Sony Hints At Higher Priced Games

Sony's Kaz Hirai hints that, in addition to the $600 console, we may have even more expensive games to look forward to. From the Gamasutra article: "I don't think consumers expect software pricing to suddenly double. So, the quick answer is that we want to make it as affordable as possible, knowing that there is a set consumer expectation for what software has cost for the past twelve years. That's kind of the best answer I can give you. So, if it becomes a bit higher than $59, don't ding me, but, again, I don't expect it to be $100."

Comments

Already too Expensive

[bailout911]

Games are already too expensive as it is, which is one reason I quit playing them about 2 years ago. I can get a lot more enjoyment out of $60 doing something outside or with friends and family than I can spending hours in the basement mashing buttons.

Re:Already too Expensive

[26reverse]

Agreed. That's the main reason I troll the "budget" software bins nowadays. There are a lot of great games out there if you're okay with "less than stellar" graphics. Graphics improve over time... but a good storyline is always a good storyline.

As such - I just (finally?) nabbed a copy of Baldur's Gate 2 with expansion for $10. Rise of Nations is also "budget" now... and their single-player mode really adds more than the typical "keep replaying random map".

Re:Already too Expensive

[bigman2003]

For me the biggest problem with 'budget' software that it is old, and in many cases (not all...) the on-line play suffers. (I don't play RPGs, so don't tell me how wonderful Everquest or World of Warcraft, or whatever is...)

When a game has been out for a long time, and you just jump in, the on-line experience usually sucks.

1- There is a good chance that many of the players have been playing for years. They know every trick, every little nuance. You don't have much of a chance to beat them. If a good player takes you under their wing (fat chance in a competitive game) you won't get to discover the game yourself, and learn things that very few other people have discovered.

2- Possibly the game wasn't too popular, but it is just something that people throw in when they're bored. They don't care about the game. They are much more likely to be griefers.

3- Maybe nobody plays anymore.

For a person who does about 80% of their gaming on-line, used budget games aren't a very good option.

Yes, of course some people are still playing Counterstrike, or Quake...my answer to that is, "geez dude, aren't you sick of that game yet?"

Great idea

[KDR_11k]

When people are outraged at the price of your console, tell them you'll charge more for the games too. Sure. I'd like to know where that guy learned marketing.

Re:Great idea

[BigNumber]

Microsoft?

What are they thinking?

[gforce811]

Sony has stated they have no real answer for Halo 3. Sony's tech demos and specs were less than overwhelming. Even Microsoft, who seemed to enjoy rising with Sony to the top during the last console generation, has come out to say that they're siding with Nintendo (alright, not literally, but you know what I mean). Finally, sony announces that they will most likely raise prices a 'bit' above the already high $59.

Someone's smoking something, and if it screws up their logic this badly, I might just want some.

Re:What are they thinking?

[Kazzahdrane]

I won't bother with converting the currencies but here in the UK new Xbox 360 games (with the exception of pretty much just Rockstar Table Tennis) cost £49.99 in stores. I work in a games store and we've been told that PS3 games are likely to cost "between 50 and 70 pounds".

Who do Sony think they're kidding? If a game costs as much as £70 I think a lot of people are going to look at our price of £99.99 for a DS Lite and a game and think "Woah, I'm being screwed".

Oh, give it to me, give it to me!

[Jerf]

The Sony Playstation S&M: Sony's got the "S" covered, guess where that leaves you?

Marketer speak

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't expect it to be $100

In marketing terms, this means some games will be $99.99. Screw that.

Also

[jayhawk88]

When you buy a PS3, someone from Sony will come and kill your puppy or kitty. If you do not have a puppy or kitty, one will be assigned to you, and then it will be killed.

The Mystical Marketing Gun of Sony

[Rob T Firefly]

Description: This cursed weapon deals +3 damage against wielder's own feet.

Price: Credibility and market share.

Weight penalty: Ponderous, especially to those with foot damage.

Re:Wait, you mean it will play GAMES, too?

[Volante3192]

Well, since you read TDB, I'm sure you caught this comment ( http://www.thedigitalbits.com/mytwocentsa122.html# comp ) where they found out it's the HDMI interface on the Samsung that causes the problems; switching to component placed Blu-Ray nearly on par with HD-DVD.

Hopefully they'll get that fixed before companies start enforcing the downsample flag...

Honestly...

[Yomer333]

I'm as much of a gamer as most people, but honestly, who the hell are they marketing this towards*? The "my parents are divorced and one parent is over-compensating with insane toys" subsect of the market doesn't seem to be large enough to sustain a console. How many teenagers/college students can afford something like this? As a college student myself, I work more than I probably should, and I don't come close to breaking even after tuition and such. I purchased a PS2 not too long ago, and generally don't get any games that are much more than $20. If I ever purchase another console, it's probably going to be a Wii just from an economical standpoint. I don't care if Sony has the OMGLOOKATTHATZ polygons (which, from hardware comparisons, it won't) or if they have a GTA for every city in the country (which, since it's not exclusive to their console, everyone will)...with $600 + ~$80 per game, I could invest in Microsoft and Nintendo and watch Sony weep as their computer without a keyboard fucking tanks.

* -- Don't end sentences with prepositions, kids.

Might be their perspective

[springbox]

I almost get the idea that in Sony's own world this is somehow being presented to "hype" the console. The wording of these articles are priceless since I was honestly expecting someone (from the article) to try and explain how this is a good thing. (as in: PS3 = Fancy resturant, games = fancy desserts.) I am not sure how continuing to leak information about the high cost of the system is going to help Sony.

