“Gaming is becoming unaffordable” — Xbox CEO says the industry has an accessibility crisis

That CEO has no room to talk about gaming being unaffordable and the industry ignoring the signs, when it's that very industry that made it unaffordable to begin with.

You can't claim ignorance of a problem you and your industry directly caused, Asha. You're as complicit in this as the industry you're saying is ignoring warning signs.

That's like if I broke a stick in half in front of a bunch of people, and then tried to say I didn't break that stick, when everyone saw me break that stick. Stupid analogy, I know, but that's basically what Asha is trying to pull here.

Whose decision was it to charge 70-80 usd for a game?

Whose ai investments are buying up all the ram, gpus, and ssds?

Not consumers’…

"People are buying indie games instead and I'm not happy about it"

Maybe if they would stop burning through all the RAM and shoving AI down our throats...

All the wealth is being concentrated in the hands of too few people. I'm not going to buy a $120 game when my salary is down, or I'm just laid off.

Well Asha, maybe you should talk to your boss Slopya about that AI problem that's raising prices on everything.

I mean, unless you play the last four decades of games in emulation... or the couple hundred thousand indie games on steam... or the other few hundred thousand mobile games or...

Oh, you mean your company profits are in crisis. Yeah. Good.

High quality indie games are very affordable <3

Why would I pay $70 for shit that's super watered down to appeal to the lowest common denominator when I could pay $20-40 for something made with real passion?

These people only care now because it's actually affecting the bottom line.

Did they care when AAA pricing was lifted to $70 (base) as AAA quality took a nosedive? Did they care when "preordering" turned into "premium"? Did they care when microtransactions made some games into spend-to-win machines?

Hell, most of these clowns don't even play games. Just more rich people putting on the hat they think they need to get away with a "hello, fellow gamers."

Maybe the industry has a C-suite crisis.

Introducing a monthly subscription for next gen consoles and hiking game pass prices /s

Gaming studios have the choice to make stylized visuals instead of chasing hyper realism. They just choose not to.

Every industry has an accessibility crisis. Lazy MBAs don't want to sell products that appeal to everyone if they can sell products that only appeal to rich people with less effort.

Perhaps making one game per decade is a losing strategey.

Edit: I heard a million excuses for that over the years from AAA industry, but my counter is just pointing to Capcom. Why can they keep up both output and quality?

Gaming, is joining everything else at becoming harder to afford.

Ultimately AI is an unaffordable industry. It'll crash in time, and there'll hopefully be a whole lot of price drops on ram, graphics, etc. People will not want to stop playing games. The industry has had crashes before and always bounced back bigger than ever.

It will be bad for whoever's economy is most dependent on it though.. And any businesses really heavily invested in it. Won't it, Microsoft.

There have an amazing catalog of affordable games that were launched over the last 25 years (or more). There's a lifetime of fun available. Gamers may chose to play those, instead of the over expensive new games or worse, subscriptions.

Well no but also yes.

An Atari 2600 was $160 in 1979. Cartridges were $25-40. Adjust for inflation and that's $738.56 for a console and $115-184 per cartridge.

Also minimum wage was $2.90 ($13.39). Median family income was $19,660 ($90,750.94).

And it was new tech.

So the prices have come down. There are a lot of amazing games that are cheap that you can play basically forever. Minecraft, Dead Cells, Skyrim, etc.

But our expectations have risen while our wages have come down.

So not wrong, but not right for the reasons you'd assume.

Is it though? I feel like there are a ton of indie games these days that are reasonably priced and run well without using a fuck ton of resources.

I don't really care if GTA 6 is $100+. It's the best of the best, maximum effort, no expense spared tier of video game making. I might eventually get it and I might not.

Keep in mind that Super Nintendo games were $60 or $70 in the mid 90s. Games have come down in relative price recently and are only now starting to creep back up, but that's because gaming has become a massively popular hobby and a lot of people want huge masterpieces like GTA 6 or Elder Scrolls 6.

I ONLY buy games when they're on sale on steam, and they need to be like 60% off for me to even consider it

How well is she paying her employees?

The arms race inherent in the world of computer gaming is reaching a point of unsustainability. I started thinking that way back when I could donate cpu time on my ps3 to protein folding simulation.

And, like most of our field, it’s a ratchet that only goes up. Efficiency and clever engineering to create an accessible experience is almost always lower down the list of priorities for these big corporate AAA publishers .

They’re more interested in swinging their dick further than the other guy. A lot of the time this doesn’t actually buy something more fun, popular, or playable. But the mind of an exec beholden to shareholders is obligated to invest in bloat. meanwhile I’m having a delightful time running clever little indie games on my steam deck.

Life is unaffordable because of them and now they’re crying about a lack of consumers to buy their stuff.

Middle class exists only by virtue of subsidies. It was an artificial creation invoked by FDR. Then Reagan started a destruction of the middle class that never ended with him. And now we are here.

There's that passive voice, striking again

Plenty of good indie or AA games with low system requirements.

Or, you know, do something else than incrementing the version number on your old games while adding nothing new.

Same old games, at a higher price, this might just not cut it.

In the meantime, the Indie games are flourishing.

That's what the industry has to say, Mr. The CEO... Open your eyes.

-- Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

PS6 and Xbox whatever aren't going to come out for a very long time.

I have enough that I could go out right now and drop $5k on a new PC build and not have it affect me.

My last mostly full build was in 2016. I'm still on ddr4 ram and just 6 months ago I upgraded my system to a used AMD R 5 5600x processor I got for $150 and an AMD 6600xt GPU I paid $200 for.

I'll play one of the million older games I haven't played yet before I ever spend so damned much on a new build or $900 on a console.

Says the company charging a minimum of $10/mo to play online (Game Pass) when you can do it for free (with the same game) on the PC.

It's like they're catching onto why the urban legend about drug dealers intentionally poisoning their customers is bullshit. Turns out your sales go down when people can't buy your product.

Emulating is becoming Easier.

I though "accessibility" in video games meant, like, color blind mode and shit.

They're talking about their own "industry", not the entire gaming industry, right? Riiight?

There's plenty of affordable stuff. But I'm not the target audience for their 50 or 60 € release titles. And my backlog is long enough either way.

It's not affordable because of the indie games competition and no market regulations. Where in software there are plenty of regulations and competition is not existent because Office is given for free to schools so children are learning to use Microsoft products.

I could've sworn there was some girl who was fit .....

If things going like this long enough, people won't be able to play pirated games too.

Hopefully they sell WoW, Diablo, Halo and any of the few good IPs they own (directly or indirectly) off

It’s interesting how people are finally starting to notice after being told for years this will all eventually come to a head.