"The cost has been increasing" - except for digital distribution. Why does EVERYONE forget that when Steam first came out, the entire point was - cheaper games for the customer, because no physical publishing overheads. In fact, for Valve itself, they started selling their own games cheaply because they didn't have a publisher taking a cut. And for a while, games on PC were indeed cheaper on Steam. Then Modern Warfare 2 came along. As far as I can remember, that was the real tipping point - MW2 came along, and suddenly it was the same price on Steam as it was in the shops. Suddenly, we were paying the same price and getting less for our money - no disc, no box, no manual. It cost Activision less to distribute, yet they were charging the same amount.<br><br>$60 is NOT the price of a big budget game. It's the PHYSICAL RETAIL PRICE of a big budget game. The fact that we're paying this price even when we're buying a digital version demonstrates how broken things already were, and how younger generations of gamers have been scammed into thinking the current pricing is "normal". It isn't. It never was.<br><br>The cost of developing games has not actually gone up and up; the pipeline for developing games has improved, the internet has made distribution easier and cheaper, improvements in technology mean that developers are spending less time experimenting and figuring out how to build their game, with more industry-standard tools available (there are companies that offer tools for handling physics, terrain... even trees), and the market has only grown so profits have been soaring.<br><br>DO NOT let them trick you. This is not some scary, precarious investment on the part of the major publishers; they are in it, because the money is there. Their bad behaviour has grown worse because the money is there; because modern western business practices involve squeezing until a franchise dies. They are not adding microtransactions and other such bullshit because of escalating costs - the costs are INVESTMENT, and investment has gone up, because profits have gone up. Increased investment follows the promise of profit, not the other way around.<br><br>EDIT: Speaking as an indie developer, obscure novelist and former games journalist... looking at some of the lunacy below, I feel compelled to add - if you work in the industry, and actually have some insight from this perspective, in all honesty I am happy to be corrected on any issue by someone with greater knowledge. But if you're not a developer... don't tell me about rising costs. Don't talk to me about how difficult it is to make a game. You don't know.,(reply>), Bunch of whiners,(reply>), The cost have been increasing and that's a fact. You don't need to talk about complicated cost structures, marketing and so on to see it. You just need to look at inflation, if you are still paying the same amount of money for something for 2 decades you simply know the costs are higher due to cost inflation.,(reply>), Every old cod is still at 60€ after years for example its like activision is actually that retarded that they think someone would buy a full priced 10 y old cod its sad to see that they will destroy blizzard next,(reply>), Nicholas Brakespear Oh my goodness, you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.  The vast majority of a game’s development budget are fixed costs that are not impacted at all by whether the game is digitally or physically distributed.  The cost difference between the two is negligible.  <br><br>And to say that costs are not rising?  Again, absolutely and unequivocally false.   Look at the credits for games that came out 15 years ago.  It was the norm to produce these games with teams of 10-15 people, even the big budget AAA games.  Nowadays a typical big budget AAA game will easily have teams of several hundred people working on them.  You don’t think this massive increase in headcount is contributing to an increase in costs?  <br><br>And you have the gall to say others shouldn’t be talking about rising costs unless they’re a developer like you?  I’m not a developer, just someone with basic knowledge of the business and some common sense, which it seems is far more important for contributing to this discussion than being a developer who knows absolutely nothing about the business end of his own industry.,(reply>), @Jack Young I agree with what you are saying here. I have personally rejected all microtransactions on any game that isn't free to play and that is minimal. But the previous statement I'm referring to though implied that selling less for more was evidence of increasing costs. Idk if costs are increasing or if they are just investing more, but charging more for the product isn't evidence of either really. They will just sell for as much as they can to maximize profit.