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Thinking about stuff I loved from the early 2010's, and then how my gaming consumption habits shifted after that, I think you're onto something, and that something is "the changeover from the 7th console generation to the 8th console generation." The 7th gen was already a huge shock for the industry, leading to multiple studios closing down (and there were still the odd casualties of studios and game franchises even into 2012-ish), and the 8th gen doubling down on high-fidelity probably didn't help keep the AAA side of the industry from becoming a total rat race.
I haven't touched console gaming in a long time, but I kinda miss this practice. I kinda liked seeing all the "Platinum Hit" covers for Nintendo, EA, and Konami games from the 6th gen. And I think it made a degree of sense, in that for some games, most of the revenue value was extracted more upfront when the games came out, so slashing the price to keep milking the long tail wasn't completely a loss for the publishers. It probably also helped pump up those impressive lifetime sales numbers to lower the price so that the kids who missed out on the launch wave could still buy in.
Like, I'm pretty sure that, right now, on Steam, you can buy the original COD 4 for just 10 bucks. 10 buckaroonies! For a game that was $50-60 new! Activision doesn't give a shit, they have the modern COD-as-a-service as their vehicle of avarice. Valve has similarly slashed the prices on their back catalogue of non-F2P games, literally the most expensive game of theirs right now is Half-Life: Alyx (still at like $60 or so).
Similarly, GOG also just added a bunch of games to their store that made their way there from the GOG Dreamlist (a relaunched version of their long-standing wishlist where people could vote on which games GOG should add), and a good number of them were part of their GOG Preservation Program, intended to make old games playable even on modern machines. Probably the standout here is Silent Hill 4, where they also went and added back in some cut content. Now, this is a game that GOG has put work in, and even gone above the call of duty in making available to their customers (ETA: and this game never even had any PC versions before this!). What do you think the price of this pseudo-remaster is?
The answer: $10. And they also had a sale on these GPP titles that ended yesterday, so you probably could have gotten it for even cheaper. Old games should be cheaper, period.
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