Fallout co-creator, The Outer Worlds co-director, and all-round chatty RPG icon Tim Cain is back with another insightful industry vlog, this time breaking down the pros and cons of digital gaming, where he argues that digital storefronts are the reason why game prices haven't matched inflation.
"Digital is cheaper. It's cheaper for everybody," he starts off in his latest YouTube video. "It's less costs all around. So, in theory, prices should've dropped, but it didn't." Cain's argument is that digital distribution meant publishers didn't need to pay as much to print physical game boxes and then distribute them to stores. Plus, digital storefronts meant games could be global.
"You know those cost savings for being digital? Those should have been passed on to consumers when things went digital," Cain continued. "They didn’t. The argument I hear is, 'Well, costs were rising in development, so they were balanced.' I don't think they were balanced."
As you can probably see any time you turn on your Nintendo eShop, PSN, or Xbox Store, buying games digitally is essentially the same price (sometimes more expensive) than picking up a physical copy. But Cain also argued that, in the long run, digital gaming probably saved us from inflated prices overall.
"Digital is probably the reason why games have resisted matching inflation because, I've said this before, I bought games for $59 in the '90s. That would have been a really expensive game these days. And these were standard games for like Super Nintendo. But those cost savings for digital weren't passed on to consumers," he concluded.
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