Oh, So Final Fantasy VII is £70 now? Huh...

 This is fine >Starts hyperventilating<

There's this belief going around the video game industry, one fuelled by wanton and targeted cognitive dissonance. It's the kind of thing that makes sense when it's told in those first fleeting seconds after it's first described to you, as certain figures insist on doing again and again, but which falls utterly apart upon the slightest further scrutiny. I'm talking about the idea that the video game industry hasn't evolved with inflation. Yes, gaming companies, first Sony and recently Square, love to remind people that games have been going for £60 since the nineties, and though they've only become more expensive to make, they arrive at our shelves with the same price tag. It sort of makes sense, but it's woefully, intentionally, misleading. Because whilst the base price of games has remained frozen for the longest time, it's done so at a price point which is entirely reasonable (In fact, a lot of times it's a bit too generous) and doesn't have any of these companies hard-up to run their day-to-days. But the industry has evolved considerably in other ways.

In the age of Microtransactions, booster packs, battle passes and now NFTs, who are the gaming industries' elite fooling when they tell us they're making no more on games then the did thirty years ago? Rockstar makes over a billion each year on the back of one game, which they released eight years ago. That's not because of the price tag on the box, let me tell you; it's the Microtransactions they've been pushing for all that time. And they aren't outliers, almost every AAA game has it's ingame store nowdays, to the point where it's more notable when a game doesn't. (Remember how Jedi Fallen Order scored headlines simply because there was no microtransactions? Shouldn't that tell you something?) Heck, as a whole the gaming industry recently crossed the threshold of becoming the most profitable entertainment industry in-the-world. All of this is to say plainly; there is no sensible reason on this green earth why the premium price of new games should go up £10. If anyone tries to tell you otherwise, scrutinise their stake in the situation until the obvious bias unravels itself.

Thus it's with that utter disdain, edging on loathing, that I look upon Final Fantasy 7 Remake's £70 price-tag. More expensive then the original game ever was, to be clear. This matches alongside a release exclusive to the Epic Games Store, a platform which only last month got around to implementing a cart, (A FREAKIN' CART) essentially proposing a plan where customers pay extra for a worse experience. The cherry on the cake of course being the fact that this release is a bloody PC port for a game that's over 2 years old, because Square are just making a power play for how much they can bend people over before they refuse to bend anymore. This isn't a one off. Forspoken, that strange Isekai game which is undergoing marketing ramp-up all over Youtube despite the fact the game isn't due till May, is also set to land with £70 on the price tag. Square are shooting for this, and if they are rewarded for this utter transgression on consumer rights it will pick up steam, and it won't be long before the entire AAA industry is charging a sixth of a brand new console for the privilege of buying software. Tell me I'm not the only one who finds that utterly repugnant!

I've said before that Sony are all aboard this train, and I'm not joking. For their first party titles, Sony has reached for £70 across the board in this next gen tax. Something which would have blown up a lot more if people could even buy up the consoles in order to see that affront to justice in the first place. But considering Xbox wasn't following suit, most could see this as a simple growing pain misstep that some consoles do in their first year or so. A stupid move that they get rightly lambasted for, and then is quickly forgotten as we move into the meat of the console age. But now Square Enix has now bought this scheme to PC, and that makes it a lot more real. Sony fans are happy to put up with Sony's crap because they believe in some twisted concept of 'brand loyalty', it's really rather sad. PC fans don't have any such delusions, and their relationship with Square is rocky as it is, so if Enix wants a fight over pricing then they've got one.

Although this might just be a fight which wages itself, because it hardly took any time at all for people to raise the fact that- oh look: the PC Port of FF7R is a piece of crap anyway! Well that is to say it's a port of a game that is said to be a very decent translation of an RPG classic, but a port made by a team who clearly don't think of the PC players as a viable market as evidenced by the effort they put in. Yes, in typical Square Enix fashion this port is about as optimised as horse-drawn carriage. That simile didn't make a whole lot of sense, but neither does selling a game with consistent frame drops on a 3080 for busy scenes! If one of those god-cards can't smoothly run this thing, I don't even want to think what the damage would be if I tried to run that on my system! (My graphics card would probably just explode.)

And whatsmore, we're looking at a port which fails to provide the standard acceptable amount of graphical options to keep your average PC fan happy; and at this point that's pretty much the laziest possible thing a port can do. Is it really breaking the bank to spend a week or so creating an options menu? Because even if it is, then that'll be worth the time because that work would demonstrate even the slightest degree of understanding for the PC market. PCs, by their nature, are varied and non-uniform beings, with some entire rigs unique and entirely different to others. We need to have the sort of optional flexibility to tailor experiences to our specific rigs. And if you can't manage that much, can't deliver an optimised experience and can't even release the thing on all store fronts, then frankly your work isn't worth £60, let alone £70.

Of course, this isn't the first time that Square has spat in the face of PC fans. Seminal android hack and slasher game, Nier Automata, famously launched on PC with pretty much no PC options whatsoever aside from resolution tweaking. They may as well have just slapped a last gen console emulator in the box and sold that. This was lambasted, reported on, shouted from the high heavens, and what did Square do? Nothing. It fell to modders to create their own configuration menus for the game. What is that about? Making your community handle basic utilities? What are you worth anyway? Final Fantasy XV is said to have been a bit better, to the point where people could at least tailor the experience they wanted out of that game. But 7 Remake? The biggest release they've had these past 3 years? Not worth the work, apparently.

For the games that you desperately want to support and make sure does well, it breaks one's heart to see the decision maker behind the title doing everything in their power to screw things up. A dedicated and talented team sat down and made Final Fantasy 7 Remake, and then the higher-ups swooped in and stuck their stupid price tag on it and then handed it off to a team of PC illiterates to botch up a port. What are you supposed to do as an artist when your superiors are actively sabotaging you? I would almost feel bad for Tetsuya Nomura, but I haven't forgiven him for the HD remake of Chain of Memories. (And likely never will.) Do I expect Square to back down, or fix their port? Maybe... on the 'fixing' part at least, there's no way in a million years they'll stop greedily slobbering over the premium pricing in their hedonistic ritual dedicated to profligacy. And this, once more for mister Days Gone director (wherever he may be), is why I buy only on steep discounts.