Is the gaming world ready for class division and tinfoil hats?
Nintendo announced Mario Kart World for Switch 2 will be $80, Microsoft said Xbox and title pricing will go up, and Doom Dark Ages dropped with a $70 price tag along with required hardware raytracing. Welcome to the age of prestige gaming, where to enjoy the best new games, your pockets have to be deep enough to run bleeding edge tech and afford titles that are inching their way ever closer to the $100 mark. It almost does read like conspiracy among GPU manufacturers, PC/console hardware makers, and game developers to force players to be ever expanding their gear and spending money.
Naturally they all want gamers to do that, that’s what they’re in business for after all. But this leads to a community of haves and have nots, where only those with the means get to enjoy the latest and greatest. It’s obvious developers like iD considered the loss of market share a risk worth taking, likely banking on the massive popularity of the franchise, as well as gamers upgrading their hardware or keeping the game until they do. It’s a big risk since you never know how well a game will be received and at the same time, you’re losing potential sales by locking out a portion of the player base.
This is at worst a disservice to gamers and at best an era of some really great games as the technology evolves, but it appears to be the model of the future for the industry, and players will be forced to evolve with it.
While many AAA games are “premium games made for premium gamers” as Randy Pitchford CEO of Gearbox Software the creators of Borderlands 4 said there have been many standout titles that have been quite the opposite, just look at the likes of Expedition 33 and ARC Raiders which have come with significantly smaller price tags, much lower hardware specs, and overall better quality and polish in their final product. That is looking past all of the more standout indie hits that have shown up this year alone like Silksong and Hades 2.
While AAA titles are becoming more out of reach for the casual gamer the indie titles and smaller companies are stepping up the fill that space that AAA titles are leaving behind still giving the more casual gamer something to look forward to and new titles to explore.