Slashdot Mirror
Large Publishers Pointing to High Prices
Despite Mark Rein's recent statements to the contrary, GamesIndustry.biz has word that Activision, THQ, and Take Two are all indicating that they may be charging $59.99 for next gen titles. From the article: "This strategy is likely to see a two-tier structure emerging for game pricing, where premium titles command a premium price point of $59.99 or more, while less important games are sold for between $39.99 and $49.99 - much closer to the current price point."
You know, they can charge anything they want and still get it. $60 a game is quite expensive. But I guess if you really want it, you'll figure out how to afford it. *shrugs* I think it sucks because not one system is better off than the other being at the mercy of the developers...
I haven't lost my mind. It's backed up on disk somewhere.
Slashdot already covered this from the other point of view, where Mark Rein of Epic found no reason games should be jumping to $60.
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http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/07
All it means for me is a longer wait. I've already been getting tired of buying games at $50 and watching the publisher suck up most of that money. Usually I only buy games at $40 or less. I have such a backlog of games anyhow that by the time I can play something new, it is already $20-$30.
Price fixing.
Costs of distribution are far lower today than they were maybe 10 years ago, and systems like steam and perhaps bittorrent mean its possible to launch a game on very little revenue - these consoles have broadband adaptors after all. Why the price hike?
Well the fact that three publishers have announced it at the same time makes me wonder if there is something dodgy here.
Any refutements or evidence in this one?
Can't see it turning out well though: Nintendo were previously thrashed on price for the N64, and they were only able to return to somewhere close to their previous revenue by producing an incredibly cheap console.
Joseph Farthing
http://josephfarthing.com
When the first Playstation came out, most games were $40, but a few premium games demanded $50. Now you can hardly find a new game for $40 on the PS2 and the XBOX. Looks like its back to the cartridge days and the $60 games.
I have only purchased one game that was at or over the $40 mark, and that was HL2. I have over thirty games and only maybe two or three of them I would say is worth $50. I do however own 2-3 games that were worth $50 at retail, but I recieved them as gifts. By no stretch do I consider a static game to be worth $60, that's just ridiculious, especially with the overall lack of gameplay quality in games nowadays. I believe $60 is too much and any game put at that price will see a reduction in overall profit of that title. I would like to add that I can easily afford a $60 game a month if I wanted. I don't buy them at that price because I can buy other entertainment equal in value for half the cost.
I couldn't think of anything witty to say, so...you're stuck with this.
Compare $50 of todays dollars with $50 in 1990!
Anyone remember paying $60 or $70 for a NES/SNES new release? Granted, you were paying for larger ROM chips...
Look at the budgets of some of todays games. Millions of dollars. How much of a budget do you think Megan Man or Castlevania had?
They have to make the costs up somewhere.
I can wait until next year and pay $20! Even less! HAHAHAHA!
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Here in Britain, $60 US would practically be a price drop.
Gran Turismo 4 for PS2 has a recommended price of UKP39.99 ($76.9219 US) and the lowest shop price I found on launch day was £29.99 ($57.6761 US).
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
i think this will lead to allot more copied games, cause im starting to have problems affording (or saying i can afford, other things have more importaint ques on my money) that are 44$ slightly cause i dont have tons of cash to spend on frivolas things at times, and mostly, cause very few games end up worth nearly that amount. and this price hike isn't going to help there cause i think. oh well. maybe once they get very old game si might be able to afford them (and hopefully that will coincide with the console dropping price too!)
Movies made by a crazy person
http://www.youtube.com/marginalpro
In Germany you pay roughly 55 Euros for new games, and even 59 Euros is not completely unheard of. That's $71.50 to $76 at the current rate. That's why I usually don't buy 'less important' titles and go straight for the gems.
