to subsidise an increase in general inflation, that affects my disposable (which is the first thing to go). And this is before we analyse inflation rates in different sectors (which are details that the median obscures), which most definitely takes this into off topic territory.

I get it. You want to believe that wages have kept up, and you believe a technicality wins you that point. All I'm trying to say is that it hasn't, and that it's not worth anyone's time to hash out why that is here.

(and I haven't even gotten started on how the median obscures the demographics per types of earner as well)

Throw me a PM if you want to get into this in more detail :)
 
Except that they have, as I demonstrated. The numbers are not on your side, no matter how much you insist otherwise.
Moderator Action: Let it drop, or take up Gorbles' PM offer if you want to debate inflation. The rate of inflation is Off-Topic (and variable depending on geography and sector) and repeating "I'm right" does not lead to productive discussion.

Further posting insisting that other posters are wrong, especially without providing evidence to back that up, may constitute trolling.
 
Inflation or no, I remember a push to get people on board of digital sales instead of physical copies as it would cut down on distribution costs and people even speaking of the price of games seeing a price drop because distribution was such a "large" part of production costs. Even the console industry is now making consoles with no disc drive. Yet we never did see a price drop even briefly. Actually DLC models extended and prices went up $10. Marketing strategies even have people paying money for the "privilege" to beta tests games but what they are really selling is "early access". Some MMOs even blatantly charge money for access to the closed betas. Not to sound all edgy - but gaming culture has became a culture of eating out of the hands of the industry. They are like "dopamine dealers" and many gamers need a "fix" and will pay for it. The Deluxe Edition or Founders Edition are the "fix" laced with the "good stuff". (Exclusive DLCs and Early Access) It gives you gamer "street cred".

Now edgy parallel aside, I too have been back and forth on the Deluxe. I am assuming none of these Editions offer expansion pack pre-buys? I already know I will buy the expansions and that the expansions will eventually come out, so I would be ok with buying everything up front. But Civ 6 has me worried because they really just hammered out some DLC for that game (which is a common marketing strategy now that MANY companies follow). What if 7 ends up with even more DLC than 6? What is odd is I actually get it to some extent. I spend a LOT of hours in Civ. You can give me 15 civs to play with or 100 and I will probably put close to the same amount of hours into it honestly. Extra civs really only add a small amount of value for me so it is easy for me to not care. If I DO feel like spicing things up and throw a couple dollars more for more variety, at least it is going to a dev and a franchise I love. However, if the base game underwhelms me, I will never invest in it. This was proven in Civ 5 and 6 for me and my tastes. I prefer the expansions to the bonus content packs and they do add up to a ridiculous amount of money anyways. I personally do not feel like I am "missing" content by not having them nor do I even necessarily feel like "they should have been in the base game. Civ 6 was pretty big with a lot of variety just on the base game and expansions. Firaxis has not pulled a "Sims 4" on us by any stretch of the imagination.

I guess my big debate internally is how much I want to invest into Civ this go around. Which is not an easy question for me currently as I am very back and forth. It isn't an issue of affordability or even if they are gouging. It is a quiestion of how much I think I will enjoy this version and man, I have never been so back and forth on a new iteration on Civ before.
 
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I don't think it is that easy to buy a game on steam on another region, as your account is tied to a region and you can only change once every 3 months, plus probably some other measures steam has to give the producers many games that does some level of regional pricing some way to feel safe about it.

As I said, it's in the interest of the people selling the product (whether we're talking about the developer, the publisher or the platform) to make it as difficult as possible, which is why it's only kind of an argument.

and don't seems like they have a negative effect on Firaxis creative wise

I want to disagree here. The difference in the amount and quality of bugfixing and balancing done by Firaxis versus, say, Triumph Studios (the developers of Age of Wonders) is huge. And because I have a hard time believing Firaxis doesn't care about those things, the only sensible conclusion is that Firaxis is required by 2K to spend time on creating new content at the cost of time spent on polishing existing content - even when that polishing really needs to happen.

