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Higher Game Prices Explored
An Anonymous Reader writes: "Next Generation has a feature interviewing a dozen or so developers, publishers and analysts on the new $60 price for games. Generally, publishers are positive, developers are skeptical and analysts are mixed." From the article: "The next gen world is considerably more complex - and prices for titles that deliver on pushing this complexity will definitely reflect that. We couldn't deliver the type of consumer experiences we're delivering in Full Auto as an example, on an existing machine. Hardcore gamers probably remember that $59 retail price points are not that unusual. Going back to N64 and as far back as the 16-bit generation - there were cartridge based games, some with battery back up that routinely cost $59. Those price points were to cover the larger cost of goods - in the next gen world it's to afford better artificial intelligence and technology, which I believe delivers better value to the consumer."
Although the price is high now, it warms my heart to think that one day all of these great, highly advanced games will be in the public domain. There will be joy and fun for people of all incomes.
Oh, wait...
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
..interviewing a dozen or so developers, publishers and analysts on the new $60 price...
Maybe they should interview some consumers and see what THEY think of the new pricing of these games...
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
games are cheap these days! 10-15 years ago, i remember snes and sega genesis games costing up to $70!
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
They are the ones making most of the money.
:-\
There's a reason why I only buy a game or two a year... I can't afford to keep up.
I'm off to the used game store.
I wish my lawn was emo, so it would cut itself.
Back when they were still shoving games onto disks, and you had to uncompress everything to play (which could someitmes take 2 hours), I paid $70 for a copy of Wing Commander 2. Until the CD came out, and it looked like games were going to occupy even more disk space, many of us had resigned ourselves to paying $70 or more for games.
I haven't paid more than 20$ for a game in a long time. Games sales seem to burst and then dwindle forcing retailers to drop the prices rather quickly. Of course there are exceptions like WoW which I didnt get until 2 months ago when Circuit City had a sale. Plus systems have to have their million seller discounted games so people will buy their systems. People who cant afford or dont want to pay full price for games simply need to wait. This raise would only effect those who cant or dont want to wait.
After you factor in the tools like Renderware as well as others, you realize game designers do far less.
The fact is the line that "The next gen world is considerably more complex - and prices for titles that deliver on pushing this complexity will definitely reflect that."
Yeah I really think the next Need for Speed game really has the same level of complexity that Xenogears (the original) and Gran Turismo have. the fact is that if you priced games by complexity it'd be easier to tell who did the most work.
The reason why the game world is going in the crapper is every other game that is released is a sequal of a lousy first game, or a rip off of another game, or worse a port of a game from a different version (console to console, Console to PC, Pc to console.). I liked Half Life 2, Morrowind, UT2004, and Doom 3, but I don't need Big Mother Truckers 2, BloodRayne 2, or Fantastic 4.
I love most of GTA, but Mafia was aweful, Driver is terrible, and True crime just sucked. Yet all those have sequals coming? And let's not fail to meantion all the RPGs that fell short, all the racing games that just arn't needed, and all action games that is just mindless violence.
And let's remember all those games started on the PC ported to the Xbox (or bought for the Xbox) and then brought back to the PC? Deus Ex was an excellent game, the sequal? restricted. Morrowind at least was done right, Halo had a lofty goal (3 different playable races) until it became part of the Microsoft family, and Splinter Cell? I remembered that game when it was just called thief.
There's too many crap games that try to be different but end up being the same old crap. Of course let's not also meantion those ultra short single player games that get all their points from Muliplayer? And half the problem is these reviewing sites that never rate stuff under 6.0 Let's be honest. Out of the last 12 monthes, there's been some good games but there's been a LOT of bombs. Why arn't I seeing Reviews that are at least honest about that.
The end problem is this. Instead of spending more money to get named actors or named properties, like movies do (which have also fallen) why don't they spend the money making the game better or tighter, no one wants to play a movie based game if it's just movie scene, gameplay, movie scene, harder gameplay, movie scene, if the gameplay is only "hard" because of crap controls.
So you're saying that the games are going to cost more, but the quality is going to be higher? ie gameplay, plot, graphics, etc?
If that's true then fine. Better quality games cost more. Contra should cost more than Ragnar.
