Should upgrades be free?

Started by the-pi-guy, Nov 27, 2021, 01:49 AM

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the-pi-guy

This gen, there have been quite a few games with patches for 60 fps, free upgrades and paid upgrades for games.

And there's a general expectation by some people, regardless of what the upgrade includes, that it should be free. Which in some cases seems a bit extreme to me.

I think asking for money for a 60 fps mode is ridiculous.

But if they're updating character models, textures and lighting, that is a bit trickier in my mind.  I don't generally have an expectation that it should be free.  

Legend

Porting a game to a next gen system and increasing the graphics settings is easy but still has a lot of people involved. I think charging for the upgrade is fine if the game lacks microtransactions.



Dr. Pezus

Charging is fine if it involves a lot of work like you said. However, don't make me pay twice for the same game. Maximum 10-15 usd for the upgrade imo

darkknightkryta

Publishers are trying to raise the prices of games while game development costs have gone down.  Fuckem.   And with that said, I'm sure all these extra things like high resolutions and framerate settings are probably already baked into games ssince that's how it's been for PCs since forever.  I would imagine these upgrades would involve extra testing and probably minor tweaks.  Costs are justified if they're going with a full overhaul; new textures, massive change in lighting, changed models, etc.

the-pi-guy

Publishers are trying to raise the prices of games while game development costs have gone down.  Fuckem.  
Not really?  
There are better tools now, so making the same asset is cheaper, but the asset quality has gone up, and more importantly the quantity has gone way up. The cost for an average AAA game has gone way up.  

They're still making more money due to other things like micro transactions, games sales are more consolidated across larger sets of customers (ie, 1 game sells 10 million instead of 10 games selling a million each, so each production is more profitable.).

The cost to make a game hasn't gone down though.

kitler53

it's there thing.  they should decide how they want to monities their work and I'll decide if I want to buy. 

but "demanding" all upgrades are free is some really privileged battleship.  


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BananaKing

I think if its just a framerate and/or res upgrade it should just be a free upgrade. Dont piss of your fanbase by updating it with something so trivial.

If its textures, animation, lighting, or so and more. Then yeah I get why they would charge.