There are more people buying games now than ever before. 20-30 years ago, games would set sales records selling over 500k copies in a year or two. Nowadays that number is like 13 million in a month. Gaming companys report record profits year over year (except Ubisoft lol) and they monetize games even harder now with microtransactions.
Prices should be going down. Its not my problem development costs are bloated because dev teams are too big and the marketing team wants to play Beatles music in every trailer. But they're making it my problem by making me pay for it.
So I just don't pay for it. Problem solved. If they go out of business, its their own fault. Not mine. Unfortunately, Nintendo is too big to fail.
Okay but NES games are still playable and transferrable. Even earlier games for the first gen consoles like the MagnaVox Odyssey are still playable, and those are far older than one decade. And if it suffers physical damage, even to the point of becoming inoperable, as long as you dumped the ROM of your game you can continue to play it (at least in the US).
If a ditigal game shop server goes away, you better hope you downloaded your data, and that the hard drive you downloaded the data to never becomes inoperable. Because once that happens, it is gone forever. Even if you technically legally still have the license still to play it, if you tried to bring a legal case about being unable to access a game you paid for, the game publisher can just invoke their right as granted to them by the EULA of the game license you are forced to agree to to use their software (shrinkwrap license) to "revoke your license at any time, for any reason."
Much, much harder to do that when someone owns a physical copy of a game, as that would require forcibly removing the physical game from you (AKA theft).
The Nintendo64 has so much power in the hardware that goes more or less wasted in every game that ever officially released for the console. I mean, they could never have known back then the programming techniques we know now, so it's not really their fault.
Its effectively a self-destructing game set on a timer.
Not unlike real physical games that succumb to time and damage, except you cannot dump the gamedata to preserve your own physical copy.
Also, physical games deteriorate at a much slower rate than Nintendo shutting down their servers. Sure, you have the right to download your digital Wii games you paid for, but have fun doing that right now on servers that no longer exist. The WiiU and 3DS eShops are next, they already have purchases disabled.
I can still play physical NES games, the only maintenance required is changing the battery, if the cart even has one, and keeping the pins clean.
They still have no real reason to exist though. Theyre a catalyst for ending physical media.
You get the worst part of owning a physical copy (you gotta find the physical game and put it in the console every time you want to.play that game) combined with the worst part about owning a digital copy (you still have to download all the game data).
Unless these versions of the game are cheaper than even the digital versions of the game, then there is no reason anybody would just pick the digital version over these. Any person interested in selling the game when they are done playing will just get normal physical media.
Yes, but that is what a tariff is designed to do. It is designed to encourage you, the consumer, to not buy imported products, so that you buy domestic products instead.
It can be frustrating for consumers in a nation that is extremely dependent on imports, like the United States, because the US does not produce the products its consumers want to buy. If the tariffs remain long enough, the idea is that domestic companies will begin making the products that the consumers want to buy instead of importing, which is obviously beneficial to the economy in many ways, but for the consumer waiting for that to happen, it is hard to see past the number.
Also doesnt help that wages have stagnated while inflation has gone up due to corporate greed. Paying 2025 prices wouldn't feel so bad if everyone was getting 2025 pay, but instead most of us are paying 2025 prices on like, 2008 pay. Not a fun experience.
Bit of a yikes for the last three games the studio worked on to be AC Shadows, Star Wars Outlaws, and Skull & Bones. Two of those proved to be monumental failures in terms of sales expectations, and Shadows still being too new to know for sure, but its not looking good.
Yes, the prices go up, but not like how people seem to be normalizing. The price increase is generally only likely to be noticeable on items where stores sell at an incredibly tiny profit margin.
A 10% tariff does not mean a 10% MSRP price increase, it means an increase but of a lot less. But people are I guess not intelligent or informed enough to know this and so incorrectly say a 10% tariff means a 10% MSRP price increase, which again, is wrong.
If the tariffs do increase the price, it won't be a flat 25% increase or whatever the tariff is set to.
A misconception I keep seeing people incorrectly repeat is that a 25% tariff on an item I can buy at the store for $100 USD today, means tomorrow it will cost me $125. This is wrong, and not how tariffs work. If you see a price increase like that, that is price gouging, using a tariff as a shield. You are getting scammed.
The 25% tariff is based on whatever the imported cost of the item is, not the MSRP or final sale price. Lets just say for simplicity that the Switch 2 cost $100 for us to buy it. But, for a store to import the product, they buy it directly from Nintendo for a cost of just $35 USD per unit (again, for simplicity). A 25% tariff would be a tax of $7.50 USD that the store would need to pay per Switch console. In this hypothetical, a 25% tariff on that item would mean you would only expect to see a final price increase to $107.50 due to tariffs, and not a final price of $125.
Please be informed, don't let yourself be scammed.
PC players like this too because controller players get pretty atrocious aim assist, meaning that playing on controller basically gives them cheats compared to mouse users. Not sure if controller users on PC get the aim assist as well, or if it can be disabled or if you can queue into matches with only the same input method.
Either way, I dont see why this.would be bad unless the player population on one device is too low to find matches in a reasonable amount of time.
Thats true, but art and code are almost completely different. Nobody puts in their personal emotions into the code they write. Nobody feels personally attached to that code, as there is no personal connection to it other than "I wrote it."
That's not true of art. The parts of a game that are not mechanical (mechanical being code, gameplay design, the "ugly" stuff, if you will) are often created by people that put their own personal emotions, feelings, and other such things into the art. It has a part of them, often deeply personal that perhaps nobody else could understand except for them, and thus having to let that go can be incredibly challenging. Though a professional artist accepts that this may happen someday with their work, when push comes to shove it is generally not easy for them to completely walk away from it. It becomes effectively, from an emotional standpoint, like their child.
I am not saying it hurts more or less than no longer working with someone else, only that the artists that created the art are definitely not feeling good about having to walk away from it and never being able to work on it again.
Creatives absolutely care about art they spend years making, professional or not. They definitely don't feel happy about wasting all that time for something they can no longer work on.
"I have an Xbox."
"Oh cool, which one?"
"The original."