But I doubt that this is how things are going to turn out. There are still going to be plenty of crap games, and they're going to be $60. So rather than price the game according to it's value, it's just "we get to charge more for our games!"
Maybe Sony/MS/Nintendo is raising the price to recoup more of the cost of the more expensive, more advanced consoles.
PS: I miss side-scrollers.
Synergy is your friend
...but I'll instead just turn to the used videogame store. Why? Because the mom and pop used videogame store is the same price as Funcoland, and I'm instead patronizing a local establishment. But here's the thing - Videogame companies don't make any money on my purchase. They've already made their profit from that particular sale. So, what happens to their sales if high prices drive a larger percentage of consumers to the used bins? With less first release sales, they won't make as much money... ...and then they'll either be smart, and drop the price back down (which will also make them look better, if everyone else is more expensive), or they'll do the sadly more likely, and raise the price again to "recoup lost profits"...
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
... if they were any good. 95% of all the publishers put out these days is absolute crap and completely unoriginal showing no innovation or advancement for the industry. All an increase in price of games is going to do is this:
1) Cause me to wait longer to buy games (eg: even if I *think* I'll like it, ill wait a few weeks to see what my non-biased friends think instead of listening to supposed 'non-biased' magazines who get kickbacks.)
2) Cause me to wait until a mediocre game hits the bargain bin.
Shrug, they can charge anything they want, if it's crap people arent gonna like buying it... all they're doing is alienating their customers really.
Shadus
I already wait for games to hit the clearance bin before buying them. I think high prices for AAA titles will be a good thing for indie developers, who aren't throwing the kind of money at a game that it requires a $60 price to recover the investment.
We've already reached the point where the cost of art assets is a greater limiting factor than hardware capabilities when it comes to graphics. I believe procedural generation will step up to the challenge and rescue the industry. Procedural terrain, buildings, and plant life are basically solved problems. Wil Wright's Spore is making a credible attempt at procedural animals. Our eyes have such high standards when it comes to the human form that I doubt we'll ever have completely procedural humans, but a number of games now have just a handful of human character graphics and parameterize features such as jaw width, cheekbone height, obesity, etc. to create combinatorial variety with a minimum of artist man-hours.
The beautiful thing about procedural and parameterized art is that they can be open-sourced in a meaningful fashion. There's currently a lot of free/public-domain game art out there, but not much of it helps. The art requirements for games are too idiosyncratic. With parameterized/procedural art you can fit random art from the internet to your needs a lot more easily. Parameterized art is re-usable art, which means less duplication of effort within the community. The collective art output of the indie gaming community will then be able to create games of similar graphical quality and content depth as commercial AAA titles.
So yes, high game prices are a good thing.
For great justice.
If you develop an AI, it costs less per unit, the more units you make. If you use a bigger RAM chip on a cartridge, it raises the cost of every unit!
Reasoning that better games are more expensive and should therefore be more expensive to purchase is a faulty argument. Games should be priced to maximise profts; PROFIT = SALES x (PRICE - COST OF MANUFACTURE) - FIXED COSTS. The fastest way to grow profit is to grow that first term, either through increased sales, higher prices or lower cost of manufacture. Fixed costs generally pay for themselves in increased sales.
The hard part here is that Price is generally inverse related to Sales. That's basic economics. Cost of manufacture is generally out of the hands of game developers, because there's certain minimums you must provide consumers and standard interfaces you need to comply with. So developers and publishers are basically left with a tradeoff between fixed cost and sales x price. Advertising, awesome new graphics, particle effects, those are all fixed costs.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Now that so many require a subscription to play. Also, the intrusive rental/DRM systems like Steam are no doubt enhancing revenue by preventing all that piracy they were crying about, so that money should be available to decrease the unit price.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
If all they do is produce the same crap over and over stop buying thier games. Support independent game developers and their creativity. Cut out the evil middle men and marketing morons who ruin everything with their single minded devotion to money.
Death to The Games Industry Part 1
Death to The Games Industry Part 2
Tinfoil hat? Naa, I long since replaced it with a reinforced titanium alloy.
"I love most of GTA, but Mafia was aweful, Driver is terrible, and True crime just sucked. Yet all those have sequals coming?"
??