I recently blogged about this...
http://www.kamalot.com/
This pricing is going to have a detrimental effect on the industry as a whole. With higher-priced games and consoles, people will be willing to buy fewer titles. The pressure will be put on game companies to produce the "next big thing" to ensure that their game is the one that gamers purchase. Publishers will only seek to fund development teams that can create tried-and-true games, ones that have a history of financial success or a recognizable tie-in to other media. As a result, there will be fewer innovative and new titles. More games will be rehashes with a new coat of paint or based on movie/comic licenses.
This is a terrible future for gaming. Gaming was once a bastion of creativity. As prices become so high, it is going to be relegated to 2nd hand status with more re-hashes than Hollywood. The evidence of this is already present.
How many games are TRULY worth the $50 we pay for them?
High prices like these also discourage more casual gamers from picking up a console and getting into video gaming. This reduces the potential audience for video gaming, making it even more of an inaccessible niche market. With the proliferation of gaming on mobile phones, and the rabid success of affordable handheld platforms, it should come as no shock that many people like to play games, if it is easy and affordable.
Please, someone explain to me how, less than 15 years ago, a *full-priced*, years-in-development, state-of-the-art game cost in the region of 10UKP ($20). That same game would take many WEEKS, if not MONTHS, of game-time to complete if you dedicated yourself to it, many of them much more than that.
[[[Me, my dad, and my older brother once spent night-after-night trying to complete Nonterraqueous and only managed it through sheer brute-force cooperative mapping of the game and many weeks of intense play... Typically, the next week someone else sent in the first ever map of Nonterraqueous to a computer magazine and had it published.]]]
That older game would be programmed by (sometimes) a single-person or at most a small team. That game would interface direct with the hardware (no OS) and take full advantage of the entire machine's capabilities. It would be programmed in the lowest-level language available and be massively MANUALLY optimised to make full use of the available speed and resources, both of which were available in only miniscule amounts.
That same game would be ported, without the aid of cross-platform tools, to numerous platforms (with similar optimisations) and sell for the same price on all platforms. That game would be fun, virtually bug-free, engaging and keep the average gamer with a large software library occupied for years and years.
So why do modern games now cost RIDICULOUS amounts (way above equivalent inflation and way out of pocket-money territory even for modern youth) when they can be completed in a few DAYS of playtime, be in development for the same amount of time as the older games and sometimes never even appear at all.
Admittedly, any game today usually have a larger team behind it and more of a PR push but that must be cancelled out by the comparatively ENORMOUS gaming market of today, the low cost of duplication, the ability to take advantage of massive libraries of pre-crafted code, audio, artwork, the proliferation of available programmers, computer artists etc.
Modern games are also now written in much higher-level languages than older titles, which are easily portable across many platforms, using a massive framework of standardised operating systems and hardware interfaces with well-established controlling libraries (DirectX) etc.
The modern games are buggy, boring, bloated and absent of decent gameplay. Processor power and resource availability has soared far beyond anything the older gamers could ever dream of, yet the games are sluggish and ugly even on the "recommended" hardware.
I haven't played a game in years that engaged me, 90% of them having a single, oft-repeated premise that has been done to death and they provide nothing new but eye-candy that gets in the way of the game.
I've actually got to the ideal point now... I have a massive library of older games and I do not buy modern games much anymore, maybe only once or twice a year, and even then usually from the budget range.
My computer is DELIBERATELY several years behind state-of-the-art so that the only games I can be tempted to run are ones which have been on the market for a long while, allowed me to weed out the chaff and buy the one, single, ground-breaking game of the era.
My last (impulsive and un-researched) game purchase was UT2003 and I installed it, completed several of the ladders and got bored and uninstalled it. Yet Counterstrike is on my hard disk (in fact, I have about 10Gb of installed Half-life games BUT NOT HL2 or CS:Source) and I'm currently engaged in a few games of OpenTTD. The best pieces of software I own are a Spectrum emulator and DOSBox.
I have often wandered into my local game store and walked out again after not being taken by any of the games, even after test-playing many of them.
