Nobody can afford games anymore..

I do think that gaming, it's called gaming is now for the rich. I think this actually did happen. I do. I think that we're in a situation now where gaming is so expensive and especially like with this PlayStation update. Oh my god, it's bad. Like, I think it'll get better. I do. But right now, it is not good. Imagine being blamed for not buying enough when they're the ones that are making everything too expensive to buy. How many of you guys have been sitting around asking when is this going to stop? It's now got to the point where the price to just live, let alone even buy a video game, is getting out of the reach of damn near everyone. That's right. And now we have PlayStation raising their prices for the second time in less than a year. $100 across the board. And this is coming off of the tale of other price increases that we've seen already throughout the entire industry. Nintendo, Xbox, PC gaming hardware. Yeah, it just feels like it won't stop. All these guys are sitting around, these executives talking about how all these price increases are supposed to feel inevitable. Like it's just a bridge that we have to cross, but that bridge is now turned into an escalator that the vast majority of people cannot afford to get on. Yeah. None of this is necessary. They're all lying to you. Every single one of them. They can cry AI. They can talk about market headwinds. They can talk about shortages or inflation or whatever they want. But at the end of the day, all this is is these are companies that do not want to take any accountability. They would much rather hand over and pass down their mistakes to you, the customer, and make you pay the cost of it. They have taken our dedication. They have taken our loyalty. They have taken our money. And they have done nothing but churn out garbage games. Now they want to blame us for it. This entire industry is just going to eat itself alive. Is this I just realized somebody in chat said This is the Concord tax. This is our punishment for not liking Concord. We thought that we got away with it. We thought everything was okay. But that $400 million, they're going to have to make it up somewhere. And now it's time to pay up. Yep. This is the final Concord. Why do you feel about pirating games? I mean, I don't think you should, but I see why people do. Does that make sense? Today, what I want to do is I want to talk about where these prices are coming from, how apparently now video games are being made for the rich, what that's going to do for society, and also how all of this is just going to end up in flames. Before that, a word from today's sponsor, boot.dev. Longtime partner of the channel and one of the best websites if you want to learn to code vibing out to a YouTube video in the background that you then close afterwards. If you guys actually want to learn how to do it, this is the site to use. 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Go to boot.dev if you're interested and use my code legendary drops at checkout. That's going to give you 25% off your first entire year on an annual plan. Link is in the description, guys. 6 years. That's all it took for the price of video. Something that used to be one of the most real quick. I got to try Deadlock, bro. I really feel like I need to start playing it. Like, at least at least try the game out. see what they got cooked up cuz it's not like Valve released a bad game, right? There's no way that happened. So, I didn't try this game out. Multiple forms of entertainment to get pushed damn near out of the reach of most normal people. Marvel first came the price increase up to $70 back in 2020, right? When people were locked into their homes with not a lot of other options and people just kind of fork the money over. Fast forward to today and well, the last couple of years have been nothing but constant headlines about prices going up again and again. games that see one of the problems now is that like back in the day like so you had like this is with the Super Nintendo era right is that you had like different price points for different qualities of game. So, like the best video games, Super Mario Yoshi's Island, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, like the expansive 100hour, 50our video games from back in the '9s. Those games were like 50, 60 bucks. They were really expensive. I heard a couple of them like 70, right? They were they were a lot of money. But then, yeah, Super Mario RPG, there's another one, right? But then the the more midlevel games like I don't know like Jurassic Park or um like I'm trying to think like some others like the Kirby game or you know Super Mario World. They were like $50. And then you had the $40 games that were like the more arcadey games like uh you know F-Zero uh you know Pocky and Rocky, you've got um I don't know the the Goof Troop games, stuff like that. And they they were simple, right? as simpler games. And then you even had games that were below that that were like movie games or like you know promotional games, stuff like that where it was like uh you know the the Cheetos, Chester the Cheeto or whatever the [ __ ] his name was the the Cheetah and it was like some game with him that was like 20 $30. So back in the day you had a better price gradation for these different games based off of like what the product was supposed to be. Now everything basically is like everything's like $60 or $70 and I think that's not really accurate. And then you have indie game pricing which I think is reasonable and there is a lot of variance but inside of AAA large publish large publisher uh you know like video game development. It's really just the same thing. It's a one-sizefits-all. And that started it didn't start with Nintendo. Nintendo 64 still had the old system. It really started with GameCube. Gamecube is whenever every game became $50. Every game was 50 bucks. That was about it. And then, you know, like uh the one after that, what was it? 360 