But lets say that 50% of every bottle of milk was spoiled. When it cost 5$, you accepted this fact that it might be spoiled as just par for the course- an unfortunate consequence of loving milk. But, if the price all of a sudden went to 10$, would you be nearly as willing to shell out the extra cash to get your milk fix? No, you wouldn't.
Games are the same way. Publishers are pushing their own development costs onto the consumer (Granted, im sure their margins are pretty small to begin with, but I may be mistaken), but every game isnt equally as good. Some games are much better than others. It SURE as heck isn't 50%- more like 10% of what I see on the shelves can I say is actually good, and all of them cost an even 49.99$. If I have to pay 59.99$ and the quality of the games doesn't change (Graphics make-th a game not), I am going to be much more cautious about what I buy. I won't be giving games chances. I'll buy GTAs, Half Lives, and Warcrafts.
>better artificial intelligence and technology, which I believe delivers better value to the consumer.
mm not really higher cost means a lack of original titles. We will see big companies milking there once decent titles *glares at EA*. Like for every Killer 7 there is 10 need for speed's out there. Whoopee just what we need.
Last year the 2k5 series of games (NBA, NFL, College Hoops, NHL, and I think their MLB) were $20. NFL, at least, got better reviews than Madden, and the move made EA so scared that they snapped up every exclusive license they could get their hands on.
Was that a loss leader in expectation of eventual market domination, or did those titles actually make a profit? I haven't seen anything definitive either way.
I get that the development cycles are getting nastier, but if you could make a better football game than Madden at a $20 price point, what's stopping nextGen titles from being $30?
Well, other than profit...
ceci n'est pas un sig.
Burnout Revenge for Xbox: $50
Burnout Revenge for Xbox2: $60
These are what stores are telling us theyll cost, so it is subject to change, but even so... wtf?
As far as I can tell, it is exactly synonymous with 'price'. This means that the second word conveys no meaning whatsoever, and so is a waste of everybody's time.
Remember, kiddies. Friends don't let friends speak like marketroids.
Things haven't changed that much... check out this scan of a 1995 flyer from Toys 'R Us. (I swiped the link from Digg, you might have seen it already)
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=949302
They're Canadian prices, but the prices typically adjust to about the same.
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
Heh heh, silly rabbit, tricks are for kids! The consumer is not going to bite on $60 games. Look at what happened to DVD movies which were quite expensive initially but now run $20 and less for many titles, even some new releases. The only DVDs that get a premium market are specialty items like Anime, and even those are mercilessly marked down after a few months. We're talking about entertainment here! So unless these next generation games are going to come to my house and blow me, forget about $60. I'll wait for the mark downs or go without.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Let me guess: you've never created a game, or held a job in the industry, have you? Otherwise you'd recognize the above as patently absurd.
Trust me, designers most certainly do *not* have it easier. Even with middleware tools like renderware & havok, and with design tools like Phototoshop, Maya, and 3ds Max, it's still an unbelievablly work-intensive process to create content for a state-of-the-art title.
For example, consider need for speed vs. gran turismo. Let's suspend the argument of which is a better game (GT kicks ass), and just talk about dev costs. You might have an argument that middleware tools have made it easier on a programmer who is relieved of low-level rendering and physics simulation tasks (though I'd wager that a programmer would disagree), but the amount of work required to create the content (audio, artwork, modeling, level/track design) in Need for Speed for the Xbox 360 exceed GT by an order of magnitude. Newer design tools make artists and designers more productive, but these productivity gains are outstripped by the work required to exploit the capabilities afforded by advances in hardware.
But don't take my word for it. Check out a recent post-mortem from Game Developer magazine (or its Gamasutra site)and compare it to one from 5-10 years back. You'll notice that the development staff (programmers, designes, artists, management) numbers have become huge! Licensing and actor royalties notwithstanding, you're still looking at increased costs.
Is the industry producing crap games? Of course. They produced crap games back then, too. It's just that they cost more to make.
I remember when PC games were $20-$30. Test Drive (and Test Drive II: The Duel), Starflight (and Starflight II), flight simulators from various vendors were fantastic finds. Many of the older classics, like King's Quest, were in that price range too. There were small teams, 1-5 people mostly with very little marketing costs. Those games were worth the money. Today's games eventually make it down to those prices, and it turns out that I'm pretty happy waiting for them. By that time, my computer can handle them with pretty little effort, and all the patches are stable.
