Slashdot Mirror
On Retailers And Videogame Pricing
Thanks to CNN Money for its article discussing the results of a retail survey analyzing relative videogame prices among "key game retailers." According to the survey: "Wal-Mart's prices were the highest, coming in 9 percent higher -- nearly $100 for a basket of 30 games -- than Amazon.com and 6 percent higher than Best Buy, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Tony Gikas." Other interesting trends were also observed, though: "The used game market has quietly been growing for the past several years and Gikas now estimates that more than 8 percent of all games sold in the U.S. are used games." The piece concludes by noting: "The survey indicated retail prices seem to be holding up as the current generation of consoles hits middle-age... Other analysts, though, say retailers they've talked to indicate while prices have not fallen much, the demand for games at higher price points is not as strong as it was a year ago."
That's an aweful large round up to $100. From the numbers in the article I got a difference of $67.06 between the cheapest and the most costly.
Chika Chik-ah... do-e ow ow.
The article doesn't really mention this but I find it hard to believe that Amazon is that much cheaper (I'd like to see what games they picked). In my experience Amazon and Best Buy are generally the same with Wal-Mart usually being a few cents to a dollar and some change cheaper. Except of course when you look at the used game market at Amazon. Then Amazon is by far cheaper but you typically aren't buying from Amazon.
I'm not buying this article...
That's $4.50 and less if you're buying games that are less obvioulsy, which is an easily justifyable travel expense in exchange for convenience or (gasp!) company loyalty based on customer service, return/exchange policies, etc.
And who's buying 30 games at a time anwyays?
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
Now, I'm not an economist or anything, but aren't costs supposed to come down when the demand decreases? Most games I'm looking to buy are fairly old, not noteworthy anymore, and simply take up space on store shelves. Still, the prices stay up where they are and nobody buys them. Even used games rarely go below $20 anymore, and I can remember walking into FuncoLand when I was a kid and seeing that newspaper of game prices with things priced around $5-$10.
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I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
You can save plenty that way. For example, I just picked up Wave Race: Blue Storm for Gamecube in Akihabara today for 500 yen - for a new copy. I'd never have paid $50 for it, but I'll buy just about anything for $5-10.
Holding off on the "iffy" purchases makes it a lot easier on the wallet to pick up the occasional "gotta have it" game at $50.
Whether you're shopping at Walmart, EBX, Best Buy, Amazon, etc... We should all be happy that the prices of games haven't risen proportional to inflation. In the mid-80's a single Nintendo game would often cost $40 - $50. The 16-bit SNES and Genesis offered games in the $50 - $70 range. Of course the media used to create games has plummetted in price (cd/dvd as opposed to cartridge), but the production cost and complexity of the software have both increased dramatically. There is no reason to complain about the cost of a game, regardless of where you buy it.
I'm getting a little sick of people being surprised that WalMart is no longer the cheapest place to get some things. Once upon a time if you wanted it cheap you went to WalMart. Now that is no longer the case. They are still the cheapest on a few things, but not on many of their products.
If you watch their low prices commercials you'll notice that the smiley face is lowering prices based on WalMart's original price for the item. WalMart is now in the game of convenience. You go to WalMart because you can get pretty much everything you need in one trip and it doesn't cost too terribly much.
WalMart is not the place it used to be. Notice that "The customer is always right" is no longer their policy and that "Always the lowest prices" has been replaced with "Always low prices".
I think there's more to it than that though because no one routinely sells cheaper games. There's no low-margin discount place like there is for most other things. It has to be artificially controlled because quite often the exact same game for the PC will be discounted almost immediately. Really the only way to get games less expensively is to track the deal sites and jump on things like coupons.
But Waltmarts bargain bin is one of the best around me.
back in the day of windows 95, I went shopping for games and saw the Warcraft 2 expansion at an Electronics Botique in the mall for $29. Was thinking of buying it, but I delayed the purchase. Later in the day I went to both Fry's and another computer mega store (CompUSA, I think). Fry's had it for $19. The other megastore had it for $9. Nine dollars is a price you really can't pass up, particularly when it's one-third the price somewhere else.
Although most stores sell things at about the same price, EBgames.com occasionally has the $10 store credit coupon on major releases. And one will occasionally run into the store that is selling a particular title cheaper than everyone else (these are usually not the nation-wide mega-retailers so finding adverts for these deals is nearly impossible.)
