Ever notice how the new video game normal seems to cost $70–$80 and up? The prices keep going up, but the games all feel terrible.

Have you noticed how, over the last couple of years, the “standard” big video game releases have climbed to over $70, with some platforms (looking at you, Nintendo) pushing even higher with extra in-game charges or passes to get the full game, and upcoming first‑party titles on next‑gen hardware aiming at crazy high prices in most markets. If you do a quick Google search right now, you'll find plenty of folks noticing how new consoles are selling at higher price points than past generations, even after adjusting for inflation. Publishers justify this with claims about higher development costs and inflation. Still, awesome free game engines like Godot make that excuse a joke. For players, the experience feels worse each year: more bugs at launch, more day‑one patches, more and more giant updates that stop you from playing the dam game! And after you have the game installed, there's more pressure to spend beyond the initial price with skins, maps, and junk! Wait, I bought the game, but not the whole game? The F@#$%!? The sticker price isn't the real cost anymore, and you don't get to find out what that cost is until after they've reached into your wallet and made you create an account with a bunch of contract agreements. Then, when you read the contract, you find out that the game you bought, you don't actually own!? What? Who's actually ok with this?

Micro-transactions have gone from side hustle to core business model. CNET has an article that says around 58% of total sales for 2024, which amounted to tens of billions of dollars, came from micro-transactions! That means the industry is incentivized to add battle passes, paid cosmetics, XP throttling, and loot mechanics that keep you forking over your wallet's cash forever.

Worse, the bloated installs that eat your storage space!

From a few gigs to eating your whole drive. Average AAA game sizes have exploded over the last decade. Techspot has an article that talks about the average AAA game ballooning from around 11 GB in 2012 to roughly 80 GB by 2023, with newer games pushing more than 150 GB. Ever feel like you “1 TB” console only holds one or two games? That's because all the other files on your console, along with one or two games, eat the whole drive. Huge file sizes would normally be bad enough on their own, but now they also collide with massive patches and unfinished launches! File size is getting out of hand!

Oversized updates stacked on top of already bloated installs, because AAA game studios ship un-optimized data and maybe only fix issues after the game releases. Maybe games are making their games oversized on purpose so that you can't easily switch to other games easily, and have to play their game more. The result is an experience where “buying a game” no longer means “playing it tonight.” It means waiting for the base install, then the patch, then possibly another patch, while your storage melts and your bandwidth dies. Games absolutely look better than they did 20 years ago, but the tradeoff is terrible, crazy higher base prices, aggressive micro-monetization, ad placement in games, gigantic file sizes, internet access being mandatory, crazy complicated contracts and user agreements, and constant updates that punish limited time and storage. If you ask me, we should go back to the simple idea of buying a game and being able to play it on the same day for less than the cost of lunch. And that's the reason that yavoz.fun is making cheap and free games that are just fun for the limited time you have to play games. Your time is valuable, don't waste it watching an update patch install. Do you want just to turn on a game, have no install nonsense, and just play a video game? Now you can.