the Wii. Then it went up to $60 and then every game was $60 and that was it. But like back then, like there was a huge a huge spectrum of how much games cost. Wrong. PS2. Well, yeah, PS2 did come out before then. No, you're right about that. But it was the GameCube era which was like PS2, GameCube, and the original Xbox, right? Those are the three. $80, even $100. Nintendo being the first to break the second of the 66 seals. Sorry, I've been watching a lot of Supernatural. Then came AI, then came the global trade tariffs. Then it was just a bunch of other convenient excuses that just made the prices go even further up. First it was Xbox with Game Pass, then it was Xbox hardware went up, not once, but twice. Then PlayStation, the Xbox Game Pass price hike. I don't know if I can really support Game Pass. Like I used to be a very big advocate for Game Pass. I I thought it was great. Now, like I don't know. It's just It's too much money, man. It is. It's a lot. Like, they almost doubled it. Their hardware prices last fall. And now here we are just eight months later again with PlayStation increasing the price of the PlayStation Pro to $899, which is basically brushing up against $1,000 after tax. Oh my god. PlayStation excused this on their website saying with continued pressures in the global economic landscape, we have made the decision to increase the prices of this pro and the PlayStation Portal remote player globally. We know that these price changes impact our community. And after careful evaluation, we found that this was a necessary step to ensure that we can continue delivering innovative, highquality gaming experiences to players worldwide. Man, guys, I don't know what to tell you. This is just global pressure. Just just guys, just send it to chat GPT next time, okay? It's market headwinds. We just can't avoid it. I don't know what to do. It's AI taking over the world. It's tariffs. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with Sony funding over 12 live service games only to cancel half of them, burning hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the critical lack of first party output, the eight studios they've shut down over the past couple of years, the estimated $400 million they burned on Concord, or by the way, somebody showed me some I guess I probably shouldn't say this. Somebody showed me some internal documents for like investment documents about Concord. It was actually more. And by more, I mean a lot more. And by a lot more, I mean you'd be shocked how much it was. Like the the the sale of the parent company that owned the company that made Concord was insane. the valuation, the fact that their biggest bet, Marathon, which allegedly was around $250 million budgeted before marketing, which means it's probably closer to $400 million allin, only managed to make over just a million in sales. And less than a month later, is now averaging 36,000 players on Steam, a platform that makes up roughly 70% of their audience. Where are they at now? Because remember, Mondays are always the days Remember what I told you guys? Man, that's a floperooi. That's And it's only gotten worse. You had it ready. I did. Marathon released. Yeah, it came out. Yes, I know that Marathon is some divine success that we just can't see. The game developers are in it for the long haul. But I would also like to remind everybody that's what they said about High Guard. Please say this that High Guard had a one-year road map. So maybe let's just come back down to Earth for a second. Surely it is global headwinds and not the fact that their live service future is now hanging on a morbidly obese Amazon that lost a foot to diabetes. Now while it might seem like I'm singling out Sony here, I promise you guys that I'm not because all of these guys are making the exact same mistakes. Xbox just the same. These guys Amazon she's Amazon pantry have taken years of players goodwill and support and money and they have sacrificed it on an altar of live service of subscriptions and games that nobody ever wanted to play and now those same companies are trying to come to you and they're trying to gaslight you into believing that these price increases are somehow out of their hands like this is just something here's how you know the best example to prove that the price increases are not necessary is expedition 33 three. That's the proof right there. That's a game that has AAA level quality, that had Andy Circus and other very well-known actors. It had Ben Star, Jennifer English. Like, these are all really really well-known successful voice actors. And I mean, Andy Circus literally in [ __ ] uh in in Lord of the Rings, right? And not to mention tons of other voice acting characters that were in the story as well. and all of that. All of these things were in the game and it was $50. It wasn't even 60. It was Elden Ring and Balders's Gate 3 were 60. This was 50. That's the reality. That that that I think is the proof that this is not necessary. It's just a market. It's just this unfortunate reality that we have no control over. No, this is cost transference. This is them pushing accountability and the cost of their own failures directly onto the customer. All to keep their shareholders happy instead of just taking the hit, digging deep and rebuilding their trust and reputation that they have destroyed their belief. I think it's a matter of uh of of bureaucracy and it's also a matter of organizational structure. I think that a lot of the companies that have had like I think that every company only the best CEOs and leaders are able to avoid this and even they fall victim to it and they have to recalibrate regularly. Guys like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk etc. they run a really tight ship. Gabe Newwell, right? And like these people run an extremely tight ship. But the problem is that many people that are in part of leadership, they just solve problems by hiring new people, which does solve the problem in the short