Remember, it took almost two and a half years for Firaxis to (in an expansion only!) reduce late-game production costs in Civ 6. And even with that reduction, they are still too high. Not to mention that the reduction applies exclusively to buildings, and not to units and wonders. This should have been a patch-after-one-month change. And there's a ton of examples like this. Like tech and civic costs - it wasn't even twenty-four hours after release before a mod increasing the increment of tech and civic costs was uploaded to this website. The official version of the game never saw this fixed, except for an anti-snowball mechanic that made techs and civics more expensive if you were ahead of the game era.
 
Remember, it took almost two and a half years for Firaxis to (in an expansion only!) reduce late-game production costs in Civ 6. And even with that reduction, they are still too high. Not to mention that the reduction applies exclusively to buildings, and not to units and wonders. This should have been a patch-after-one-month change. And there's a ton of examples like this. Like tech and civic costs - it wasn't even twenty-four hours after release before a mod increasing the increment of tech and civic costs was uploaded to this website. The official version of the game never saw this fixed, except for an anti-snowball mechanic that made techs and civics more expensive if you were ahead of the game era.
Bugfixing goes without saying, but balance is something else. The benefit of mods is that they're opt-in. You might think X and Y were necessary, but I can guarantee there would be others that wouldn't. Firaxis have to weigh these suggestions against how they want the game to evolve.
 
Bugfixing goes without saying, but balance is something else. The benefit of mods is that they're opt-in. You might think X and Y were necessary, but I can guarantee there would be others that wouldn't. Firaxis have to weigh these suggestions against how they want the game to evolve.

I am a Deity-level player (as in, I'll fool around for the first two hundred turns and still win comfortably) and I still thought production costs were too high.

Do the math for what that means for the average person, who has a significantly worse understanding of production being king.

Not to mention that production cost balancing was extraordinarily lazy (or rushed) in Civ 6. Without regard for quality, every building, unit or wonder in the game had a production cost that depended on only two factors: it's type (building vs unit vs wonder) and the column in the tech tree that unlocked it. To the point where a Stable was more expensive than a Barracks despite giving the exact same yields, because it unlocked a column later.
 
I have the same impression as @Leyrann, refining existing content seemed a very low priority with Civ 6, and I also believe 2K are the most likely reason why so much went into making monetizable content, and seemingly so little into bugfixing, refinement, and implementing certain basic features that were missing, like a production queue. We may disagree on which bits were more or less necessary, especially when it comes to balancing, but if we zoom out: was there ever any system of the game which was overhauled beyond small adjustments like a -1 here and a +1 there? I certainly think there were aspects of the game which needed it.

Instead we got ever more stuff...new civs, new systems, new game modes which were terribly balanced, couldn't be used well by the AI, and apparently loosely integrated with the rest so that you could toggle them on or off. To me this certainly looked like commercial concerns taking priority over game design. I worry that we will see a repeat of this with Civ 7.

I am a fan of Firaxis, always have been. They have made some of my favourite PC games of all time. But I agree that they deserve a better publisher.
 
I am a Deity-level player (as in, I'll fool around for the first two hundred turns and still win comfortably) and I still thought production costs were too high.

Do the math for what that means for the average person, who has a significantly worse understanding of production being king.

Not to mention that production cost balancing was extraordinarily lazy (or rushed) in Civ 6. Without regard for quality, every building, unit or wonder in the game had a production cost that depended on only two factors: it's type (building vs unit vs wonder) and the column in the tech tree that unlocked it. To the point where a Stable was more expensive than a Barracks despite giving the exact same yields, because it unlocked a column later.
I don't have the high-level gameplay experience you do, but balance and design are two halves of a bigger picture. Anyhow this is a derail, so I'm happy to leave it there. I'm not saying you're wrong. My general position is "developers should take input from high-level players to refine the game" (any game, really, it doesn't have to be competitive), but at the same time players really don't understand much (if anything) of what happens internally, or a developer's vision for a game.

Also, please note (for @KayAU as well), that casual players overwhelmingly prefer new content to striving for (ever) better balance and pacing. Don't get me wrong - we benefit from it. But there's far less of a return investing in balance than content, and balance suffers more from diminishing returns as well.

I'm not saying this to defend 2K, or any kind of game pricing or the value of DLC, etc. I'm just saying that in terms of resource allocation, you need to understand that there are players who will appreciate this, and that it isn't always / just the publisher forcing out shiny things.
 
