It’s official, Square Enix has made the decision to raise the price of its games on PC, and done it big. If we want to buy Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade in the Epic Games Store, a title that will be available from December 16, we will have to pay 79.99 euros, that is, almost 80 euros, a figure that seems like a real nonsense for a game that, above all, comes in digital format, and that is neither more nor less than a simple adaptation of the PS5 version.
Personally, this move by Square Enix seems to me a real nonsense, And it’s a shame, because I was determined to buy Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade for PC, even though I played the PS4 version at the time. It goes without saying that, after knowing the price that the compatible version will have, I am not going to approach it, and that I will only consider buying it when it is available at a much, much, more reasonable price.
It’s funny, really. When the Epic Games Store came along, it touted itself as the advocate for developers and publishers, saying that charging them a 30% commission was a lot. Since then, many have said that charging a 12% commission is ideal, and that this would make the games cheaper, that is, that price drops. With that in mind, allow me a question, why then do we have Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade as an exclusive from the Epic Games Store, where the commission is only 12%, at a price of 79.99 euros?
What can I say, it seems crazy to me. Square Enix takes a peak for the exclusive launch of Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade only in the Epic Games Store, it charges a 12% commission instead of 30%, we have a game based on PS4, and on top of that company asks for him a whopping 80 euros. A real nonsense that, obviously, it has no justification.
Square Enix Sets a Dangerous Precedent: Increasingly Expensive, Worse-Optimized PC Games
Those of you who read us daily know that it is not the first time that I openly criticize the poor state of developments on PC, but intergenerational developments, which continue to start with PS4 and Xbox One, and the laziness of the developers, are leading us to an extreme situation where every time we find more triple A games than they arrive loaded with errors, and they offer a bad performance because they are unable to harness the real power of a PC.
If anyone thinks I’m exaggerating, it’s because they haven’t played titles like Battlefield 2042, Halo Infinite or Far Cry 6 on PC. All three show a very poor optimization, and in the case of the first and third the bottlenecks that occur at the CPU level are so marked that we find ourselves, when we play in 1080p, with scenarios in which the GPU barely hits 60% usage, but performance is not up to expectations, and the game is unable to scale further to improve the situation.
We have been with tremendously powerful PC hardware for years, and with advanced technologies that make a big difference, but developers are unable to take advantage of it, and they continue to launch the same type of games, with the same shortcomings and the same problems from years ago. Interesting, because instead of considering doing something to improve this panorama, what we are seeing is that some prefer to directly raise the price of their games and voila, the rest do not care.
This price increase has already been noticed in other titles, so no, it is not something exclusive to Square Enix, and it is not a problem limited to money either. The key is that, in the end, PC games are adaptations that have an increasingly poorer quality, who suffer from bottlenecks and have serious problems that make it impossible to really take advantage of the current hardware, and that despite this the publishers and developers believe that they have the right to sell them more expensively. I’m sorry, but they don’t count on me.
