MudMan

I do think fighting games are a special case because the DLC is so obvious that the seasonal microtransaction stuff is not as much of a focus.

But hey, SF6 did add a battlepass, so… it’s moving in that direction. We’ll see.

Sure.

And the natural conclusion of that is why have the up front charge at all. You do the 2XKO thing or the Multiversus thing and just let people play and charge for the characters. Of course that may mean being online for purchase authentication, right?

I don’t like where that goes.

I think SF in particular is pretty sure it can pull a decent chunk of cash up front and not impact sales too much, so that’s better for them, since they’re monetizing all the casual players, but sitll. It’s a dynamic that’s in play and I don’t like it.

You already spend more than 100 for Street Fighter and always have. The full roster for SF6 is currently 100/110 bucks. Not counting MTX and extra cosmetics.

Sure, you didn’t pay it all at once, but that’s no different than me buying SF2 and then Super SF2 the following year, each for seventy-ish bucks.

Sorta kinda. We moved to 69.99 for major releases a while ago. Late 2000s in some territories, later in others.

In the US it was 59.99 for the CD era, but it was higher before when cart costs were a massive chunk of the retail price. I bought games that launched at 100 (or its local equivalent) in the 90s, particularly on SNES and N64.

But it’s true that prices have been super stable while moving from expensive carts to cheap CDs and then trivially expensive digital releases. Now there’s no way to cut costs on distribution (you’re already subsidizing storage, it’s just down to bandwidth, which is paid by the retailer anyway). So now inflation is catching up, since none of the money is going to making boxes, stamping CDs or shipping games in trucks. Now when inflation hits there’s no longer a way to hide the pricing impact, so it goes to sticker price.

And people are so used to that stability that they immediately rage on the Internet, if this thread is anything to go by, so the only answer is to hide more of the cost in MTX and dump the sticker price altogether.

Kinda argued against myself there. The real answer isn’t prices will “evenutally” go up, it’s that they will go down to zero and traditional gaming will become mobile gaming. That’s probably more likely.

Who the hell are the developers clamoring for this?

Gonna guess the tens of thousands getting laid off who are anxiously waiting for money to come back to the business so they can get hired again.

VERY educated guess, there.

This is some weird reporting.

For one thing, I’m not American, baseline game prices here took a similar hike during the PS4 era, so I’d be curious to see if or when US game prices adjust and whether that comes with a local price bump. Although looking at recent releases maybe they already did.

For another, it is kind of insane how much lower the baseline price of what used to be called “retail packaged goods” games has gotten, adjusted for inlfation. As I write this, Civ 7 is the best selling full price game on Steam, going for 69,99USD. That’s 48-ish USD in 2010 money, the Internet tells me. The previous release to even get close to the best sellers list at that price (and it sold pretty terribly, as far as I can tell, at least on Steam), was Indiana Jones, for the same price. Everything else is much, much, much cheaper, with the list being dominated by games anywhere between free to play and thirty bucks.

That’s two conflicting pushes. Games are dirt cheap now. You can’t even sell them at the sticker price that was normal in the 2010s anymore, and even if you did, that’s 30% less inflation-adjusted money than before. The average game developer salary has gone from high 90K to 115K in 2025 in that period as, again, the Internet tells me.

So basically GTA or no, I don’t see how you get anything BUT GTA sequels and Call of Dutys going forward. It’s MTX-fests or nothing. It’s pretty messed up, IMO. I like splashy, good-looking AAA games and would take them any day over, say, a Marvel Rivals. But spoiler alert, Marvel Rivals is going to make all the money and you’ll be lucky if you ever see a Ratchet sequel again, let alone a third party big single player game.

So… pick your poison, I suppose.

I mean… yeah, give it a long enough time and it will be. Kinda how inflation works. “Eventually” is a pretty expansive word.

If you told me SteamOS is them giving up on fixing desktop Steam and starting over from the hardware up I’d believe you.

The profile page alone is horrific. A single interface designer each week wakes up in cold sweats having dreamt of it and not knowing what they just saw.

No arugment there. I’m not questioning that corpos make the issue deliberately worse as an engagement engine. That’s a fact.

But a lot of people jump from there to assuming those patterns will just vanish without algorithmic intervention, and that’s just not true, which can lead to a lot of disappointment when people move to other alternatives.

This happens on decentralized social media, too. Fedi dwellers are all so convinced that the trolls wouldn’t have happened without intervention and man, is that not true.

Don’t get me wrong, the corpos used that dynamic for profit, but they didn’t invent it. Having been there before the algorithm, old forums, IRC and other protosocial spaces had very plump trolls, and so do federated, decentralized spaces when they reach critical mass.

You are absolutely exoticising European traditions as having ancient histories compared to American ones. You’re just not doing it consciously, or on purpose. Ironically, you seem to be doing it because… well, that’s an American cultural tradition inherited from colonialism.

Okay, let me get specific, because otherwise we’re not gonna get anywhere. Since we started with Christmas. Hey, did you ever hear about that Dutch controversy about that traditional black slave-like figure portrayed by some dude in blackface that is now deemed racist and sometimes defended by Dutch racists as being traditional and innocent? Yeah, that’s 19th century stuff. The taboo of blackface is purely an American thing that is getting exported now, which is part of the controversy.