term. But then you whenever you solve 10 problems that way, then you have 10 more [ __ ] people, right? Or a hundred more people in the company because you had to solve 10 problems with 10 hiring free uh 10 hiring things. So that's what I think happened. You do not think it's also because of egos? No, I think that there is something that is corporate entropy. I've seen it happen myself in companies that I've been involved with is that people always want to have more people working there because they think that that can offset their responsibility. And so there creates a general expectation that a company will generally grow. And I think that once corporate entropy fully takes hold and you have an HR office that's creating a management office that manages the HR at the management office, then you have so much of this [ __ ] happen that it's just it it's it's like a Titanic, right? It's like this ship is too big to move and to avoid danger. That's what happens. And I think that's the main problem these companies have is that they're not run from a perspective of uh you know like they're not run in a in like a in a light way, right? There's just too many people their faith in this matter is that well and also a lot of the people that are there don't contribute to the end sorry uh the only the only people that are there. They don't contribute to the benefit of the end product. They are like ancillary secondary people that are really unnecessary. players are just mindless slugs. That the hardcore gaming audience that makes up 18 to 20% of players is just going to keep buying things no matter what. That their demand is basically inelastic. It's unmoving. It's never going to change. That they can raise prices, strip value, and make mistake after mistake and that crowd is still going to show up and just fork it over. And for everybody else, well, the rest of the sheep will just fall in line, too, because they're going to convince themselves these prices are temporary when they are anything but that. Because if any of this was about economic headwinds and the prices would eventually No, no. I Please bring back down when those winds change, but that never happens. I'd like to remind people that we were once told that game prices would come down when the industry shifted into digital, but instead we just got the opposite. I didn't think about that. That's actually a good idea. I was thinking about CO. How many of you guys Oh, the prices are going up because of COVID. Okay. Well, that makes sense. It's a global pandemic. Maybe things are going to be harder to make. then the pandemic's over. They stay up. That's what it was is [ __ ] co. I'd like to also remind people that the $70 price increase didn't happen until lockdowns when publishers and console makers were making more money than they were actually spending. They had more engagement, more investment they ever had seen in their entire lives. Even when these guys are winning, they're still pretending like they're losing. Now, while I understand that people can and largely will just keep playing what they already have for now, the long-term effects of this are going to be brutal. We are already brushing up against a thousand consoles and we're not even in the next generation yet, which is likely going to be even worse. That means the reality is that eventually because of inflation and the way that our financial system works, when we are very old, we will look back fondly on the days where you only had to spend $100 to buy a video game. Like assuming that we live for another like 50 years, you know, that's that's that's a good scenario, right? That' be good. If we live for another 50 years, the odds are that we will be looking back fondly on $100 video games. It's just the way it is. But the problem is that like basically wages, income, the amount of the the quality of the games uh is not going up at the same rate that the price is going up. is an industry that built itself on lower and middle inome households and they are now slowly cutting those people out of the picture. Gaming becomes a luxury. Hardware lower and middle inome households are being cut out of the picture themselves becomes a luxury and I genuinely do not understand how any of these companies can look at that and think that this makes any sense. This is your audience. This is the people that you need and you're now making it harder and harder for these guys to be able to buy in at all. And you know, once you start pricing those people out, I just I don't see how this doesn't kill the console market in the next 5 years. PlayStation especially, this is making even less sense. If their whole new strategy now is to keep their games off of PC, then shrinking your console audience is just going to destroy you. The only way that this makes any sense to me is if these guys have decided that they don't need ordinary people anymore, that wealthy households who now make up the majority of sales can carry the market. that these guys I hate the fact that he's probably right about this. And how do you know this? Because this is literally the business model of gotacha games. This is the gotacha game business model where the majority of people are like very very light to free-to-play spenders, like non-spenders. Maybe they buy a battle pass or something and then the entire game is funded by whales basically. Just keep paying out no matter what. But that math doesn't matter. Luxury cars. Yeah. Now, we already know that lower and middle inome households are buying less and less hardware. And more of that burden is now falling onto richer households, which is a much smaller market to begin with, households making over $100,000 a year now account for more than half of all of these purchases for all this gaming hardware. And the price increases that we're seeing is just going to push. Keep in mind that there are it is a surprising amount of households that make over $100,000 a year in the US. Like a a crazy amount. I think that