Got a fairly expensive LG OLED and after 5 years it's developing clusters of dead pixels down one edge. And even if the hardware doesn't fail/degrade, the software is often enshittified (ads pushed to smart TVs)
Now with everything digital only, you don't even own your games, your ability to play it is at the whims of mega-corporations. You can't resell it to recoup money, or lend it to a friend. Most games start on day 1 as essentially a beta, with tons of huge updates required to get them in a decent state, loot boxes, microtransactions, live service games taking over the entire market share, RAMmagedden driving up console prices post-launch, etc etc etc etc.
They are definitely prettier now and have fancy lighting effects though.
As I said to another commenter, that applies to many of the games I buy today. OK, not quite all since I do buy some titles digitally, but that is my choice.
> They are definitely prettier now and have fancy lighting effects though.
And are much better in terms of accessibility, quality-of-life in general, scope, etc.
A lot of people aren't enjoying modern games (with modern monetization)
20 years ago you bought a disk and the entire game was on there. 10 years ago you bought a disk and you have a massive day 1 patch to get the rest of the game. Today you buy a physical box with no actual disk in it, only a download code!
I'm exaggerating a little bit about today's situation but not by much...
If I pay $10 for a game and play it for 400hrs and pay $40 for another game and only play it for 50hrs, is one necessarily worse or better than the other by that metric? For example, I've played Outer Wilds significantly less than many other games that I've enjoyed far less, but I would still rank Outer Wilds as one of my all-time top favorite games. However that's very subjective to my experience. Others would disagree.
The point is, video games is a very bad point of comparison here and very obviously not the kind of product the OP is referring to.
But putting that aside, the ratio isn't 1:1. I'd expect the ratio to be at least 20:1 - you can name at most 1 thing that got better/cheaper for every 20 things that got worse/more expensive.
That's the thing, the style of game release of the 90s is all but dead. Sure you can still find indy studios releasing in a 90s style, but you can't find the big players doing that. Now a lot of the big name games have switched to either a freemium model or a pay to play model.
You don't simply buy a game like Overwatch, you have to get a battle pass to keep playing. And you don't ultimately own overwatch, once blizzard is done with it, the game is over and you can no longer play it. Then there's the fact that to be competitive, these games often sell items and loot boxes. If you want to not always die, you end up needing to buy these perks.
That is a worst experience designed to milk money out of players as much as possible, more than what you'd be paying adjusted for inflation.
The entire genre of FPS is like this now. Unless you play the old games, you basically cannot get the old experience of setting up a server, maybe letting it be open to the public, and just playing a game with friends. Instead is a bunch of random dumb shit that you have to deal with.
From my point of view, 2006-2012 was a nadir of PC gaming. A string of unoriginal games or bad console ports.
I'm always happy to keep my mind open to alternate points of view, but I'd really struggle to name the big and cheap hits of that era.
That era in gaming had many releases that are still considered among the best games of all time, that pioneered trends that reshaped the whole industry. Almost every year had at least a couple such titles.
2004 GTA San Andreas, Half-Life 2
2005 God of War, Need For Speed: Most Wanted
2006: TES: Oblivion, Gears of War, Okami
2007: Call of Duty 4, Portal, Bioshock
2008: Dead Space, Left 4 Dead
2009: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted 2
2010: Read Dead Redemption, Bayonetta, Starcraft 2
2011: Skyrim, Portal 2, Dark Souls
2012: XCOM, Guild Wars 2, Diablo 3, Far Cry 3
2013: GTA V, The Last of Us, DOTA 2
Red Dead Redemption still hasn't even come to PC yet, it's due out this year!
Okay, so I was the one who narrowed it to talking about PC games, but if we look at console gaming then it has got consistently cheaper.
Sonic & Knuckles cost around $60 in 1994 money, that's about $130 in today's money.
Games have got vastly cheaper, for decades they were consistently around $60 and it's only recently they've crept up.
But I'm not here to argue about 2006. I'm making a point that contemporary games are worse. I don't think it's even possible to make such a list for recent years. We get 1, at most 2 good games per year - and most of them are straight sequels with little to no innovation over their pre-pandemic predecessors. And not just on PC - across all platforms. Seriously, try to write down this list for the last 5 years and tell me it's not drastically worse than my list - and my list is of the allegedly worst period for gaming!
As for the prices. Most games were $50 until 2005 or so. A lot of PSX titles were $40. Then there's the trend of dicing up content into $10-20 DLCs in increasing quantities, meaning you're getting less of a game per purchace if you only buy the base version. A different kind of shrinkflation.
Get some fresher data mr LLM.
You used to get a lot of stuff in a game box that wasn't just the game though. Manuals were often very detailed, arguably works of art in their own right. Also the cost of producing and shipping games is way lower online than it was for physical copies. Companies all used to have to develop their own engines and tooling to build games, that cost is mostly just gone with Unity and Unreal now.
Last and definitely not least, there's way more competition in the gaming industry now, and that tends to drive prices down.
I can't fathom why you'd pick video games as your example ffs.
That describes at least 90% of the games I play today.
I should have gone with any electrical item, tbh; that would probably have flown here without any dissent. But video games that are nowadays almost always one or two orders of magnitude 'better value' while being approximately half the price they were back in the nineties are still a legitimate example, I think.
