>>718095240
>Also why move the goalposts to AAA, you can't compare AAA tier studios with what you called "teens in a garage".
We're talking about the most expensive video games of that era to the most expensive games of this era. A goalpost wasn't moved. And no ones playing a video game today that's being made in a week.

>Games that ran like shit got panned so hard they died. Seeing frame drops was the death of a game, because back then the devs could not use a day 1 patch or "we will fix it in updates" as an excuse. A bit of a younger game, Daikatana, released in 2000, ran like shit, got absolutely destroyed by critics.
See, this is goalpost moving, because I was talking about a 60 FPS minimum expectation of gamers today and how that wasn't a thing back then. Now, you're talking about the entire game running like shit. Also, just because you got old, doesn't mean you got smart. Framerate drops were not uncommon and the squiggly Digital Foundry FPS line old games would get would get the game crucified on social media today.

Well, the Euro wasn't launched until the end of the '99. So, it wouldn't even be sold in Euros. But if video games weren't high priced in Europe back then, they were in America.

Because Doom was one of the best products the video game industry offered back then. Just like some of the best games today could cost $200M dollars. And in relative cost to other entertainment products like movies, video games were a tiny cost budget-wise. Here, how about this. Let's compare Doom (1993) with Palworld (2024). Palworld reportedly cost around $7M to make. For a game that basically recycled most of the dev's previous game, stole a decades old, established IP's basic idea and made a few changes. It cost 7X more than Doom. That is a great example of games costing more to make today.

Whether its marketing or not, at the end of the day, discoverability has always been an issue. Back in the day, you wanted to buy space on retail shelves. Wasn't cheap.