people are still stuck with like, you know, 2001 thinking where like $100,000 a year is a huge amount. It's actually not. Like the way that we saw a hund Oh man, a six figure salary. The way that we saw that whenever we were like kids, that's like 200 and something,000 a year now. Like it's like$180 to $250,000 a year. Threshold even higher. probably into the $150,000 or even $250,000 range when the rest of the economy keeps inflating. So now you're shrinking from a little over 40% of the US households to 26 maybe even 16% and the people below that just don't have any room to be able to close that gap anymore. I'm broke. Yeah, I know. That's what I'm saying. Which brings me to something else. And maybe this is something that is just too hard for these guys to understand. Maybe they are just too ignorant to be able to get it. But the more expensive that hardware gets, the harder it is for players to enter, which means there are fewer people around to be able to buy games at all. And once that happens, these giant full production games that these guys are making starts making less and less sense. This was always the conversation around PC gaming is that games like, for example, HalfLife 2 when it came out in 2004, a lot of people were like, well, how are they going to make the money back? Like what is this? like so few people could even really play HalfLife 2 because of the uh system requirements. And there were a handful of other instances of that happening too where basically if the price of getting into a market is so high that it's prohibitive, then how can you possibly make any money companies to get better? I want these companies to shrink down, but I'm not hoping for all of these guys to die. But something like this does not give them a future. It strips one away. There's just not going to be anybody around to buy any of these games. They're just going to choke out the hobby. Halfife was the most popular. If this is what's going to happen to the companies, imagine what's going to happen to the people that are already barely hanging on and using games as one of the very few things that they could still afford. I really they're going to be like the South Americans. That's what's going to happen is they're turn again. It's third worldization, bro. It's everywhere. It's every the thing is even come to video games. You are going to be out there picking mints in Ginshin Impact. No, you can't afford the new the new limited time banner character. No, you can't buy her weapon. No, you can't get her alternative outfit. But you can pick the mens and do your dailies. That's right. And you do that so you can be fodder for some Chinese millionaire that spends, you know, $10,000 a month on Epic 7 to just farm you all day and all night. That's it. Not see how any of this works out in the long term. You know, one of the reasons why PC has been taking off over the past couple of years, getting bigger and bigger, is largely because people have been able to stretch older hardware a lot further than I think the industry thought that they would be able to. I just seen recently that over 50% of players on PC are still playing games at 1080p, which looks fantastic, by the way. I can attest to this. I was playing on 1080p not even all that long ago. But most of these guys are not chasing the highest end hardware. They're just chasing something that's going to last as long as possible. It's expensive, possible. Also, they're probably not playing a lot of these AAA games anyway. But console's a entirely different beast. These guys don't have a choice. They're going to they're going to get drugged forward whether they like it or not. The games start running like garbage, looking like garbage, or the console makers or the game makers just stop making games for them entirely. It's planned obsolescence, but it used to not be that bad because it was over a long period of time and it was still a relatively inexpensive transition to be able to get into, a more exciting transition to be able to make. But no wonder PlayStation has been having such a hard time getting people off of the PS4. people can't afford it. Well, now and and now they're forcing people off of the PS4 by ending support to different things. Like for example, Ginchinch and Impact, it was like today or yesterday, announced that they're going to be ending support for the PS4. Like I I used I I had to stop using my PS4 because it literally wouldn't update anymore if it wasn't for that. Like now I'm using my PS5, but like I I mean again like why would I use my PS5 if I already have my PS4? like I'm just going to it's a Netflix machine anyway. Like I don't give a [ __ ] And so that's what am I the only person that did that? I feel like I'm not more so now. That's why none of this that's why I'm struggling to understand how what the broader strategy is here. Honestly, I don't even think there is one because all this is doing is shrinking your console base, which is also then cutting off new buyers. Yeah. And by extension of that, it's crashing your hardware appeal. It's killing game sales, and it's just dragging the rest of the games industry down with it. I think he's bringing up a good point, especially with like second order effects of controller sales, like you know, memory card sales back in the day, stand sales, like all of the other ancillary accessories are now having a much smaller market that they can be sold to. I I think that what they're doing instead is they're trying to make more money off of individual users through things like Game Pass, PS+, marketplace sales, and then residuals that they get from that. and they're using that to make up for the console sales that they're not making. So, it's like basically the gotcha model again, right? Where you're just basically finding ways that you can continuously charge the people with the most money in order to make up for the rising baseline across the entire consumer base. That's what I think's happening. These studios are