While this is _true_, it's hardly a good-faith interpretation. The original Mario Bros was around $40 on release. Mostly sold as a bundle with the NES itself around $100.
That's $350 in today's money. Oddly around the same as the switch 1 on release ($299) + BOTW ($60)
Compare the "value" of NES + Mario Bros with Switch 1 + Breath of the Wild.
Yes Nintendo can take one of those away from you, that's despicable, but the "product" has shrunk in no way.
I even prefer the original CS over most of today's FPS games.
True! But for me Myst was one of those super-hyped-up titles that failed to live up to its reputation. And I'm not a youngun, I started on NES/SNES! I'm not convinced GP isn't relying more on nostalgia than a real sampling of current titles.
I did stop gaming ~15 years ago, but I have tried to find good games for my (now teenage) kids, so I have tried to research new games even if I haven't played them myself. I haven't found anything on the level of Myst/Riven/Exile.
You know what else they don't make anymore? Good split/screen coop games, like Splinter Cell. Everything is online multiplayer, but no more being able to sit on a couch and play together (other than Nintendo games, racing games). Same for good ol' LAN games. And sure, it's convenient to just game from home, but there's nothing like everyone lugging their boxes over to your place and setting them up on the dining room table for a pizza-fueled all nighter :)
The economics of software (including video games) are entirely different than candy bars or burgers as the marginal cost of each "unit" is effectively zero.
That's a better example, though the "continually better, faster & cheaper" days for computers (and consumer electronics broadly) have recently been heavily disrupted by the current AI rush. Guess we'll find out how temporary or permanent this is.
What's it like to live in a world where competent AAA studios are still plentiful, and the legacy studios successfully passed down knowledge and ethos to new hires, so as to avoid becoming skinsuit versions of their past selves?
How is it, living in a world where several AAA blockbuster games are still being released annually, with none of them being remakes of decade-plus-old titles?
Is there any wisdom in how your reality's AAA video game industry kept the stride they built up to in the 2000s, into the 2010s, that you could share with us, so we can hopefully rebuild the smoldering crater of a AAA video game industry we have in our reality?
A world that contains Breath of the Wild, Blue Prince, Balatro, Mario Kart World, (you get the point—there are lots of good games).
Is “the AAA video game industry” just Nintendo, to you?
> a decade and a half ago?
For me personally, the AAA game industry is entirely Nintendo, yes. Half the games I mentioned are cross-platform, though; I know they're not 'AAA', but I don't think this discussion needs to be limited purely to AAAs. And, as I mentioned, there are plenty more games that I could have included.
There's nothing wrong with being a fan of one company, but pretending that going from a world where there were many high-quality AAA video games released each year from many different studios to what we have today, just because Nintendo is doing alright and you like Nintendo—when the topic at hand is specifically “the video games industry” as a whole—is simply asinine.
AAA studios were once the force driving technology and game design forward, regularly starting fresh new IPs that would go on to become cherished by fans. That simply does not happen anymore. What was the last fresh new Nintendo IP that went on to become a beloved recurring success—Splatoon (eleven years ago)?
Nintendo deserves plenty of credit for actively working against stagnation more than literally everyone else, but they are completely peerless in this regard. Everyone else ended up falling into a death spiral of churning out remakes and/or being absorbed into Microsoft and then stagnating until death. There is no longer a vibrant industry full of technical innovation and a genuine eye toward craftsmanship, quality, and generally making new fun things to play.
The indie game scene picked up some of the slack on the innovation front, to great success, yet almost none of the successful indie studios (off the top of my head, Facepunch is the only exception I can think of) have transmuted said success into building a studio with a culture focused on exploring the frontier of the medium. Hell, half of the big indie successes these days make their millions in Early Access, predicated upon the implied promise that their Early Access success will permit them to substantially build out the game beyond their Early Access offering, only to completely and utterly fail to do so in the end.
Anyone who thinks the video games industry is in a good place in 2026 is completely delusional and/or simply ignoring relatively recent history and pretending that things have always been as dire as they are today.
Also Mario Kart World was eighty bucks at launch dude (I had to look it up to be sure, but, yeah—I totally paid eighty US dollars for that game), and it's still selling for eighty bucks today, so, your entire position in this discussion is completely invalid on its face.
Such a professional industry completely cratering in on itself (for myriad reasons) is a bad thing.
Indie vs. AAA doesn't have to be a zero-sum game—the rise of the indie does not necessarily have to correspond with the fall of AAA.
Semantics aside, the point is, at one point in time, it was very good and healthy for the medium to have a vibrant AAA (and AA) video games industry. You're generally not going to see indies pushing the technical frontier forward, practically by definition. Things were never perfect, but they were better than they are today. Nowadays, it's basically impossible for someone to get a salaried position making video games.
Which is a bummer, because I grew up thinking that would be definitely where I was going to end up in terms of my career—having some salaried position somewhere, making games with people with different skillsets and areas of expertise than my own, learning from my seniors, having a sense of comradery with the people I worked with, becoming a better game developer. That ship has sadly sailed (or sunk)—it doesn't seem likely that we will have an industry like that again anytime soon.