Destructoid Checkpoint: Prices keep on rising

It’s been an entire week in the world of gaming, and while I was going to deep dive into what I see as the ridiculous discourse around Crimson Desert, and my fear that every single game release is going to be hijacked and turned into “them versus us” nonsense, I am going to ignore that until next week.

Instead, two issues of plight, problems for the squishy bags of salty water that actually make games, and buy them. That's right, news has gotten firmly in the way of opinion. How awful.

PlayStation prices are going up, up, up

Due to what Sony is describing as “continued pressures in the global economic landscape,” the price of the PS5, PS5 Digital, PS5 Pro, and the PlayStation Portable are all going up. The standard PS5, both disc and digital versions, will jump $100 each to $649.99 and $599.99, respectively, while the PS5 Pro is going up $150, coming in at $899 in total. The Portal, meanwhile, will have a new price tag of $249.99.

This has been a frankly depressing and expensive generation, as none of the major players are free of the various economic issues that are driving consumer prices, all of which are compounding to drive the cost of living for the average person higher and higher. 

PC components such as GPUs and RAM have both seen incredible price increases recently as well, with the demand for parts to get slotted away into AI datacenters so that someone can render whatever pointless garbage they will instantly forget about, driving prices at a consumer level ever further up. 

Where it gets both hilarious and sad is that, according to Goldman Sachs, all this investment in AI is basically adding nothing to the US economy. If you strip out all the money that companies are pouring into the AI sector, they are getting almost nothing out. 

While that is likely a rant for another day, for now, we are left with elevated prices in the gaming space and little sign that they will come down any time soon. The price of the upcoming Steam Cube is almost certainly ticking upward, beyond a price point that many fans would consider worth investing in, and even the next generation of consoles is likely to launch at an eye-watering price point. 

Epic layoffs

Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine and Fortnite, will be laying off more than 1000 people. According to CEO Tim Sweeney, the company is working to save $500 million in contracting, marketing, layoffs, and the closure of some currently advertised roles. I am going to assume that this saving needs to be annualized and is expected to put the company in a better position with respect to incoming and outgoing cash.

The problem there is that a similar batch of layoffs, some 830, occurred in 2023. That would have been some early post-pandemic adjustment, but it obviously wasn’t enough. Now, without access to deep data on Epic’s day-to-day, it’s hard to know exactly what went wrong, but some blame does need to be levelled at a pattern of “interesting” acquisitions that were made from 2019 to 2021. Bandcamp was purchased to provide credibility in Epic’s attempt to convince the world that were not at all like other corporations, but it was sold 18 months later when what Bandcamp is (a weird cog in the underground machine of music) didn’t turn out to be what Epic wanted, which seemed to be a plug-and-play music machine to fit in their failed attempts to compete with everyone else’s failed attempts to compete with what Facebook would ultimately fail to do with the metaverse.

Meanwhile, companies like Psyonix (Rocket League) and Mediatonic (Fall Guys) were purchased to bolster the idea of the Epic Games Store, Epic’s attempt to compete with Valve. 

For people wondering where the Fortnite Warchest was going, this is it. Money was being bandied about to pick up new pieces of a failing puzzle, while that same golden goose was being plucked due to an over-reliance on licensing deals that appear to have had a very detrimental impact on Epic’s bottom line. 

Even then, it’s hugely unlikely a company would dip into the Warchest in an effort to maintain employee numbers when the books are not balanced, simply because that would be considered a losing strategy. The first step will always be to stop the bleeding. 

Epic is being impacted by the same thing as everyone else, which is rising costs and fewer consumers, because people just don’t have money to spend, and prices like Sony’s above all but guaranteeing a lack of newcomers to the gaming ecosystem. 

With that said, expect more layoffs next year.

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Tiago Manuel wants to know what you fear. - “A lot has been theorized over what the scariest enemy in games might be. I have played many horror games, seen many mods, and cross-referencing intel from both has revealed that the scariest monster in all of them is apparently just regular spiders.”

Andrej Barovic takes a walk through the Crimson Desert. - “Based on how much I’ve been talking about it since before it launched, you can tell by now how much I care for Crimson Desert. Though not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination, I still consider it a worthwhile experience that rewards you for sticking with it through thick and thin.”

Scott Duwe has been exploring Marathon, what it does well, and where it is lacking. - “The biggest issue with Marathon is that it’s extremely niche, built for a hardcore PvP extraction shooter audience, with PvE quests and missions in the background as powerful AI enemies also add in several wrinkles to the core loop. But is it a bad thing? Not for me, but your mileage may vary quite a bit.”