(But it’s also heavily on sale right now, for $15 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/526870/Satisfactory/)
Personally, I don’t mind at all. For one I bought it at $30, but also I have 2,000 hours logged. Per hour that’s a cost of $0.02 per hour (at the new price) if I had bought it at $40. I’m all for calling out studios like ubisoft for being greedy, but coffee stain has done a very fair job with Satisfactory IMO, and they very well deserve $10 more for the game.
That being said, go pick it up now for $15
Hence why you release a new product. You can’t indefinitely make income from one thing until the end of time.
You can charge more for a new product, as you can actually scale for inflation when you have to make it from the ground up. After all, the tools and manpower it required cost more now. So you can charge more.
But asking for more money for a product that was made half a decade prior, that didn’t cost what it costs now since inflation wasn’t where it is now, isn’t the answer.
Listen, as a general rule of thumb, if even EA and Activision won’t go there, maybe you shouldn’t either.
So they should just stop development on a game that’s still considered early access and leave it in an unfinished state and start working on something else that they can charge more for and just stop working on it once inflation catches up no matter the state it’s in? That’s what you’re saying devs should do?
EA, Activision, Ubisoft don’t do it this way, instead they charge you for all extra content separately.
Maybe that’s what the Satisfactory team should do, release the game as is as being complete, not change the price and then release paid DLC that would otherwise have been updates so in the end people need to pay more to get the full game… Damn, we’re back to square one but now people who already paid for the game also need to pay for updates…
Nope, they decided to accept purchases for a game that isn’t finished, and in doing so promised that one day it would be. If they stop now they’ll just be scammers.
They should do what Larian did. Release the game in EA, develop the game with those new purchases helping to keep things going, then release it when it’s complete. No artificially changing the price, no bs.
And in what world has what we’ve gotten from free Satisfactory updates constituted would-be paid dlc? Or are you just using hypotheticals that aren’t relevant?
I mean, they get to decide when it’s finished, if it’s stable and there’s enough content that people are playing hundreds of hours then they can say that that’s the basic experience and if people want more they need to pay for it, in the end it’s even worse than just not having paid DLC and increasing the price as the game gets more content and life becomes more expensive.
Not as if there was anything new to doing that, Minecraft cost about 5$ for the people who bought it as soon as it was made available, now you don’t even get the mobile version for that price.
Again, there’s literally no reason for you to believe that this price increase somehow means you’ll never have to pay for dlc. Have you never heard of Factorio?
And for the record, like with your Minecraft example, I’m not against devs charging less for Early Access versions, alphas, betas, etc, and charging more for the finished product when it fully launches. That’s a very common practice, in fact it’s the standard.
That’s very different than deciding to increase the price arbitrarily in the middle of developing an early access title that’s been in development for 5 years, and isn’t releasing officially yet.
“I’m not against what Minecraft did, I’m just against what Minecraft did.”
Get your story straight buddy.
Google strawman.
Look, I don’t mean to be a dick but unless your reading comprehension is abysmal you’re purposefully misunderstanding my point.
Like I said,
I’m okay with how Minecraft did things. Same with titles like BG3, Hades, Shovel Knight, and countless others. This is different, and if you can’t understand that after I laid it out twice for you then it’s clear you’re not arguing in good faith.
That’s exactly what Minecraft did…
Free then 5 then 10 then 15 and so on, all price hikes that happened while the game was still in development and had not reached 1.0. it was one of the first mainstream example of an early access game!
You just don’t want to recognize that Satisfactory today is different from what it was when it was first made available, just like Alpha and beta Minecraft weren’t the same.
But hey, I guess I’m the one that’s not arguing in good faith by pointing out that the situation is pretty much exactly the same and that the alternative is worse for all current owners.
Again, if you keep doing the same office job as before, do you refuse to ask for a pay increase and prefer to become poorer over time just because your job hasn’t changed?
No you’re right, Minecraft did do that. At least they didn’t hide behind inflation though, they simply increased the price as content was added.
Regardless, office pay has next to nothing to do with this. The consumer doesn’t directly pay the worker’s salary. The worker makes the product, the consumer buys the product, end of transaction.
Pay is handled by the studio. If the devs want a pay increase, which is more than deserved, then the studio needs to find the funds for that. If they don’t have the funds then they need to create more product. Simple as. Artificially boosting the price of existing products isn’t the answer.
Again, it’d be like if CDPR decided Cyberpunk was suddenly worth $90 after the 2.0 update. That’d be silly.