I have a hard time imagining why some of these games are so expensive. Doom III, for example, started out over $60. If they had a design team of 8 people, take 8*75,000/$60 and cut out half for marketing, and it seems like they can sell 20,000 copies and do pretty well-- before licensing the engine to everybody. Maybe those rock stars are demanding salaries twice that (40k copies), and maybe profits are half that -- benefits anyone? (80k copies?).
I can reconcile how games aren't as cheap to make anymore. They have things called "artists", because the hardware can keep up with more than 160x100 in 16 colors. But $60 is more than that kind of entertainment is worth to me. I'm a casual gamer --at best. Starcraft appears to be the apex of entertainment for. Relatively short games, very varied in game play, multiplayer aware, pretty (but not overly so) graphics and not unnecessarily burdensome on hardware.
Starflight II cost me $30 and provided hundreds of hours of entertainment. I can't find that kind of value these days. I've put $120 into Starcraft at this point (two copies each of Starcraft and Brood War, one for my PC and the other for my Mac) and Starcraft has proven itself to me to be worth its cost far more than any first person shooter could by providing hundreds of hours of entertainment per year.
Long before this, the Colecovision had a marginally decent port of Zaxxon, and it cost $50. This was a time when I was earning about $14/week from my paper route, and "regular" games were $19-$29.
As far as loading crap into the cartridge, I believe some of the later Atari 2600 cartridges had their own processors in them, and used the base console as little more than a display terminal. This is why they can't be ROM'd on a standard Atari emulator.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/09/06/news_6132
I know it's no confirmation but that's still good news for me considering I haven't seen any official words saying next-gen titles would cost any more.
"This is considered plagiarism."
I remember those days, and I'm not looking forward to reliving them.
What I find interesting is that I'm hearing this generally out of the console gaming crowd, not for the PC. Sounds to me like they're just hyping this up to maximize their profits. If SquareSoft could release their later Final Fantasy games at $49, games which spanned over several discs and are among the more expensive games developed thanks to the huge development staffs and times, yet still apparently turn a healthy profit, I don't see anything to validate these claims.
Another observation is that Microsoft will be charging the old $49 price point on their first-party games. Now, they're the ones who have to recoup costs from selling the hardware at a loss, and apparently they can sell at the old price point. Anyone see anything wrong with that picture?
This is merely a case of we'll charge whatever we can. If we see $59+ games and $399+ consoles, you can expect to see smaller sales numbers. More people will simply make the choice I have...wait for the price drop. Besides, I have a long list of current gen games I have yet to get to, the prices of which are dropping all the time. Yes, I'm a CAG...
"The next gen world is considerably more complex - and prices for titles that deliver on pushing this complexity will definitely reflect that."
The question is, why is it more complex? So far the only thing we've heard is that, being supercomputers and all, it will be difficult to program for. For some reason. And yet, they are fundamentally no different from computers. In fact, they usually can compile and run the same major (or brand, in the case of Microsoft) languages. The only thing different is that they have to learn hwo to best take advantage of the console's hardware. Which PC games have been doing since, well, they came into existence. And how do we really know it is complex? Are we to believe the stock holders? The financial officers? These guys don't make the games. I want to hear a programmer's perspective. You know, a guy who works the 90 hour weeks to complete a game.
"Hardcore gamers probably remember that $59 retail price points are not that unusual. Going back to N64 and as far back as the 16-bit generation - there were cartridge based games, some with battery back up that routinely cost $59. Those price points were to cover the larger cost of goods - in the next gen world it's to afford better artificial intelligence and technology, which I believe delivers better value to the consumer."
There is a reason prices used to be that high: we were the friggin' minority. Now everybody plays games, and this isn't a couple million dollar market anymore. The gaming market is surpassing the movie-goer market. So, now, using the same language and current PC-level hardware, it is somehow more complex to make a game, and thus price increases are justified?
If these guys want to raise prices, they should just do it and stop blaming it on the hardware, programmers, or sake of quality. I doubt ten dollars more is going to increase the quality of a game. Shit, most of these guys can't make a quality game with a selling price of $50. We all lived through the summer of 2005, everybody knows what I'm talking about.
