$70

 You push a man too far

I am a cheap skate, a penny pincher, a scrounging scrooge, a miserable miser, a terrible tightwad, a narcissistic niggard, a callous churl, a pernicious piker, a harrying hoarder and a no good bottom-feeding thrifter. At least that is how I look in the face of the industry I love. Why? Perhaps because I'm so discerning with how I spend my money, rarely ever shelling out to get a game for full price on the week of launch unless I am absolutely sure it's going to be something that I love. Hogwarts Legacy? I was a victim of my age, there was no way I couldn't play that game with everything I had grown up with and be forced to love during my childhood. Tears of the Kingdom? Nintendo is a masterpiece factory and Breath of the Wild was my muse- Tears earned my day-one £60 purchase. Every other game of this year? Nah, I'll wait for 40 if I hear the game is good, and I'll wait years if it turns out to be another Ubisoft-standard title. (Just got around to starting Assassin's Creed Odyssey the other day. It's alright.)

What I mean to express is that the price of what games cost, and how much I consider a reasonable sum, is going to be different to the general consensus and there's a good reason for that. Whereas the everyday man is attracted to that one series of games that they come back to perhaps once a year, and so a small premium investment in that title is nothing to stay abreast of their franchise- I am a gaming aficionado. I was born and raised within this world, within this industry, and I play games of all shapes and sizes, genres and creeds, qualities and lack-there-ofs: I have that knowledge of what every game could have been, so I know pretty much what one is worth in the face of others. I know that of the £70 games of the current world, very few have argued the case that their game is worth it's price more than the £60 of the age beforehand. This perceived 'new plateau of quality' is a limp marketing push that is seeped in cooperate lies and misleading pomp. What price did Tears of the Kingdom, one of the best games of the past three years, release at? Well, don't tell anyone but I got my copy for £60- Guess it pays to go physical sometimes... (Digital is 70.)

But in their avarice and their hubris, the industry has done a wonderful job exposing it's ass and blaming the players for their own frivolous spending mistakes. Why take the brunt of your own responsibility when instead it is so much easier to accuse players of demanding too much from these producers and developers? Why those overly big, under delivering open world games that everyone is sick and tired of just take so much man power to develop and produce in such a brief time frame! Yes, it is entirely the producers themselves that choose to milk dry a genre style that was growing antiquated ten years back, but it's the consumer that should pay the monetary cost and the disappointment cost when, despite the increase to price, the game is still kind of mid. Not to mention the absolute disgrace of the lie that games haven't grown in price for the past two decades, as if DLC, microtransactions, season passes, expansions and stand-alone sequels are just handed out for free like sketchy ice-cream's out the unmarked van around the corner from a day fair.

And yet this is the world in which we live. A world that accepts the £70 price point more and more by refusing to spit in the mouth of developers who propose it by virtue of sheer overwhelming. How can you spur out at every developer who bites at this forbidden apple when the culprits are everyone? Capcom are on a role with their games of late, but they're also falling into this scowl-worthy pattern- So what can we say about them and how their games make us feel? It's a staggering shame there aren't more champions for the consumer within our industry outside of indie developers who struggle to keep the lights on. But at the very least there's still a slither of that innate human pride, that un-shakeable gag reflex, which lurches and froths when things get just that one bit too much. Such as when Mortal Kombat 1 proposes to launch as £70 on Switch.

Um... excuse me, mister NetherRealm? Yeah, your ass is showing. I get it, in the very most cynical of sense, why they might think themselves totally in the right for this decision. Because let's be honest, it's not every odd other moon that we see a Mortal Kombat game out of these guys, and it's coming around to be first new one of this generation. It's a fresh beginning for the Mortal Kombat franchise, and NetherRealm are following the trend of other developers who are coming around to the inflated price point as a matter of fact. The new price symbolises a commitment to creating the best of the genre, in the highest fidelity graphics to best standard of the studio. And I would consider NetherRealm some of the best fighting game developers around; so why do I consider this a worse transgression than other studios going for this price point?

Remember the console I mentioned? The Nintendo Switch. An antiquated hunk of junk only relevant for its novel design functionality and the support afforded to it by the notoriously jealous Nintendo and their first party obsession. (Hey it serves them well, I can't really knock it.) We're talking about a console incapable of reaching those benchmark pinnacles of the gaming industry. It can't hit 4k resolution, it can't produce smooth 60 fps, and given Nintendo's embarrassingly archaic approach to network design I consider it a wonder the thing can even host multiplayer fights. And yet here is NetherRealm pricing the thing at the exact same price point as all the other console version which offer their customers all the boons this console generation takes for granted.

Essentially what we're looking at here is a quiet customer bias that NetherRealm are endorsing through their silent compliance with a 'same price across all systems' model that blindly ignores the realities of the world. Yeah, we'd all love to live in a perfect equal utopia where everyone is afforded the exact same opportunities and allowances as everyone else- but we don't currently reside in floating castles in the sky, now do we? This is something that most every other developer has recognised. Games of this quality aren't ported to Switch because the sacrifice in quality requisite to making it work there disqualifies their already shaky ground for justifying the price point- but NetherRealm apparently have no qualms and think the unequal value proposition is entirely justified here. To be clear, I usually wouldn't have a problem with developers doing this at a normal full price £60 value, but when you decide to overcharge the metaphorical gloves come off.

In situations like these I tend to come across as a bit harsh, because I see the faceless scowl of the corporate machine before I see the humans working in their studios making these games. But as unfair of a view as that might be to take, the truth is that they don't often see us either from behind the barrier that the job places for them. When it comes to the price points, that pure corporate greed riding straight over the consumer and grinding our face into the dirt like we're nothing better than the dirt on their shoe. It's in the face of 'respect' like that which gives me full recourse to channel my inner Johnny Silverhand, shove my middle finger up skyhigh and metaphorically piss on the steps of those grubbing greedy grouches. Screw the $70 price point and all the horses it rode in on!