effectively like stores in a mall and the console is the mall, but the mall just locked the doors. Oops. Now, while I know a lot of people are going to hear this and they're going to be like, "Yeah, whatever. Okay, I'm just going to, you know, keep getting by. I'm going to coast by on the games that I already have or the hardware that I already have." Yeah, that's true. But I think that it dodges out on a much larger issue, which is consoles, you can't do that because they just they stop doing updates that like the functionality ceases to work. And because most things are digital demand or a digital delivery, like you don't have the discs, right? It's not like it's a PS5 where or a PS2 where you can just put the disc in. Who these guys are locking out? Thinking about the new players, the new people, the young people, the students, the families that no longer can justify buying into this hobby anymore. I think we should probably talk about the people that they're locking out. I try to be a champion of fair pricing because honestly, it is just my biggest concern, not only as a content creator, but just as a person. I did not come from money. And no matter how much success I find or how old I get, I'm always going to be worried about how much something costs because it's just baked into my DNA at this point. Even more so with video games because they were so instrumental and keeping me out of trouble and helping me make friends and keeping me sane and most importantly helping me save money. I feel like for a lot of us, video games were like the benchmark that we graded the value of everything else. Like whenever my mom would tell me, you know, if I buy you this, that's like one10enth of a video game and she's buying me Pokemon cards or something like that. That was always, it's like, you know, it's like basically, you know, how they say like Americans use everything like a football field as a frame of reference for everything. That's the way it was if you were like a, you know, a nerdy kid or a gamer, a kid gamer in like the 90s and the 2000s is like everything was structured around the price as a relation to maybe either a fast food meal or a video game. And like I I judged everything off of that, right? I mean, like, you know, getting a new skateboard with like, you know, an actual like, you know, custommade skateboard that was like $120. That's like two and a half video games. getting uh you know like a full meal at at you know [ __ ] KFC that was like uh half of a video game if it was like you know a big meal for like my mom and me, right? Like everything was built off of that. It was all about that. A lot of millennials I graduated high school immediately went to college for something that I was not cut out for. Maxed out my credit cards, built up college debt, dropped out and then found myself stuck working deadend jobs trying to survive and just trying to figure out who the hell I even was. years and years of living paycheck to paycheck, years of feeling stuck. And through all of that, the one thing that I always had was video games. The one affordable thing, the one thing that I could hold on to, the one escape that I had. And now I'm watching entire generations and entire households get locked out of it entirely. Yeah. You're being de you're being downgraded to a third worlder. And now you're playing free-to-play games. Free to play. The first people getting hit by all this are lowincome households, which is exactly what is making this so disgusting to me. The people who need access to cheaper entertainment the most are the ones that are being cut off from it. Especially depending on what kind of living conditions you grew up in. I got a bunch of friends of mine that would straight up tell you that if it wasn't for video games, they probably would have ended up on drugs or had a kid before they were 16. That's not me being dramatic. That's just real life in this situation. Gen Z, Gen A students, casual gamers, low-income households, all of these groups are just getting pushed further and further out of the market because either these guys just flat out don't have the money for this or they can't justify spending that kind of money on something that they just don't have enough free time to be able to make worth it, especially at these prices. And man, that's just so sad to me because gaming has always had a relatively low barrier of entry. People like to shrug this entire thing off and pull the whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps routine or start paring yourself out to a nine-year-old. Like that's the thing is like I mean these are kids that can't play the games. And also like what are the kids doing instead of that? They're getting groomed on Roblox and they're playing Camala Harris's [ __ ] uh Fortnite map. That's not that that's not the way it's supposed to be, guys. It's not it it absolutely [ __ ] it's ridiculous. Some Tik Tok life coach about how you should be spending all of your time making money. But people need joy in their lives or they start to lose their damn mind. Back when I was stuck working at a gas station back when I had no money to go out, I couldn't go out to concerts or anything like that with my friends and I felt like I was going nowhere. Video games were still there for me. Instead of me blowing my money on drinking or some other dumb [ __ ] I could buy one or two games a year and I could stretch those games forever. Night after night, I'd be playing online hockey leagues with NHL or I'd be talking [ __ ] in FPS lobbies with my friends, dumping what felt like hundreds of hours into an RPG. And honestly, if I didn't have that, I don't know where I would have ended up. I think what bothers me the most about all of this is that I already know where this all ends. I know exactly what their plan is. It's clear as day to see. They do not intend to leave these people behind. No, they intend to use them to squeeze more money out of them than they ever could have through