- cross-posted to:
- games@hexbear.net
- gamedev@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- games@hexbear.net
- gamedev@lemmy.world
Not only that, but charging full price for a game and then charging $15-20 for cosmetic DLC is fucking wild. If I’ve paid you $60+ for a title, I expect the full experience. If you want to add some shit a year down the line to lengthen the life, I’m on board, but day one DLC that costs more than the base game was played out the moment Bethesda graced us with horse armor. I’ve gotten more joy out of Vampire Survivors than I have out of any Ubisoft and EA games in the last 20 years combined.
I was considering buying Risk of Rain 2 on sale yesterday for 9€ but buying all the DLCs costs 45€.
For what it’s worth, only one player needs the DLC for everybody in the session to use it, which is pretty cool of the devs to allow that in this day and age.
That is very interesting 🤔
Thanks!Unless something changed, players who don’t own DLC can’t play as the DLC characters. I believe they can interact with all the rest of the content normally, just locked to the vanilla character selection (which is still broad and fun enough, and further expandable with mods).
As the other commenter said, only one person needs the dlc to play the (non-character) DLC content. It also frequently goes on pretty big sales, though right now it’s probably full price since the newest (and imo, best) DLC just dropped. Each DLC is a significant content expansion to the game, and is absolutely worth the asking price (except maybe seekers, which fell a bit flat for me on release. It’s since been rebalanced).
If you wanted to weigh which DLC to consider getting, I would recommend Void if you like the idea of modified items that do cool shit, an alternate ending to the game, and some cool new mechanics. It comes with a dope sniper survivor and a void survivor that trades health for damage or vice versa.
Seekers comes with an alternate path of stages leading to an alternate (very challenging) boss. I find that the seekers boss is a severe difficulty check compared to the ease of reaching the boss, compared to the void boss which you only fight late in a run or after a different boss. Two of the survivors feel lackluster to me, but False Son is an absolute beast and the only melee character capable of truly tanking rather than using i-frames or mobility.
Alloyed Collective is the newest, and comes tons of new mechanics (free for everyone but expanded on in the DLC), a new path to follow, SEVERAL new super interesting boss fights, tons of new stages, and tons of new enemies. Overall, super worth it. The characters it adds are a drone controller (a previously unviable play style) and a loot gremlin that gets tons of really awesome interactions and A Cube.
My list would be Alloyed, Void, then Seekers. Alloyed and Void add the most to the base game, Seekers is mostly alternate stuff that won’t touch your runs, though the new shrines are pretty useful early game.
This is one of my favorite games and I haven’t bought any DLC, my friend has and I mooch off of them when we play :)
Let’s see, 70-100+(!) bucks for the (yawn) twentyseventh COD with a 4 hour campaign, or 20 for a game that is complete and lasts for dozens if not hundreds of hours?
Yeah, my choice is easily made.
it kinda feels like the more expensive a game is, the less value it seem to have.
I’ve got something like 200 hours in Vampire Survivors, and it cost me less than a fiver
As an indie dev, this article is fucking stupid.
Want to know why indie games are priced at $10 to $15? Becaue AAA has been putting everything they’ve made in the last decade on Steam and it’s all going for $20 - $25.
Indies can’t launch at that price point anymore because they’re competing with AAA games from 10 years ago that have been discounted to death.
The Steam winter sale is the best example of this, where most people will buy RDR2 for $19 instead of the new mega hit indie that’s $20. So indies have been lowering their price to actually get sales. That’s why team cherry priced Silk Song at $20.
Basically, AAA is now just competing with the bottom part of the market they spent that last decade flooding.
They’re complaining about people actually choosing where to spend their money wisely because that means they might actually have to make a good product if they want to sell a game for $70.
Terraria has always been $10. Stardew Valley: $15. Undertale: $10. Braid was $15 when it launched, and even then, people were bitching about the price. So, the price tag has always been in that range since the first indie game launched.
I think you’re ignoring the incredible amount of oversaturation in the industry. Games are everywhere. I could throw a thousand sticks into the wilderness and it would smack into a thousand different game studios, all working for years on their big hit that (in their eyes) would make them millions of dollars.
But, people don’t have time to even play their own Steam backlog. On average, people buy more games than they even have time to play, and that’s not even counting the sheer amount of movies, music, TV shows, YouTube videos, whatever that is competing for people’s time. If they are playing video games, then they are not watching or listening to other media.
It’s not just the gaming industry. The entire creative industry is propped up on the backing of a 98% failure rate, or sometimes even a 99.99% failure rate. The lucky few get to spout off their survivorship biases, under the bones of former companies and individuals, crunched under the weight of oversaturation.
Buying power is down. If they want me to spend more, capital has to pay me more.
I had to drop my “under 5 bucks” rule because games don’t drop that low anymore. 10-15 is where it’s at now, for better and for worse
Almost all of the “Top 10 most replayable games” I have are Indie games, especially in the last 10 years.
They’re games like Factorio or Project Zomboid which I keep getting back to a year or two after I last played so much of it that I got fed up.
Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero, worse so for games which seem open-world but are in fact linear.
Mind you, some older AAA jewels in that style (such as Oblivion) do get me to come back eventually, but it takes something like 5+ or more as I basically have to forget most of the story before it’s interesting to play such a game again.
If Price matched “Hours of Fun”, almost all of the AAA stuff would be way cheaper whilst many Indie games would be far more expensive.
The developer of Barony is insane like the Stardew Valley guy, and just. never. stops. updating. I’ll play the game forever at this point.

Piracy is free. If you’re charging 70usd for a game, then I’d rather just spend the time and pirate it. If it’s 10 bucks, Im just lazy to do a Google search and pay you for it.
That plus so many games that are genuinely good and I have lots of hours into are in the $5-20 range.
Plus those 70$ games invest so much of that $ in fucking you with DRM.
Oh fuuuuuck the DRM. I purchased CIV5 for my phone and it requires an active internet connection or it boots you out. I only play on an airplane. So I ended up downloading the pirated version so I can play the game I purchased.
It seems you fly a lot. Are you a pilot?..
No, I have a business that requires I fly a ton.
Thing is, I can also NOT play games and spend my money on other hobbies.
i will continue buying the games and not playing them, tyvm