Also, please note (for @KayAU as well), that casual players overwhelmingly prefer new content to striving for (ever) better balance and pacing. Don't get me wrong - we benefit from it. But there's far less of a return investing in balance than content, and balance suffers more from diminishing returns as well.

That's absolutely true, however I would be very unsurprised if something like the Civ 6 production costs (and potentially also too-low tech and civic costs) is a contributing factor to the extremely high 'never finished a game' statistic. It's no fun to build a new city in the Industrial Era because there's still an unsettled 5-tile island, only to find find that it'll take you 160 turns to build a district, and even after you've developed the city as much as you can in a short time span, it's still 40 turns. Or when you want to fight a war in the Modern Era and all cities need at least 12 turns to build a single Tank, except that one super high production city that can do it in 7 turns. While at the same time you can research five technologies in those 12 turns, meaning the Tanks are pretty much outdated by the time they are completed...
 
I have the same impression as @Leyrann, refining existing content seemed a very low priority with Civ 6, and I also believe 2K are the most likely reason why so much went into making monetizable content, and seemingly so little into bugfixing, refinement, and implementing certain basic features that were missing, like a production queue. We may disagree on which bits were more or less necessary, especially when it comes to balancing, but if we zoom out: was there ever any system of the game which was overhauled beyond small adjustments like a -1 here and a +1 there? I certainly think there were aspects of the game which needed it.

Instead we got ever more stuff...new civs, new systems, new game modes which were terribly balanced, couldn't be used well by the AI, and apparently loosely integrated with the rest so that you could toggle them on or off. To me this certainly looked like commercial concerns taking priority over game design. I worry that we will see a repeat of this with Civ 7.

I am a fan of Firaxis, always have been. They have made some of my favourite PC games of all time. But I agree that they deserve a better publisher.
This is the reason I'm not pre-ordering or buying Civ7 until it has matured a little bit. I feel like Civ6 almost got worse over time do to feature/content bloat without any balance/polish/refinement.
 
This is the reason I'm not pre-ordering or buying Civ7 until it has matured a little bit. I feel like Civ6 almost got worse over time do to feature/content bloat without any balance/polish/refinement.
For me it was not "almost"...I genuinely think Civ 6 got worse over time. Features like the World Congress (which I though was very poorly implemented) and governors (which added even more chores you had to remember), I felt made the game less enjoyable to play for me. This was very much contrary to my expectations based on Civ 5, which got a lot better with expansions.
 
Ah well... in the end (as I expected was going to happen anyways) I gave in to my final belief that I WILL buy every DLC collection and they WILL cost more if bought separately...

Made a deal with the GF to buy me the FE for my Birthday (tomorrow) as the difference in price between standard version (that I was goin to buy 100% certain) and the FE was close to
what she wanted to spend on a present that she couldn't find any idea for :lol:

I call this win-win :clap:

Now crossing my fingers until next year that I WILL get my money's worth :thanx:
 
Therefore, wages have kept up with inflation in the US and in fact have been very slightly better than that.

Not where I live, and especially not me as I lost my job last year. My wages have gone considerably down since I make a lot less than I used to. I definitely can't buy video games like I used to. Not that I buy that many anyways. But no more than 2 a year for me.
 
Not where I live, and especially not me as I lost my job last year. My wages have gone considerably down since I make a lot less than I used to. I definitely can't buy video games like I used to. Not that I buy that many anyways. But no more than 2 a year for me.
Unfortunately, we aren't allowed to continue this discussion.
 
Inflation or no, I remember a push to get people on board of digital sales instead of physical copies as it would cut down on distribution costs and people even speaking of the price of games seeing a price drop because distribution was such a "large" part of production costs. Even the console industry is now making consoles with no disc drive. Yet we never did see a price drop even briefly.
It hasn't lowered launch prices for AAA games, no. And it has enabled small updates that wouldn't have been feasible given the printing and distribution overhead in the physical copy days.

