With the lead time on titles like Cyberpunk 2077 climbing to almost a decade, and the development costs of Red Dead Redemption 2 reportedly coming in at over £400 million. This has an unavoidable impact on the cost of these titles when they hit the shelves. The cost of major games has risen by over £15-20 in as many years, as the consoles themselves.
An original Xbox in 2001 cost £300, whereas the new Xbox Series X comes in at £450. Naturally, people are happy to pay a premium for the latest and greatest games, but this hasn’t stopped the rise of alternative platforms, services, and ways of playing, all aimed at delivering quality experiences at a fraction of the cost. Evidence of this trend can be found across the industry, from savvy iGamers making the most of the casino welcome bonuses offered by comparison platform oddschecker, to those console gamers capitalising on the frequent sales provided by Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft to pick up major discounts on popular titles.
Additionally, new technology is taking root across the industry that holds out the promise of passing on considerable savings to gamers everywhere. This new technology is known as cloud gaming, and it stands to fundamentally alter the way people purchase, access and play video games in the future.
Cloud gaming is still little known, but the platforms that offer it are gaining market share rapidly. Simply put, cloud gaming, which is also known as on-demand gaming, dispenses with the requirement of users to own dedicated gaming hardware. This is because games are streamed, over the internet, to any compatible device, browser or display at one’s disposal. Hence, the game itself is stored in the cloud, and powered by high-performance server-side gaming
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