Why do companies even THINK that people will pay for the rubbish they churn out, except possibly by mistake? Black & White was, for me, the last game purchase I made near it's release date... it was
I have to wonder how much this will really help? Personally, I only buy a few games a year anymore, and I'm somewhat selective in doing so. Usually, I'll try to wait for games to hit the bargin rack, or I'll wait for a friend to buy it, finish it, and borrow it from him. I'll grant that there are some games that I will buy at full price, but those are getting to be fewer. This year, the only game I'm looking at paying full price for is Rainbow 6: 4. And that assumes that it hits this year, and doesn't have a ton of bugs at release. The sad part is, I'll probably only play through it in co-op mode with some friends, whom I've played through 3 with. We just enjoy that sort of thing, and we all need to have our own copies.
The other problem with the prices climbing higher, is going to be piracy. Let's face it, pirating a game is easy these days. And all of the silly key codes are doing nothing to slow it down. Do a quick google for "half life 2 cd key" and you'll see what I mean. Granted, this won't help people with online play, but if all they want is the single player version, then it'll get the job done.
At some point, higher prices are not going to result in higher returns. Too many people will wait for the price to drop or outright pirate the game. Are we there yet, who knows, but we'll probably get to find out soon when the companies start charging more.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
They can charge what they want. Standard economics, you don't even need to take the class to understand it. As price increases demand falls. At some point there is optimal profit. As you raise prices you are also loosing customers who would buy at a lower price, while lowering prices brings in less customers than the added profit.
They can try raising prices. However I personally consider $25 on a game too much, so already there are many games I personally do not buy. As price goes up more and more people will cross that line. I know many people who would buy more games, but their wife keeps saying that is too much.
I feel the exact same way. I'll pay $60 for a game if I feel I'm going to get $60 worth of entertainment out of it.
Half-Life 2 is a perfect example, according to X-Fire I've played HL2 for a total of 67 hours! Well worth the money I paid for it, and more.
On the other hand, there's a game like Call Of Duty. I paid $50 for it back in the day, and as great as the game is, I finished the SP campaign in FIVE hours. I'm not much into online multiplayer, and I've only found it worth one re-play, so I only got 10 hours (at best) of entertainment for my money. NOT worth it.
More and more, I just wait for the games to hit the bargain bin and buy them for $20-$30 instead. As games continue to rise in price I'm sure more and more people will do they same. Enough to make a difference? Probably not. :-(
1. Activision, THQ, and Take Two are all indicating that they may be charging $59.99 for next gen titles.
Well who buys games from these guys anyway? This is just another nail in their coffin. IT would be a bigger deal if it was Nintendo, Electronic Arts and Square Enix saying they are going to charge $60+.
2. The possible main reason for the pirce flux is probably the cost of Blu-Ray or HD-DVD on the PS3 or Xbox Next, as oppossed to just cheapo DVD or whatever cheap propietary disc nintendo will use. Other than that, development is no more complicated than making a game for the PC, yet for some reason PC games are generally less expansive than console games (epsecially games released on console and PC simultaneously, see EA games). And we know that even with the next gen of consoles, PC gaming will still be ahead of consoles and always more complex. Once Xbox Next, Revolution and PS3 come out, shortly there will be graphics cards for PC that overshadows them. So "new console development" is no excuse.
3. I have a feeling that if Nintendo can always manage to find a way to keep the prices of their new consoles $200 or less at launch, they will find a way to keep their Revolution games $50 or under. This may be a good thing for them, if PS3 or Xbox Next games will be $60 and up.
Every year, I become more and more happy that I "retired" from console gaming about 6 years ago.
I'll pay $300-$500 every couple of years to upgrade my PC, but there's no way in hell I'd pay $60 each for console games.
PC games come down in price so fast that I'm more than happy to wait 6 months to get games at a reasonable price point like $20-$30.
But, I guess as long as people are willing to play those prices, they'll keep charging them. It's just possible that they might not know the limit, they may overstep their bounds and do serious damage to the software marketplace.
Because if they price their games too high and sales slump, do you think the executives will admit that it's because they fucked up or will they blame the "loss" on "evil internet pirates"?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano