Slashdot Mirror
On The Mysteries Of PC Computer Game Pricing
Thanks to The Adrenaline Vault for its editorial discussing the recent, seemingly strange retail pricing of PC videogames. The author explains that he has "reviewed a series of recent PC titles with an initial retail price of either $19.99 or, at most, $29.99... This is occurring even as console versions of the same games are selling for around $49.99." He concludes: "From a consumer standpoint, this new pricing pattern is heaven. You can buy more hours of quality virtual interactive entertainment for a lower fee than ever before... The one downside is the ability to get titles released more than six months ago, as small profit margins have led to diminishing shelf space in ever-contracting retail stores." But is there indeed a danger that "smaller [PC-developing] companies often can't handle the loss of revenues from lowered prices, so too dramatic a drop might jeopardize their existence"?
This is pretty much inevitable. Price is one of the few areas left in which PC games can compete for a mainstream audience with the consoles. PC games have a particular advantage here for one particular reason, a reason which is both the PC's strength and perhaps its greatest weakness (in gaming terms only, obviously).
Simply put, the PC has no big parent company to push it. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo can all put megabucks behind "their" console, developing first-party games and throwing money at developers to give them exclusives, or at least support their machine. The PC has nobody to do this; the only company who might really have a vested interest in doing this this (Microsoft) actually have a bigger vested interest elsewhere (the X-Box). So, the PC essentially gets games from what would, in console terms, be called "third party" developers, who are developing for the system just because they think they can make the game they want to make on it and that the game will sell. In many cases, this isn't a powerful incentive and in some of the cases where it is, it backfires spectacularly given the low-profitability of many PC games and the rampant piracy in the market.
This all sounds pretty negative. But there is an up-side to it. First of all, there is no restriction on what content you can put in PC games, aside from the laws of the country you're developing (and the countries you want to sell the game in). This doesn't just mean that you can make porn titles for the PC... has anybody else noticed how none of the recent Vietnam-themed fpses have been ported to the consoles? Of course, not having to make sure that all of your games look like the visual designs were done by a 5 year old with Attention Deficit Disorder also helps (although developers for Sony and Microsoft can generally get away with this as well).
The relevance to the current pricing situation is also related to this. On every console game sold, a pretty hefty chunk of the money from the sale goes not to the developer or the publisher, but rather to the company behind the console. In many cases, this can be around 10 per game. Indeed, Nintento's share is apparently very large indeed, which accounts for why, in the UK at least, Gamecube games tend to debut at 45, rather than 40 as with the other consoles, and tend to drop in price more slowly. This isn't an issue on the PC - companies like Dell or Microsoft don't get any such cut of the profits, at least not directly.
In short, PC developers can afford to sell their games for less, withou necessarily making less profit per game than the console developers. The danger, of course, comes from the fact that they probably won't sell as many games, even with the lower price.