[Mazryonh]

Originally Posted by funkychinaman

I can't really fault game companies for DLC prices. I believe video games are far cheaper than they should be.

I believe this is partly because of the rise of digital piracy; if you're trying to sell something, you can't beat "free and easy" (in the mind of the consumer) by cutting prices and still have the producer stay in business. You can read a revealing piece written by a PC game developer destroyed by piracy here.

Note: "Free and easy" is what counts. I'm sure a lot of firearms owners here wouldn't mind the lowered ammunition costs of handloading, if setting up a well-stocked and well-functioning reloading apparatus at home didn't involve a fairly large start-up cost for machinery and componets, and a lot of time spent getting things to work. Once it's up and running it you can assemble your own ammo for a lot less than buying it at retail, but the work involved undoubtedly puts many people off of such a prospect.

Originally Posted by funkychinaman

Twenty five years ago, I remember getting TMNT: The Arcade Game for the NES on sale for $40. A game today, with many more hours of content, only costs $60. I think there's just some psychological price barrier people aren't willing to break through, and DLC is just trying to compensate for that.

Ever since gaming went mainstream people have been less and less willing to pay higher prices for games. Furthermore, as hardware has gone up in capability and complexity, so have development times/difficulty (and the money needed to pay such skilled people) for anything not casual-oriented or meant to be played on limited hardware like phones.

Take a look at Diaspora: Shattered Armistice. It's an excellently made "total conversion" mod for the famous Battlestar Galactica TV show that, in my experience, is the best simulation of combat in a Colonial Viper available. But it took 4 years for the first release (containing only 6 missions) to be finished, and this is even with an older engine that has had both its source code and mod tools released. Yes, if it were a full-time paying job for the developers rather than something they did in their spare time they might get it done faster, but it does highlight just how much work is involved in game development. Work that, by all accounts, is being respected less and less, with people feeling entitled to more and more content for less and less money to the developers and publishers, assuming the consumers aren't outright pirating the content.

There's also the fact that people will, in all likelihood, prefer to pay a lot of money in dribs and drabs rather than all up front. You can see this phenomenon in the success of "microtransaction" games, and you can read an article about how one such monstrously popular title regularly drains its customers dry here.

Originally Posted by funkychinaman

As for capture devices, I don't think an HD one exists for less than a hundred bucks.

Damn, that puts a damper on my prospects. And to think that for PC games, screenshot utilities can be had for free, or are built into the software platform (such as Steam). I wouldn't be surprised if some of the game screenshots on this wiki actually came from console games played on PC emulators for that reason.

(I actually heard once that some HD games, such as the best-selling Metal Gear Solid 4, are actually still lower-resolution, just upscaled so as to keep framerates constant. This may change with the now-current PS4 and Xbox 1.)

Anyway, I'm done going off-topic. I made this thread so that users here could petition the mods for mod-privileges-requiring activities like Category creation or redirect-page alteration, but now that I know how to create Category pages without requiring such privileges, the mods here can close this topic or create another "petition the mods here" thread if that's a good idea.