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The High Cost of Gaming
MTV Games is reporting on the financial pinch next-gen gamers will feel now that the 360 is out. $60 games are drawing frustrations from both sides of the gaming industry. From the article: "Many developers and publishers say the reason for the price hike is simple: Next-gen games, because of graphics, coding, voice acting, cinema scenes and everything else gamers expect, cost more to make. 'As a studio we can certainly speak to the amount of man hours and increase in staffing for next-generation content,' said Cord Smith, the producer of February 2006 car-combat title 'Full Auto.' 'As a gamer, it seems like it costs a lot to enter this new generation.'"
If you adjust for inflation, it's not really as much as it was in previous generations. I remember when Street Fighter 2 came out for SNES. That game was $70! So the new games for XBox 360 cost $60. Adjusted for inflation, that's less than what SF2 cost when it first came out. Or we can look at price as a percentage of yearly wage. Still, it's less than what it used to be.
The solution is to wait a few months after release before you buy a game. It's really not that hard to do.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
The newest things aren't necessarily the best.
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This is rubbish. If you go by the logic that 'better graphics/voice acting = higher price tag' then console games should have dropped to $30 for a brand new, day its released game during the PS2/Xbox/GC era. Most console games flat-out have awful graphics, poor textures and low resolutions. That alone should justify a $10 cut but it doesnt happen. Vice versa, PC games with their resolutions commonly reaching 1600*1200 the least, often times requiring a hardware upgrade just to reach 60 frames per second, hardware stress-testing graphics should cost $60~$80 by now. Same thing for voice acting, music, and the extra cost of developing for new hardware (if you add $10 for each hardware generation since the Atari 2600 we should be paying over $100 for a game by now.)
More content, lower price. Welcome to the wonderfull world of game economics.
The reason could be that game companies look at their respective userbases and decide wich userbase is most likely to be stupid enough to pay more for less.
Or perhaps the reason is that the console version has to recover the licensing cost. MS doesn't get a penny for a pc game but they certainly get paid for an X-box game.
As for the cost increasing because of either inflation or higher production costs. If the industry was working properly this would be offset by increased market share meaning they would have more copies of the games being sold to spread the cost over.
Games are not normal product. They are a luxury item partly bought by parents for kids and adding yet another 10 (your currency here) is likely to at least make parents think twice. Especially in a down economy. The 5th of december in holland is sinterklaas, the day to give gift to each other like christmas in is in the rest of the world, and the PSP has NOT BEEN SOLD OUT for two weeks now. The original rush was the game fanatics buying it but this was too early for the holiday season buying. Only the most together parents would have started shopping that early.
I am no analyst but this leads me to believe that many a kid is not going to find the PSP in his shoe (Sinterklaas uses shoes, Santa stockings). Part reason? The high price for the games. Come on, most of the games are rehashes, the are smaller without such niceties as voice acting and yet cost more then full pc games?
Oh and a further tell-tale sign that the cost of production has little to do with the cost of games. How can every game cost exactly the same amount to produce? What do I mean? Well if cost of production detemines price and every game is priced the same then the cost of production must be equal.
No games are priced for what the market can bare. Then some daring company raises it by 10 and if it works slowly other companies will follow. Price hikes like the euro introduction work wonders too.
I think that the game industry is just shooting itself in the foot again. With copy protection just a fantasy does the industry really want to raise the barrier against simply buying the game? Anyone want to take bets on how long it will take before the 360 is hacked?
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I hope Nintendo can really pull through with their promises to make game development simple and cheap with the Revolution. I think ease of development may become a HUGE factor in who wins the next console war...
Sony and Microsoft can show me all the pretty graphics they want, but if I just don't have the money than it really doesn't mean anything to me, does it?
I haven't payed $40.00 for a game since The Sims.
If I buy a game, I'm checking EBGames, eBay, Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon, wherever, and I'm finding the cheapest copy I can get. Most of the games I buy are older, simply because they're cheaper, great games, and I've never had the chance to play them.
Who's going to pay $60.00 for a game when there are plenty of excellent games you can grab for $5.00-$20.00?
Would I pay $30.00 or $40.00 for a new game I was anticipating? Sure, I guess so.
Any more than that, and more than $200.00 for the console, is just plain greedy.
