I don't mind buying games at higher prices. 100+ bucks is ok for me IF the game condones the hours. Fallout 4 as an example gave me 200+ hours and not a single loot box in sight. I did however pay 120 bucks for it and the DLC and I would do it again.
Honestly gamers are partly to blame for the lootbox fiasco. Publishers are forced to keep the stale 59.99 pricing and yet the cost of gaming as skyrocked since the 1980's. 49.99 to 59.99 from 1986 to 2017 is hardly an adjustment for inflation. In fact they would be losing their asses at this point. Sprinkle in mass piracy and you have publishers paying gamers to buy their product. This is not fair to anyone.
IMO publishers should be charging a minimum of 100 bucks for a AAA game with EVERYTHING included at launch. No more DLC. No more loot crates and IMO that would be an amazing compromise between the supply and the demand. We have come a long way from 8-bit side scrollers. The price needs to reflect that.
patently false. The cost of games only have gone up on select titles and sales has also skyrocketed in line with increased budget.
No intelligent person makes or relies on loot boxes to make a quality game. It is dishonest and laughable to make such a statement and anyone purporting this should be laughed out of town. 
There was no such thing as having millions in sold copies back in the 80s or 90s. A million copies sold is a new thing since the 2000s. I dont think even HL sold a million copies at first. It took many years for that to happen or if it did it was one of a select few games that did and was an anomaly due to it being a game changer.
Some early access games have sold 10s of millions of copies in todays world. No dev is starving for money if they make a good product....even crappy ones make good money. A special place in hell exists for devs like code hatch. Prime example of whats wrong with humanity and the gaming market. This is why i do not give my money willie nillie to devs unless there is good cause. They deserve no trust.
I have commented and posted before about how a good dev would post financials and business plans for a game and treat early access buyers as investors and not a rich parent giving them free money.
I hate loot boxes because its about a cash grab and padding profit margins. It isn't about making a quality product. PS2 is a prime example
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Regulations are almost always bad and the only regulation that needs to exist is publishing statistics like probabilities of loot boxes and maybe source codes to be audited for corruption/theft from trying to publish fake statistics to steal money.
Anything else is a blatant power grab and will only cause more harm than good....Consumers can use their brain and not buy loot boxes from shady companies....like website games.
Only if they have a lot of marketing/brand recognition behind it.
A-Train (the original) released in 1993 for $100. That's $172.98 in today's dollars.
read above....ark and PUBG had no issue making a "good"/"high demand" game and making 10s to 100s of millions of dollars.
now....lets just see 60% actually get reinvested into the game....ha i am dreaming.
The Belgian government has already concluded that this kind of thing is gambling. And a number of other EU governments are joining in investigating. There are even rumblings of the US Senate looking into things. And I hope they impose very strict regulations on this kind of thing. It will discourage devs/publishers from including it in games.
i could careless what some statist thug says. Regulations on gambling defies basic logic. As I stated above...the only regulation you could possible argue for is releasing the statistics so people know what they were actually buying.
Anything else is a statist power grab.
It still boggles my mind how the Steam Market is allowed to exist. Valve is practically printing money. I think the only tax on it is sales tax to the state of Washington. Still, every game that offers something on there, they're effectively creating a new unregulated market asking money for a digital product that has a real, one time value, of no more than $1000 (time to create the asset). Then they give away 1000s of them randomly and (here's the trouble spot): allow people to trade them for money. This effectively makes them securities (like stocks) but they're not being regulated as such . Valve needs to declare the tangible worth of the good and it can never be exceeded.
And it doesn't stop there either: music, movies, games, everything that is strictly digital. It can be copied ad infinitum but it still needs a declared value. Why is this important? It goes straight into piracy. If someone has a copy of something they're not supposed to, that's how much money was "stolen." Declaring a value of a digital good then becomes a two sided coin: If they declare the value of something too high and they sue a pirate asking for 1000 times that much, the judge will ask what are they smoking. If they declare the value too low and someone is selling the product for less than that, the publisher can use that in court against the seller because they're technically selling at a loss, therefore, the item must be stolen or second hand (these are not-transferrable by nature).
Problem is, there's only two parties involved here: 1) lawmakers that don't understand it enough to regulate it and 2) the game publishers profiting hugely from it. I don't see a path to a good, permanent solution for everyone.
It's good they're cracking down on loot crates because it turns the above problem into gambling. It needs to be labeled as such. But to get at the heart of the problem.......not going to happen any time soon.
your failing to understand the value of intellectual property and the value of a service. Something doesn't need to have a physical value to have value.
Paintings, cards, bitcoin, historical items, and so on all have a value put on to them via market demand. Why has no one made a second steam and replicated it. They have....Why does it not have the same value you? market barriers, market share, demand, and more are several but not all inclusive reasons for such a thing.
Actually no. DLC is a fantastic thing if done right. DLC if used like expansion packs of old (Simcity 4 Rush Hour, C&C Generals Zero Hour, GTA IV EFLC, etc...) is fantastic and a nice way to make a game great and to enlarge the current universe of a game...
Saints Row are games that due DLC right. You have a solid game without DLC and you can add more content for a fairly low price too. If you wait for sales like cheap/poor people. You can get all DLC and base game for 5-10 bucks after everyone elses buys.
This is what you call price skimming and i have been harping about how game industry needs to realize that price skimming is their friend! In the last 5-7 years price skimming has because a common practice and gets companies much much more money especially from people like me.
I bought like 10 games over 15 years because old games...HL was still going for what 35 bucks 5-8 years after release? Granted it was the only gmae that could pull that off but its why i never bought many games and spent maybe 500 dollars over 15 years of gaming.
now in the world of steam. I pay hardly nothing for games for 2 reasons:
1.) DRM (GOG excluded)
2.) price skimming
first reason is why i'll never pay full price for a game with a select few exceptions (like 2 games)
2nd reason is why I have a 1200 game steam account with games in origin and GOG.
I have spent like 2 or 3 grand over the years but they would have never gotten me to spend that much if it wasn't for price skimming. For 50 bucks...sure..I'll buy 20 Star Wars games from my childhood that you would never get me to pay more than 5 dollars for but 1 or 2 of my must haves. But since they used bulk selling and price skimming they got 50 dollars from me when before at best they would get 0-10 dollars.