About a month ago, i was looking for a new shooter to play on LIVE... i went to wal-mart, and found that they had Return to Castle Wolfenstein for only $24.99 (Canadian), much cheaper than EB, who was selling it for 39$.
And its consistent -- Last week I went to go buy Ninja Gaiden -- the guy at EB said that they didnt have any used copies in, but suggested a new copy, at the canada-normal price of $69.99. Meh, i said, i might as well see what price it is across the street at wal-mart, considering the deal i got last month. Walmart had it for $58.99. (Great game, btw)
So fuck EB's high prices, Wal-mart has some really good prices on games, and that's where im shopping from now on.
Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com
Buy it in Australia and pay twice the US rate, even though our dollar hasn't been that low in years. We are paying roughly 50% more than the converted price ($100 AUD for a $50 USD game, which at the current exchange should be $70 AUD).
You can count on the fact that if our dollar had gone down they would have adjusted prices... they didn't lose any time adjusting it when it slid.
I think I have good reason to complain about the cost of a game (although I appreciate the article was focused on US sales).
Anyways I think your argument regarding the increase in game cost and complexity versus the sale price is flawed - there are vastly more games being sold today than previously, so although it might cost more to develop them, the costs are recovered as more copies are sold. Ask EA if they mind their $500 million profit margins...
Ever notice that Best Buy or Circuit City will have a good price on a game a few weeks after release for like a week then the price goes back up? Return to Wolfenstien was like $50, then on sale for $29 then backup to $50.
Obviously Ebay is a great source. Funco land is almost as bad as a college book store - they give you practically nothing for your game and then give a very minor discount to a buyer.
I just got back from wal-mart, I couldn't find any of the $3 games :(
I'm no great fan of Wal-Mart, but I wouldn't be too quick to judge them based on the limited data in this survey. According to the article, 30 games were price compared between seven shops. The highest price for this basket of goods was $1231.76 at Wal-Mart; the lowest, $1134.51, was at Amazon.com. Does that mean Wal-Mart is evil and overpriced? Not necessarily....
;-)
First, we have no idea how the games were selected, other than that they were a presumably random mix of "recent and older games from all platforms". If we picked a different set of 30 games, or sampled another set of 30 games, we'd likely get a much different result.
A second point to consider is what is called the "grocery store paradox": store A advertises lower prices than store B, and vice versa, and a check of the receipts shows that both are telling the truth. Were we to break out certain categories of games from the sample (such as all PS2 or XBox games), Wal-Mart might have the lowest prices on these categories... old N64 cartridges that management won't drop below cost might be keeping Wal-Mart's average prices high, but most game buyers wouldn't care. We don't have the data, so we can't say for sure.
My last point (because this is getting too boring, even for Slashdot) is that the differences presented by the survey likely won't matter to most consumers. The difference between best and worst was $97.25, or just over three dollars per game. If I only want 5 out of the 30, and I want them now, then a $16 convenience fee might be worth paying... and, who knows, Wal-Mart might have better prices on those five.
To sum up: Amazon rocks, and Wal-Mart does in fact suck, but not for the reasons stated in the article.
Vanya's Law: "In any culture without irony, fart jokes will be the highest form of humor."
Discounted or simply lower priced? After all, porting a console game (especially Xbox) to PC is fairly straightforward, so marginal costs will likely be low. However, no royalties will be owed to Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo. Generally, multi-platform PC games are $10 cheaper than their console brethren. My estimate of console royalties is... lessee... carry the five... $10. The corresponding disadvantage, of course, is the lack of secondary markets for PC games.
I think part of the higher prices at Walmart is that they don't mark down older games, or wait much longer to do so. New games go on the shelves at similar prices to EB or Gamestop, but when the others have long since marked down titles to $20-30, Walmart still has them at $50.
For great justice.
It's interesting that they list BestBuy ahead of EB in this list. In my town EB is almost always $5-10 cheaper than BestBuy. Of course I'm not in a major metropolis, so YMMV. I suspect that the BestBuys in major markets are more price competitive in general...
I've also noticed all of Wal-Mart's GBA games are $5 more than anywhere else. I believe they are still selling Beyond Good and Evil for $49 at my local store as well.
Cheap Ass Gamer has good deals sometimes but I've found the best place to get new games is Half.com
Where the big differences come in is when the big box stores use a title as a loss leader to get people into their store/website, or when they work out some kind of deal with a publisher for a bargain price, or even exclusivity for the whole title.