ownership. Middle and lower inome households and players are just going to get Well, now they're allowing you to rent consoles. I don't know if you guys saw this before, but now you can rent a PS5. You know what they say, you'll earn nothing. [ __ ] No, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy. Wow. It's true. mobile subscriptions, cloud gaming, maybe even leasing consoles like PlayStation has already floated in the past. Exactly. All of it sold as access. Ridiculous. All of it sold as convenience. All of it's going to be predatory as hell. This is a direct attack on the middle and lower class. It's a way to keep people exactly where they are, stuck in a cycle of smaller payments while owning absolutely nothing at all, paying way more in the long run because the price is broken up just enough to feel manageable while they're able to keep them on the hook forever. Mhm. And the worst part is is that this already works, which is exactly why these guys are going to keep doing it. Earlier, I had showed a graphic breaking down where the paid audience is actually coming from. And what stood out to me is how obvious this divide really is. Hardcore players are making up the biggest share of the AAA audience, but the smallest share of freeto play. Meanwhile, core and casual players, the groups that are far more tied to lower and middle income brackets, are making up the majority of the free-to-play audience. And then yeah, they're literally surfs. They're like the plankton that the whales eat in the ocean. That's that it this is this is the way it's meant to work. Yeah, I saw something much more uglier start to creep in. A whole category that doesn't register at all with hardcore players start showing up for everyone else. Cards and casino games. fifth most for core gamers and third most for casual gamers. So when these companies are trying to push out ownership out of reach, they're not just trying to change the way that people play, they are trying to train these people to operate within a worse ecosystem, more exploitative ones. the exact I think that what you're going to see happen is that as purchasing things over time will become more common there will be added incentives for for example like if you're paying for something over time like let's say you're paying for a PlayStation 5 over 3 years or you're leasing it there is probably going to be a possib like if I if I was the leasing company and this is what I would do I would create a second a secondary way to make payments where every single month that you make a payment on the console, you have the opportunity to take a gamble of maybe like a 1 in 10 chance or a one in seven chance that you can spend twice as much for the payment this month, but then you roll the dice on being able to own the console. That's if I was them, that's what I would do. I would that would probably go so hard. And I bet that and and again again that's a good idea. I think it's a good idea. That's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. Don't give them ideas. I'm telling you kind of ecosystems that are built to bleed the most vulnerable. This is why I try to warn people. Mhm. Luckily, there is a bright side to all of this. The more inaccessible, predatory, and disgusting that these people continue to make video games, well, the more they just keep shoving players into the arms of somebody else. And in doing that, not only are they making their own problems worse, but they're also strengthening the very competition that is eating their market share, competition that respects their time a lot more, competition that respects these players freedom a lot more. And right now that means indie games and Valve. It wasn't all that long ago that we were talking about the pricing crash on Steam where AAA games were not only losing market share, but getting outsold by indie games, but also the average price of games being sold on the platform had fell with it. the median price had dropped from around $20 to just over $14. And that matters because well, it shows that there's still an enormous demand for games. People have not lost interest in gaming. They're just being forced to be a lot smarter with their money. And when given the choice between bloated, overpriced slop and cheaper, better, more focused games. Well, more and more people are starting to choose the latter. And Valve, well, they're going to take that a step further. Well, I think also like a a big component to this also is that a lot of the AAA video games focus on content and mechanisms that are not important to the player. Like uh like for example like in not where Winds meet in Crimson Desert there's a lot of features in Crimson Desert that I think most players don't really care about. Crimson Desert's a very great game. I think it's amazing, but at the same time, it has a lot of features in it that really are unnecessary that nobody really gives a [ __ ] about. Uh, like things like the wagon, like who want who likes doing that? I mean, sure, some people like doing it, but like is it really worth designing a system like this in the game? And the really bad examples. Crimson Desert's not a bad example. It's actually a relatively good example because it's a maximalist game to begin with. But Assassin's Creed Shadows, why do you have a house building system in Assassin's Creed Shadows? Why can you pick the cats that are in Assassin's Creed Shadows? Is this really something that is increasing the user base? Is this something that because it costs money to make something like that and it increases the value of the game or like the cost of the game, but is it increasing the value of the game? And I think yeah, that's a good way to look at it is that a lot of these AAA games have a lot of features and functionalities that increase the cost of the game but not the value of the game. And I think that's why you see people that are going back to games that are a very uniform, very defined but narrow in scope but deep in focus uh