High Price Scare Tactics

GamesIndustry.biz has comments from Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games, stating that he considers the recent talk about sky high game and console prices nothing but scare tactics on the part of large publishers. From the article: "'I guess they just don't have productive tools like we have,' he went on to suggest."

Comments

Re:Even higher?

[chris_mahan]

Nah,

You gotta buy the game at that price.

If good games cost less, they would already cost less. The market is already adjusted to the optimum price to support the greatest numebr of users and the industry.

Trip Hawkins Mows My Lawn

[King Fuckstain]

" More people need to start following your lead. If you see a game that's priced out of the norm £40 for the UKers, $55-$60 for the Americans, etc...skip it."

If more people waited 6-12 months to purchase a game, the length of time before the publishers dropped the price would just increase. You should be encouraging fewer people to wait 6-12 months. The more people who buy the game on the first day it is released, the faster the publisher will drop the price.

"Last year, some publishers finally got smart, and gave us discount games like Katamari Damacy, Gungrave: Overdose and the ESPN sports titles."

Bargain games are not exactly a new innovation. The only difference is that now major publishers are taking a cue from the cheapie companies and considering development costs when pricing their games.

"Reward the good companies willing to stick their neck out like that, and punish the ones just trying to stick their hands out into your wallet."

Stick their neck out? Yes. Not putting their hands into your wallet? No. The $20 price point some companies are releasing games at is merely an attempt to take a product that they don't believe will sell well at $50 and make it more of an impulse buy at $20. At the end of the day, they all want to get into your wallet and would be happy to it empty.

"Eventually, the publishers will notice that there are pathetic sales for the games in their first weeks out of the game, and phenomenal numbers after the price drop. Then maybe they'll get it."

The market functions nothing like you think it does. The companies want to meet a certain target of units moved at the $50 price point - calculated by market research. Once they believe that they've sold all the copies they're going to sell at $50, they'll lower the price. Waiting will merely lead to the company waiting longer because their research shows the game needs to sell X number of copies before they will lower the price. Look at the cost of Mac games and how long it takes for the price to be reduced on those - it's quite a long time. Then, look at the EA Sports line of games for the PC. Those are reduced in price much more quickly than the same products on the consoles because EA believes fewer people are destined to buy at the $50 price point.

Finally, a post on Slashdot telling people not to buy games is going to in no way have any impact on an international marketplace, ever. God Bless.

Re:Trip Hawkins Mows My Lawn

[Some_Llama]

"If more people waited 6-12 months to purchase a game, the length of time before the publishers dropped the price would just increase. You should be encouraging fewer people to wait 6-12 months. The more people who buy the game on the first day it is released, the faster the publisher will drop the price. "

Wrong, doom3 dropped their price in less than 6 months, halflife 2 is still going for 60+, they both sold about the same in the first few weeks/months.

"Waiting will merely lead to the company waiting longer because their research shows the game needs to sell X number of copies before they will lower the price."

No waiting will ensure that they go broke if noone buys the game at their artificially inflated 50+ dollar price...

Do the math, 1 million games sold at 50 bucks, or 5 million sold at 20-30 dollars, which generates more profit?

When you make the games affordable so anyone can buy them you will reduce piracy and generate bigger interest in the game.. anyone remember this little title called Serious Sam? How about it's sequel...

----------------
I consider myself a liberal, does that count?

Kismet... wow!

[nacturation]

Everyone's commenting on the cost issue, but the full interview has some really great stuff about the Unreal 3 engine. Here's a snippet regarding Kismet, the scripting environment within the engine:

I have a great quote from one of our team, actually, which describes it perfectly. He's one of our level designers who posted on a private development forum, describing what his working life is like now with Kismet.

They were talking about Unreal Engine 3, and what he said was; "Nothing to do with graphics actually - the tools just ooze creative inspiration. I've never scripted or coded in my life, but our visual scripting - which I know is not an entirely new concept - is a fucking blast to work with. I've created levels with entire mini-games in them, AI behaviours, damage systems depicting various stun events and healing, cinematics, bizarre control schemes, even physically rolling dice telling me totals based on the angle of the surfaces facing upright when the object's velocity reaches zero, which I check every 0.5 seconds."

"I've even coded a random level generator and I've needed virtually no interaction with anyone on the code side to make this work. We've had level designers implementing a fighting game in a level, a driving game with chase cam and effects, targeting systems and etc, with incredibly low learning curve. You could walk into a room in a deathmatch level and suddenly find yourself in the middle of a Dance Dance Revolution mini-game."

"Just last week a potential licensee was in-house, and described the game they wanted to build and how one of their critical game mechanics was going to work. Literally within five minutes they looked over my shoulder, I'd built that core dynamic into a level of our game. The demo went incredibly well to say the least. "

"Typically, I'll sit down with a new recruit, a designer with no scripting experience, for about two hours, and show them the basics of Kismet - how triggers work, characters, toggles, cinematic systems, conditions, variables and so on. Then I'll give them about a day to screw around with it. Within a day I'll see some absurd crap" ... Ah, I'm replacing swear words here! [laughs] "...happening in their levels that would have been an absolute nightmare to get going otherwise, even if they could describe what they were actually looking for to a programmer - and that communication would no doubt affect the outcome anyway."

"The bottom line is that engine tools dramatically affect your creative process, and our engine has been designed with far more in mind than just pretty shadows."

With all the new games requiring a dozen programmers or so, will technologies like this bring back the concept of the one or two person commercial game? Artwork is obviously still a major hurdle, but there are many places to purchase models if you need to. And, finally, anyone know if this will be available for mod developers with the next Unreal game, or only to those who fork over the big bucks for an engine license?