this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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Satisfactory
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No, no it doesn’t. The cost of a game getting patches and updates isn’t the same as the cost of making the game in the first place.
Inflation affects physical goods because you need to make the product from the ground up every single time. And those materials cost money, and rise with inflation, so making the product from scratch each time gradually costs more as time goes on. Hence why they need to raise the price of the finished product - otherwise they'd literally lose money on each sale.
Digital goods don’t work this way, once the product has been made it can freely be distributed without having to be remade again and again.
Yes, it costs money to patch and update. But that’s not comparable to rebuilding the product from the ground up like with physical goods.
By your logic all movies, tv shows, and all other forms of digital goods should actually increase price with age, not decrease. Team Fortress 2 should be like $100 by now. After all, servers aren’t free.
Also, their wages come from sales. If they no longer have money to pay their employees then they should look towards developing new games, dlc, or merchandising. Artificially inflating the prices of existing goods isn’t the answer. There’s a reason that not even EA or Activision have pulled this.
Not only material costs go up with inflation.
Those materials have a price because you need labor to obtain them. The cost of everything is driven by the price of labor. The price of labor goes up with inflation.
There is no product that is unaffected by inflation.
So you’re saying that because of that, all things must also rise in price, just inherently?
By your logic any movie released decades ago should cost far more now than it did back then, right? To rent or buy, it should be infinitely more. What about games from the 90’s or 00’s? They should be far more expensive.
Why don’t I have to pay 100’s of dollars every time I watch A Clockwork Orange? Why doesn’t it cost hundreds of dollars to play the original Half-Life? After all, counting for inflation they should all cost far, far more than they currently do. Actually take a second and think about it.
Why do you think buying a digital copy of something is cheaper than buying a brand new, physical copy? Because each physical copy had to be built from the ground up, taking all new materials to do so, whereas the digital copies can effectively be infinitely reproduced. They’re not affected in the same way.
Inflation is not the only factor in the pricing on products. Otherwise a potato would cost 1000x what it does.
Even then, all the things you mention are media that was already produced, and the only cost associated to them now is licensing and distribution. Satisfactory is still in production, which costs orders of magnitude more.
The costs of updates and bug fixes, ie maintenance, aren’t equivalent to building the game from the ground up.