Fact check: That's what it would look like if I was reading this news for the first time about the Microsoft price increases But I read it earlier and I already got all my frustration out of the way privately screaming into a pillow This isn't some makebelieve fish paste a little video game industry boogeyman here with some false reports This is confirmed that Microsoft will be increasing all of their prices across the board on hardware as well as accessories And most notably they are increasing the price on their Xbox firstparty games to $80 following in line with what Nintendo is doing with some of their games Now you may notice if you've got some keen peepers on you I'm not in my normal domain I'm in a hotel room I'm in hiding because I knew I'd need to escape because I'm about to criticize Nintendo again while talking about Microsoft And Nintendo fans don't like that So we got to play it safe here Nintendo I think has set the trend here They've broken the seal that $80 games will be accepted by people And by people I mean gamers which is a different kind of person because they will accept any kind of [ __ ] you feed them at any price point it seems And now since that case has been made with the Switch to making record-breaking pre-orders apparently Microsoft feels confident that they can do the same and they'll follow suit And I imagine other big boys in the gaming industry will also do the same because being able to put the squeeze on gamers piggy bank a little bit stronger is good for the bottom line And since a lot of people are defending the $80 price tag gaming companies are going to go in that direction and thus it'll most likely be the new norm But I am surprised it's happening this quick I thought there'd still be more of a buffer before other big gaming industry giants jumped on board the $80 price tag Now of course Nintendo's not solely to blame here A lot of it will obviously fall on the uncertainty with tariffs and all of that That's absolutely a factor here no doubt And obviously it's something a lot of people are unhappy about except for the mindless drones who do free PR for multi-billion dollar gaming corporations fighting their battles day and night on Twitter in the trenches to defend their honor just so they can continue to be exploited for their piggy bank So anyway it's been a lot of talk on this subject throughout the day Everyone is you know weighing in and it's been a big discussion but there's been a surprising lack of coverage and a lack of discussion around my hot ass and this [ __ ] fart I'm about to [ __ ] out I don't know if the webcam mic could pick that up but that was Americanmade That's tariffree right there I'll promise you that The point is though $80 games sucks And it's not like the price tag is indicative of a quality increase across the board because in a lot of cases the main formula these gaming companies look to exploit is live service So you're paying $80 for oftent times games that are incomplete and are only tinted to after you've paid the $80 and then they'll go in and try and make it better down the line So you're paying more money for a less complete project in a lot of cases Of course that's not an absolute statement That's not a blanket across the board but in general we've seen this a lot in recent years where the idea is push it out now Let's make money now We'll fix it later And I really cannot understand how anyone could see the state that gaming is in right now and be like "Yeah it makes sense I'll pay $80 for these games that keep coming out that are [ __ ] broken on launch missing half of the content that they've promised." Oh yeah Absolutely Like that is pathetic Like no one should be happy about the direction of $80 games coming up right now Anyway though I'd like to read you their pricing update that they just posted As of May 1st we have adjusted recommended retailer pricing for our consoles and controllers worldwide We also expect to adjust the pricing of some of our new firstparty games starting this holiday season to $79.99 Those titles purchased on the Xbox store have the benefit of Xbox play anywhere allowing players to buy once and play on console and PC at no additional cost We understand that these changes are challenging and they were made with careful consideration given market conditions and the rising cost of development Looking ahead we continue to focus on offering more ways to play more games across any screen and ensuring value for Xbox players The rising cost of development is something I've talked about a lot How every game costs like $100 million now and like six years of development just baking it in the oven only to come out and be just underwhelming That isn't entirely that is 100% on them It's not like the industry norm There are so many indie games that have proven you don't need $100 million budgets to deliver extraordinary experiences It's just these suits these [ __ ] corpo zombies at the top of the food chain that are so delusional They're seeing Hollywood investing $320 million in the [ __ ] stinkeroois like electric state and then being like we need to do that for video games So that's been the direction they've gone for the last like [ __ ] I don't know almost 10 years now But I have said very loudly for a long time the actual future of AAA gaming is by doing smaller projects that require less time to develop and less money and smaller teams Like that to me I feel like that's a no-brainer Like there are so many examples in recent years you can pull from of small teams or even oneman teams delivering game of the year like quality experiences You don't need to be dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the next Concord Like it's just a stupid path But they keep talking about it like it's an inevitability how development cost has to continue rising and every studio needs 500 developers all working on Assassin's Creed Shadows 2 Like it's it's just super unnecessary It is so much bloat for no reason Instead just put your money where your ass is and just invest in good projects that don't need to be like a super grand slam to make a single oodle of money back on the investment Like just think about how much a game has to sell in order to be profitable in the AAA space right now Even if you do have a game that does really well it's a good chance it doesn't make any money back because you've put so much money into it over the course of so many years that it' need to sell like a [ __ ] billion dollars worth of of revenue in order to see it go green even slightly Whereas if you had a bunch of smaller projects that don't need to be these crazy miracle home runs to make money you stand a chance Like I really think the Blumbhouse model this is the one I always mention where Blumbhouse finances like [ __ ] a hundred horror movies a year that all cost like $2 to5 million And you probably haven't even heard of half of these absolute turbo [ __ ] But they only need to make like 10 million $15 million to be like a super success for the company And they always do It's very rare that a Blumbhouse film doesn't make more than the budget because it's so cheap to produce and it doesn't take that long So it it's a model that is proven efficient and works And there are so many games that prove that model works too But AAA is just so hellbent on just dumping as much infinite money as they can into like one or two projects over the course of so many years And they just end up being like super safe Weeny Hut Jr uninteresting And even if they do moderately well it's not good enough because it needs to do extraordinarily well to make any money back cuz too much went into that [ __ ] pit producing it And it's only going to get worse now at $80 being the norm because more and more people are getting priced out of buying AAA games So what's going to happen naturally More and more people are going to start pirating the games But anyway I'm rambling about things I've talked about a lot already It's just this is something a lot of people saw coming with $80 being the new norm once that floodgate was opened Yeah you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube So it sucks to see And uh yeah I just kind of wanted to to rant about it a little bit here That's about it