Quality games. I can't wait to see the AI in the next Dead or Alive game.
I'd love it. EA/Sony games are getting worse by the month. You bank on cornering the market vs. creating good games. You bank on sucking people into MMOs and the charging them to complete quests. Poor suckers who bought Madden 2006. HAHA! This will be great for independents. And finally some creative devs will see direct compensation and control of their work. To EA/Sony .. I say go for it ya' damn fools.
I worked at an EB in New Jersey back around 96 and 97 when the N64 was coming on the scene... they werent selling games for $59, oh no, they were $79 in most cases. People complained but still bought them since some were scarce at the time, such as Wave Race, and Star Fox. I thought it was crazy to spend that much, and was happy I only had the PS1 which were at the most $54.99 at the EB.
If all I'll get for $60 dollars is another Tekken/Halo/Generic sports game sequel/clone with better graphics, I don't think i'll get a "next generation" console. Indie developers like Introversion are a great example of how you don't need massive budgets and spectacular graphics to make a brilliant game. Both Uplink and Darwinia a far better than most of the pap EA come out with and were made with a fraction of the cost.
Despite being only 24, I'm old enough to remember the days of NES carts priced at $60 each. Today, some games on DVD still cost $60 (when very popular and just-released).
What's changed in those 15 years or so? Our wages/salaries: in nominal terms (not adjusted for inflation), these have risen on average.
But game prices have not.
So, the *real* (inflation-adjusted) price of buying a game has actually decreased since the old days. That is, what might've been a $30,000 salary 15 years ago is, after adjusting for inflation, equivalent to (let's say; this isn't based on actual inflation, this is only an example) $60,000.
Since your salary has doubled in pure numerical value, but game prices have remained constant, you (obviously) can afford 2 new $60 games today as easily as you could afford only 1 game 15 years ago -- even though today's games are *VASTLY* more complex, in every feature category imaginable...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
This way you make money off the people who have countdown timers set on their cellphones for the next GTA or Blizzard game, who will happily pay $60. After that, however, all it does is discourage buying and encourage copyright infringment.
Publisher's get too greedy imagining dollar signs and don't look for the sweet spot on price as much as they should. I go through about a 50 pack of DVD-R's every month, and don't buy that many games or movies. But the last time I was next to the $5.50 bargin bin at Wal-Mart, I grabbed 10 movies before I knew what I was doing. And I saw plenty of other people, who obviously didn't come in to shop for DVD's, grab a few as well.
Fixing this post.. stupid markup language left more than half of the post out... "If you go back to the Nintendo 64 days, many of those frontline titles retailed for $60 and consumers were more than willing to buy them, when they were good games." Yeah I paid $60.oo+ for truely awesome games back in the 1990's, but then again I only bought 6-10 games a year. ($70.00 for R-type and I thing $80 each fpr Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana) Now I buy over 50 games a year, most of which start off at $49.99 and quickly end up on the $19.99 or less rack, which is where I start to contemplate picking them up. When I find them for $15.oo or less it's ussually a no-brainer even if the game isn't "that great". With $60.oo games I imagine the same thing will happen with most being discounted $20.oo to $40.oo when they don't "fly" off the shelf? As for the great games... they'll retain their higher price as always.
There's a Fantastic 4? I thought Fantastic 3 was crap
Likewise, where can I find Five Degrees of Separation or Ocean's Ten or Apollo 12 or Six or The Magnificent Six or 47 Hrs.? If the Mega Man and Street Fighter (J) games can go to zero, then what about the movies Air Force Zero or The Zero?
Read More...
but I'll instead just turn to the used videogame store.
But watch as you can't go online with the game because either 1. that serial number has already been activated, or 2. almost all the players have moved on to the sequel.
When the first CD and DVD games came out a massive chunk of the cost was to pay for the media itself, now CDs cost next to nothing, DVDs are going the same way as will HD DVD's.
The market was also smaller, a developer could expect to sell maybe 100,000 games tops, now they can quite easily sell millions if its a good game.
Publishers cant get away with saying "Games were $60+ some 10 years ago, and these games are so much better/more advanced". A 29" TV cost me almost $1,000 10 years ago, I can now buy one for $150 (and its better AND more advanced than the 10 year old one).