experience. Something like Slay the Spire for example or Meabon or Ball Pit or anything else like that. That's the reason why Valve updated its regional pricing tools to help developers automate their pricing based on local purchasing power, not just flat currency conversion. And that's a huge difference. I don't think people really understand this because instead of just charging somebody what the equivalent of $20 USD is in another currency and then pretending like that's somehow fair. Instead, this system is trying to reflect what $20 actually means inside that economy. In some places, $20 is not casual spending. It is a big chunk of somebody's week. So, Valve is effectively making it easier for developers to price their games in a way that real people can actually afford. Now, in combination, unfortunately, you have people that use VPNs that use it to get around and to take advantage of regional pricing that's meant to subsidize people that are in developing countries. I think that it's a very small subset of people, but like I mean again, like obviously you have to have regional pricing. You you need to have that or you're not going to be able to to sell anything in like Brazil or in Iran for example. Listen, honestly, the timing couldn't be any better, but we're probably about to see another wave of even stronger indie titles because making them just got a hell of a lot more accessible and a hell of a lot more cheaper. Valve just signed a deal with the makers of Garry's Mod to build Sandbox, a version of Source 2 with simplified creation tools and features that are brought over from Unreal and Unity, while also still maintaining the kind of optimization and performance that Source is known for, making it easier to not only build greatl lookinging games, but also games for lower-end hardware, which is a pretty big deal. An even bigger deal, though, is that it's all royalty-free. And Gary Newman, the maker of Gary's Mod and Sandbox, explained exactly why when he said, "Valve gave me a chance. I'm already rich. I don't want to [ __ ] anyone over. I only want to give opportunities to the next generation like Val [ __ ] patriot. I love to see this, bro. This is the way it should be. Did to me. We can all win together. Ban is that not a massive contrast from the rest of the industry. It sure is. Now, you're not only making it easier for smaller developers to make games of their own, make better games of their own, make more games for more people, avoid royalties, release their games directly onto Steam, but you're also letting these guys keep more of their revenue and also cut down on the kind of overhead that is constantly being shoved straight on to customers. And again, it's like what I said before about how Valve is really smart. Oh yeah, these people making these games, you're going to get paid because they're going to sell them on Steam. And you know what happens when they sell them on Steam? You get your percentage from that. So, it's all about lowering the barrier to entry. So, you can hopefully get a few games that do really well and then you capitalize on the Steam sales from that. So, it's again, it's not that they're doing this for free. It's just that they're focusing the payment on a position where there's less of a barrier to entry. So, that that's that's again that's smart business sense. And I think this goes to show just how unnecessary all of this is. While some of the biggest companies in the industry are trying to find more ways to make gaming more expensive, more restrictive, and more predatory, somebody else is out there trying to make games easier to make, easier to distribute, easier to make money off of, and easier for people to actually afford. That's the split. You got one side that's building ladders and the other side is trying to build toll booths. At some point, we got to stop pretending like this is just some market or inflation or it's just bad luck. This is a choice. And if this industry keeps choosing to push normal people out of gaming, well, then they're definitely going to deserve what comes next. I remember this one time where I was uninsured, no savings, and I chipped a tooth. And for basically an entire month, I had Tylenol like it was candy until I could save up money. And then I finally got the crown. And when I did, I still had to make payments on it. But the entire time that I was going through all of that, the one thing that I had was that I had a crippling addiction to playing EA NHL where I was doing these online hockey leagues on a website where you get with a group and you guys play through like whole tournament brackets and stuff. And while it was the only game that I had time for while I was working that much, it saved me a lot of money and it also saved me a lot of pain. It got me through it. I'll never forget that. And that's why I take all this so seriously. This is why I want people to have fair access to entertainment because I know how important it is. And also going through everything, I also know how predatory the world has become over the years. And I'm going to keep calling it out. I should keep calling it out. Anybody that has the opportunity should every single chance they get. And you know, when you're coming from low income, everything is chip damage. Everything is built against you. You know, I had a It's expensive. I had to take a job where it's expensive to be poor. There's a lot of like really small things that for example like I don't have to pay because I have a lot of money and like let me think of a good example like if you can afford to it's always it's like little simple things like for example uh like Door Dash like if you if you have a bit of money you can get Door Dash but if you have a little bit more money you can get the Dash pass and then you have to spend less money. It's the same as Uber Eats or something like that. It's like being able to afford a membership to Sam's Club and then you can buy things wholesale rather than buying them at