But it has enabled things like the 90% off sales for Civ VI that have been common over the past year or two. $6 for a AAA game published a few years ago, but still heavily-played, even without any of the expansions? You wouldn't find that in the bargain bin at CompUSA in the physical era. Sure, there'd be some $5 games that never sold well, but not one of similar quality to a Civ game.

From a AAA standpoint, I think that's where consumers have seen some benefit from digital. 90% off is rare, to be sure, but 75% off a few years after release is not uncommon. It's just that the benefit accrues to those who buy after launch - while for the developer and publisher, it's easier to make up the development costs up front with a 30% Steam cut (or even better, a 12% Epic cut), rather than the 50%-60% physical store/publisher/printing cut.

It has also helped on the indie front. How many good games would not have been made, or not have become popular, had it not been easy to distribute digitally? We'll never know. But when I think of Factorio... it barely got enough momentum in its early years to make it as it was, I suspect had it needed physical sales, it wouldn't have made it.
 
Going to keep it to this thread rather than derail other threads with it, but how is it that the game is too expensive for die-hard fans with thousands of posts on these forums to afford?

Like, I'm sorry, but it's roughly five months still to release. Was six when the price was announced. You have to save just ~12 dollars/euros per month to afford that. At my (almost-minimum) wage, that's one hour of work in a few months. Even if you live in a country with a converted 2 dollars/euros per month minimum wage, you overshoot at just 1.5 hours of extra work per week.

And, in more general terms: do people not have any savings at all? For reference, I save about a quarter of my monthly income simply because I don't have anything useful to spend it on. Obviously, not everyone will have such a relatively favorable balance between income and expenses, but I am literally incapable of working more than ~24 hours per week (I tried). Going with the earlier assumption of 2 dollars/euros per hour minimum wage, and 24 hour work weeks just as an extra income penalty, and a quarter of the relative-to-income left-over money that I have (so 1/16) of the total, that would still still save 3 euros/dollars equivalent per week... translating to over 75 euros/dollars equivalent in half a year. Enough to buy the game if you start saving when it's announced. And frankly I feel like I'm being very pessimistic in my estimates.

(edited because I accidentally calculated half the savings you actually get with the scenario I outlined in the last paragraph)
 
Going to keep it to this thread rather than derail other threads with it, but how is it that the game is too expensive for die-hard fans with thousands of posts on these forums to afford?

Like, I'm sorry, but it's roughly five months still to release. Was six when the price was announced. You have to save just ~12 dollars/euros per month to afford that. At my (almost-minimum) wage, that's one hour of work in a few months. Even if you live in a country with a converted 2 dollars/euros per month minimum wage, you overshoot at just 1.5 hours of extra work per week.

And, in more general terms: do people not have any savings at all? For reference, I save about a quarter of my monthly income simply because I don't have anything useful to spend it on. Obviously, not everyone will have such a relatively favorable balance between income and expenses, but I am literally incapable of working more than ~24 hours per week (I tried). Going with the earlier assumption of 2 dollars/euros per hour minimum wage, and 24 hour work weeks just as an extra income penalty, and a quarter of the relative-to-income left-over money that I have (so 1/16) of the total, that would still still save 1.5 euros/dollars equivalent per week... translating to over 75 euros/dollars equivalent in a year. Enough to buy the game if you happened to already be saving up. And frankly I feel like I'm being very pessimistic in my estimates.
I'm sorry, but that so "first world view" post. I'm at emigrant status right now and half a year ago I was in a situation "if I won't find job in a couple of months, I'll have to beg landlord to not throw my family to the street".
 
I'm sorry, but that so "first world view" post. I'm at emigrant status right now and half a year ago I was in a situation "if I won't find job in a couple of months, I'll have to beg landlord to not throw my family to the street".

Thank you for diagnosing me as living in a wealthy country. I'm aware.

Could you perhaps actually elaborate on what I'm not seeing due to my background?
 
Thank you for diagnosing me as living in a wealthy country. I'm aware.

Could you perhaps actually elaborate on what I'm not seeing due to my background?
I didn't mean to be rude. In real life there are a lot of people who spend like 80% of their income on food. So entertainment compete with things like clothes. Also, mentioning savings just makes it really painful. I believe people having debts are much more common than people having savings.
 
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