They're blaming the cost of games on voice acting? That is the biggest load of crap ever becase that's like the once place they can hire good AND cheap actors to play the parts. However, instead of going that, developers are intent on paying big bucks to celebrities because they believe that it somhow legitimizes their game by having big name celebrities in the credits.
Billy West, a voice actor with the roles of Fry and Prof. Farnsworth from futurama to his credit, has an interesting article on The Onion - AV Club about how Hollywood pays people like Cameron Diaz 20 million for their voice in Shrek while overlooking the vetran voice actors in the industry. He makes a lot of good points about how good film actors don't make good voice actors and vice versa, since a voice actor has to learn to expression emotion without the use of his physical features, and how regular actors never really escape their own voice. He also has other interesting tibits about how voice actors typically help producers save money because they can do multiple different voices. I mean, would you guess that the same actor did the voices of Fry, Prof Farnsworth, Zapp Brannigan, and Zoidberg on Futurama?. Anyways, the point is that I don't buy the fact that the video game industry is all that interested in keeping prices low, because they could find cheaper means of production if they were truly interested in doing so.
You want me to pay for:
Can I please see a few more games like Alien Hominid? Not speaking from a genre point of view, just the style of the game. I think the XBox360 Live Arcade is a step in the right direction, but I'd rather see new games with old-style graphics, not the other way around, which is what I'm seeing from a lot of those games (ie Joust, Smash TV).
This whole post just wrote itself. It took like 2 minutes to write it. That means I feel strongly about it. You should probably take that with a grain of salt... I'm just saying.
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So, if next gen games are costing so much more to produce, why is it that a game like Call of Duty 2, which is made in tandem for pc and xbox 360, will sell for 50 bucks on pc and 60 on the console? Seems like they might be messing with the market base a bit.
What a load of carp. Right, so the technology is changing and we didn't realise it was going to cost more so we have to pass on the costs to you guys...sorry! Come on - technology is constantly evolving, the only difficulty is keeping your developers skills up to date. The technology gets better/shinier/more complicated (choose two) but costs overall do not go up, except for inflationary rises or where a major retooling is required (I can't think of anything of the top of my head - I was going to say something like a holographic display but we're already producing 3d!). This is just price gouging.
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If a certain entertainment-option (such as a game) is not worth the price asked to you, then don't buy it. Selling games at $60 works only when people buy games at $60, and evidently, quite a few do.
Most games fal in price rapidly, so it's not like you can't play the very same game for half the price, if you're willing to wait a few months. If not, and you absolutely *must* have the game at release-day, even at $60, then obviously the price was not too high, but instead correct. It's called a free marketm, get used to it.
One thing they waste far too much time on in many games is character models. I guess it makes for nice screenshots, but how often are you right up close to a character examining the detail on their boots?
This is at least true for FPSes. I guess RPGs and other more interactive games can use close-up detail. But thinking of UT2004, the character models have obviously been slaved over for many months, and are works of art; but the most you ever see is a couple of quick flashes as someone runs past. To be honest, the character models in the original Unreal Tournament (99?) were perfectly fine for an FPS.
The same mostly goes for weapon and power-up models. Gratuitous transparency and pretty textures is interesting for maybe the first 30 seconds, and then it could just be a yellow circle for all the player cares.
That's a big chunk of graphics they could simplify and spend much less time on. Further, it would save wasting lots of polygons on them.
The thing that really makes a big impression is the landscapes, and a lot of those are at least partially machine generated, so I guess they are probably a lot more efficient in terms of results for time spent.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Well, I haven't really read in detail anything about videogame development costs but, are they really more expensive to produce than a blockbuster movie with, say, julia roberts and brad pitt plus the best of the FX ? I'm pretty sure than each one of the Lord of the Rings movies was more expensive to make than Halo 2 and I haven't seen yet a 60$ DVD of a single movie.
I don't think it's justified princing a videogame in 60$. Maybe costs per unit in the cartridge era where higher and we could in some way accept that price, but now hay games come in optical media? Apart from the game itself, their cost is less than a dollar to manufacture for crying out loud!
And as people said before, nowadays they have a very populated audience. Videogames are no longer a hobby for a few, and neither its price should be.
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Thinking never hurt anybody --MacGyver