Walmart. And then buying them at Walmart is cheaper than being able to buy them at the gas station. But it's the difference between having the disposable income that's discretionary of $6 versus $16 or you know like you know $26 versus $60. And many people don't have discretionary spending income that's that low, especially whenever you're talking about multiple other products. Yeah, minimum balance fees. Yeah, minimum balance fees is a huge big one. Overdraft fees. You know who doesn't have to worry about overdraft fees? People that have a ridiculous amount of money in their account or that have a good amount of money in their account. People that have no like, think about like when would you ever have to worry about an overdraft fee if you're like really well off? Never. And so there are so many hidden fees and costs and things that poor people have to deal with that rich people don't ever think about or even and this is not even rich people. These are people that are financially secure, right? So this is these are problems that like the bottom half of society has to deal with basically and especially the bottom 20%. That's the really bad stuff. That's the the purgatory level [ __ ] I worked across the country working 14 to 16 hour days, seven days a week just to be able to crawl my way out over four years to find security. Then I stumbled into this job. Thank you guys. Bus no idea. Thank you guys. But you know, the entire time I just learned how everything is built against you. And here you now have these game companies that want to come in and they want to add another layer on top of that. No, another piece. Don't let it do Don't let them do it. walk away. Find something else. Find other games to support. Find other platforms to support. Figure out your hardware situation. Buy a PC. Buy a small PC. Tiny build. You don't need anything crazy, man. Well, just wait till you get the like I mean the thing is that if you want a PC to do gaming in, you probably have some sort of PC. Now, look at the parts with that PC and build your own. I will promise you that if you have a good amount of time and a very little amount of money, you will always come out ahead making your own PC. And I said this even whenever I was involved with Star Forge and everything. And like we sold [ __ ] uh you know the the custommade PCs. Those are like the fact is that you will always be able to get a cheaper PC if you build it yourself. Like now I'm very fortunate that this is a pre-built. That's a pre-built. I've got one other pre-built over there. All of the older ones that are downstairs, those are all made by me. And you can build yourself a PC nowadays, a a good PC. I would say you're looking at $1,000 to $1.6,000. I could be out of date with that based off of the recent price increases, but prior to that, that was about where you were at 2000. Really? With or without RAM? Is it really that bad now, guys? I haven't built a PC for like five years. Holy [ __ ] You know, even if it's older gaming laptop, play indie games and do that instead. This is not going to work out for these guys. Abandoning the lower and middle class is essentially just going to dry up all of your earnings if they think well it it will happen over time because think about like in this like he and I are great examples of this now. We're we're very financially secure. We're doing well. We can buy whatever the [ __ ] we want basically. Here's the difference. We grew up not being able to do that. And the habits that we developed as we were growing up leads us to continue playing these video games and spending more money. So basically, it's like you're cutting off the evolutionary cycle where you don't have younger people that didn't have a lot that found a refuge in gaming that then got older and got more discretionary income. Well, when you don't have that, now you've lost your pipeline to your high-end users. That's the problem. And that's a long-term problem that manifests in 20 years, not overnight. If these guys actually think that they're actually going to be able to support everything using the upper class, it's not going to happen. Just because by their nature, the upper class typically does not spend that much time playing these kind of spending money on this kind of entertainment. They have other forms of entertainment that they spend money on. And you're just not going to get the same level of income or the same level of loyalty that you would normally see from people that are somewhere in the middle. These guys are just going to continue to lose money at an everinccreasing rate. And it's going to get to the point where it's just going to collapse these companies entirely. Y maybe that's what has to happen. The only way for any of this next is for some of these guys to just straight up go out of business or to just have their That's not a bad thing. I mean, again, like it's it's not a bad thing. like that. That's nature. That that is it's again it's natural selection with business, right? It's the free market working. The stock cut in half. That's how it is. Their staff's cut in half and their presence cut in half and then just lose the isn't having the same issues. I think actually maybe now they are. Hope you guys enjoyed the video. If you guys did enjoy the video, like the video, subscribe to the channel, share with your friends, share it on social media, follow me on Twitch, follow me on Twitter. I always actually really like seeing you guys posting stuff on social media. I always get a notification or a tag because of it and it's always like that's nice. Anyway, thank you guys for watching. Stay cool, stay righteous, stay safe. Catch you in the next one. Peace. No, it's a good video. It's a really good video. I mean, you guys can tell, right? I mean, I'm I'm pretty passionate and I'm very opinionated about this. All So, like for a lot of other people, like they might not care about it in the same way that I do. Imagine being I I definitely care about this a