The Dutch also generate the idea of St Nicholas as “Sinterklaas”, which is recognizable worldwide in its American form. The Dutch guy comes from Spain in early December to leave gifts instead. In Spain, curiously, they didn’t use to have a Santa equivalent, but they did do the “arriving in a parade” bit about the Three Wise Men in January. That tradition? 19th century as well, even if the story itself is in the bible. And then that got semi-replaced by good old Santa. But not the one coming from the Netherlands, just US Santa, largely imported to Spain via Coca-Cola ads and American movies in the late 20th century.

Meanwhile, in Germany and Italy they didn’t have any medieval Christmas traditions at all because “Germany” and “Italy” didn’t actually exist as a country until the 19th century. Most of what you think about “traditions” from those places are local stuff that then got repackaged and branded at the national level after that point.

The reason you don’t think about it that way is probably that the US is a colony and I supposed US racists liked bragging about their ancient European heritage and American exceptionalists liked bragging about how new and modern American ideals are. But obviously a lot of the perception of that heritage, from the US version of national stereotypes to the uniquely American versions of imported celebrations is itself purely American culture.

And then the rest of the world learns about it through cultural imperialism. I’m not American, and I know about Thanksgiving, and Paul Revere, and western mythos and St Paddy’s day (but the American one, not the Irish one) and Cinco de Mayo and Juneteenth and Black Friday is a thing here now even if we don’t have a Thanksgiving day to go with it. There are local rappers here and the country went through a rockabilly phase in music at one point. Obviously most of the cinema in theatres is American and has been for the better part of a century.

Culture isn’t culture because it’s old. Culture is of the moment, it refers to the assumptions and habits and traditions the people who are alive today have. It takes one generation to create a cultural tradition, or to lose it. The US has had an iron grip on a significant portion of all the media and messaging that gets distributed worldwide for far longer than that. The mythos of ancient culture and its amputation from colonial territories is, itself, American cultural heritage, developed during the beginnings of nationalism along with nation-states and weaponized in revolutionary times across the world.

Man, we’ve gotten so far away from topic, but I do find this very interesting so I’m not mad about it.

Good call. Vita emulation still sucks, the device proper is very nice and there are some good games stuck in there. Less these days, when a bunch of them got up-ports to PC and whatnot, but still.

For the life of me I don’t understand why there’s so little interest in Vita preservation. I get that it wasn’t as well liked as the PSP, and all the custom features are tricky while also having the hassle of all the PSN integration you get on modern console emus, but… still, you know?

The 3DS screen feels like magic every time I go back to it.

No, wait, yeah, all those things are true of European nations.

And by the wonders of colonialism, also of American nations.

To everybody’s chagrin yeah, the stupid bible is a fact of life people have to deal with and has been so for a couple millenia, but that’s not some ancient European thing that makes Europeans so much more connected to their cultural heritage or whatever. Americans are very much on that boat. At the helm of that boat, actually, in some form of malformed Dutchglish protestant thing.

The argument you were making is that white Americans have no cultural heritage to speak of when compared to “traditions and cultures in Europe”. US Christmas borrowed as much Yule and Saturnalia as French Christmas, if not more so. Cultural heritage unlocked, European exoticization still unnecessary.

Yeah, that’s your culture. I mean, time to own it.

For one thing, the rest of us out here don’t make that much of a distinction between different US subcultures. Trump is American culture, Oprah is American culture. They’re all pretty much the same thing.

For another, have some accountability. You guys did this, and yet you all insist it was not you you and you all feel so much more connected to wherever else. No. Stop it. Own it or change it.

Also, as a side point, man, do Americans love to exoticize how old everywhere else is. Yeah, sure, there are a bunch of medieval castles around and a few cultural remnants in traditions, but by and large most European folklore is rooted in some 18th/19th century crap, just like in the US. Europeans aren’t out there having Saturnalia parties.

Having heard native speakers say it many times, this post is mostly showing the limitations of IPA because… yeah, no, not really.

When my dad is trying to joke about it he’ll call it “Londón”, and I’m weirdly fine with that.

I don’t know if it’s “fixable”. At this point you just acknowledge that there is very little information about pronuntiation in the spelling of English words and wait for your human brain to figure it out over time.

It’s a shame, because the grammar is pretty simple, but man, the semi-random relationship of noises and words is a mess.

Still not the weirdest thing as a non-native speaker. That’d be when native speakers have a super serious ten minute argument about which specific type of “a” is supposed to go in a word, all of them indistinguishable to my ear.

Then some other native speaker with a wild accent shows up, pronounces the same word in an absolutely unfathomable way and everybody just goes along with it.

It’s been thirty years since I started using the language, I still have no idea what’s going on there.

Yeah, friend, that’s what I got, too.

What did you think I got? This is a very confusing response. Maybe I should put it back through Translate. Hold on.

Welchen gefälschten Google Translate-Klon haben Sie verwendet?

There, Translateception.