Food cutbacks (voluntary or involuntary) due to finances is likely contributing too.

Some of the font work and shading/color choices reminded me a lot of persona.

Several?! I counted like 10 games with directly ripped off gameplay and/or visual styling. Just off the top of my head:

• Batman
• Spider-Man
• GTA
• Sleeping Dogs
• Watch Dogs
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Persona
• Yakuza
• Dead Rising

Anyone got more I didn’t think of?

You might want to look up the actual meaning of the phrase. It might apply here but not in the way you think. This isn’t early 20th century Sears.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right

The price point most definitely isn’t static. Before we get into actual price points there’s DLC and whether or not that’s free or how it’s priced. But for actual games there’s an $80 price point, a $70 one, and a $60 one if you want to cherry pick and only discuss “console” games. There’s still plenty of games releasing at $40 or even $20 and those are *also released on consoles but likely don’t get physical releases. Don’t act like these companies don’t have leeway to set their own prices for what they produce.

I don’t think many people are expecting a GTA or BG3 amount of content. Yea those are outliers. The problem arises when your game is the same or greater in price as those. Your game better be one hell of a unique experience if you expect people to be satisfied with that price point.

That’s recency bias. The PS3/360 era had lots of variation on price for games.

It doesn’t need to be based on playtime. It’s honestly weird to base price exclusively on that. Quality isn’t easy to define for video games but if you explicitly say your game is lesser than a counterpart… maybe it’s not worth as much.

So it’s priced accordingly right? Right?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study

Games haven’t ever taken this long. The “good old days” were quickly made games comparatively. Slow games lead to bloated budgets which lead to bloated content which leads to bloated investor expectations.

This is kind of obvious. If you don’t like the games then why care about making more of them in the future?

There is no news. There’s the truth of the signal. What l see. And, there’s the puppet theater the Parliament jesters foist on the somnambulant public.

I get that cultural change is happening but how much better, if at all, are these employment numbers compared to the Japanese norm? I very much doubt that the touted “great” employment of the article is that great if we didn’t compare it to entire other cultures. Maybe Sony’s Japanese employment would be a good comparison?

Isn’t the latter true for basically all of Japan?