Even so, it would seem as if there are some fans who would still buy the system and games even if they continued to raise the price.

Let's not even mention "real dollars"

[Control Group]

Let me just head one line of reasoning off at the pass: I'm sure someone's going to start throwing around calculations involving inflation and real purchasing power. Which are right... ...but they don't matter.

People, by and large, do not factor the devaluation of money between then and now into their price comparisons. For example, consider gas prices - everyone complains about them, despite the fact that they're actually lower (in terms of real dollars) than they were 25 years ago.

Yet you'll always hear the stories about how "I remember when a gallon of gas was fifty cents!"

Video games are the same way. They've been in the $50 range for a long time, and people are therefore acclimated to that price point. It doesn't really matter that $50 for a game in 1995 was more money than $50 is now.

According to a calculator I found online (grain of salt, but it passes my smell test and I can't be arsed to really research this just now), $200 in 1985 translates to $363 in 2005. Which means that the premium XBox 360 is a whole $36 more expensive than the NES (and the core system $63 cheaper!), in terms of real purchasing power. This has not stopped plenty of people complaining about its price.

Of course, anyone who figures real purchasing power into the equation is right, when you come down to it...but it doesn't matter when it comes to what drives the purchasing public to either pull the trigger or not on a new toy.

Re:Let's not even mention "real dollars"

[Chris Burke]

According to a calculator I found online (grain of salt, but it passes my smell test and I can't be arsed to really research this just now), $200 in 1985 translates to $363 in 2005. Which means that the premium XBox 360 is a whole $36 more expensive than the NES (and the core system $63 cheaper!), in terms of real purchasing power. This has not stopped plenty of people complaining about its price.

I don't see why they shouldn't complain if they want to, as far as the console itself goes. The cost of electronics has been going down steadily since the 80s, both absolute and inflation adjusted. This is because producing them has become cheaper. In the late 80s a PC would cost thousands of dollars; today you can get one for $500 at Walmart. A game console in 2005 costing the same as a game console in 1985 after adjusting for inflation isn't impressive in the least. So if people percieve the price of the 360 as too high, well, there's some basis for that. Personally I don't think it's bad.

For games it is easy to see that they have actually gone up in cost to produce, so it isn't surprising that their purchase cost has gone up. I think this gets to people because they have the reasonable expectation based on experience that technology should go down in price (or stay the same in absolute dollars and thus become cheaper due to inflation), and they see the games as being an extension of that technology. This is the acclimation you're talking about. Or maybe they're like me. I certainly appreciate that games cost more to produce, but honestly I don't care. Telling me how many millions a game cost to produce doesn't make the $100 or whatever price any lower, and doesn't make me want to pay that high a price either.

Re:Hit games shouldn't be expensive, except early

[Control Group]

You have to be real careful with this sort of thing.

You really don't want to train people to know that you're going to drop the price of something within a few weeks. It's one thing to know that you could wait a year and spend $30 to get the game you're about to spend $50 on. It's another thing entirely to know that you could wait a month and spend $50 to get the game you're about to spend $80 on.

A lot more people will be willing to wait month to save $30 than a year to save $20. All you're going to do, ultimately, is drive down sales within the first few weeks of release.

It would probably work for the first couple games they did it with, sure...but even the American buying public would catch on to quick follow-on price drops. Note how, even today, MS denies that they have any plans to drop the price on the 360 when the PS3 launches, despite the fact that it's so painfully obvious that anyone with two neurons firing in synch is pretty sure they will.

But you never, ever, want people to believe (much less know) that the thing they're about to buy will be cheaper just a little bit down the road.

The Higher the Price of the Game

[Greyfox]

The less likely I am to buy it on impulse. Most games suck, as simple as that. I'm willing to risk $20 against the chances that the game will suck. At the $50 I'm much less inclined to buy a game on the spur of the moment. At $70 almost all of the games would look unappealing given that I can wait a year, buy them used (In which case the publisher gets NOTHING) or both. At more than $70, I'd be inclined to chuck the console and find a different hobby.

Re:Sony is trying hard to lose the console war

[stratjakt]

I object to PS3 and XBox 360 being termed "next generation". They're exactly the same as what we have now, just at higher resolutions. Resolutions hardly anybody has. Most people I know think they have HDTVs, and then I point out that they have merely EDTV, or a HD-Ready TV. I tell them to truly experience the XBox 360, they have to drop some serious $$$ for something that does 720P and a DTS system. Then they can go spend another $$$$ on a BluRay or HD-DVD player, and basically gamble whether they're getting another BetaMax.

High Definition is such a stupid direction the industries taking. People don't care, they aren't flocking to Best Buy to upgrade. I'm a geek who's into and actually understands all this crap, HDMI, 1080i vs 1080p, and so on, and I don't care. I really don't give a rats ass about high-definition anything, it doesn't improve the experience of TV, movies or console video games.

So Sony and MSFT have hitched their wagons to the HDTV "revolution" that isn't going to take place. They can only force upgrades, a la "buy a PS3 because we aren't making PS2 games anymore".

Now, Wii is different, watching the videos of the guy playing Red Steel, made me wonder "why didn't we have that before?" It looks like such a natural way to play an FPS, it looks like it may even be SUPERIOR to a keyboard and mouse. I'll have to wait and see. It seems like more of a gimmick, and something that will be here to stay. The first time I saw the NES control pad, I thought it was a cheesy gimmick, and could never replace the Wico Command Control I used with my C64. Games are played with joysticks, not stupid little boxes with buttons to move, I thought. I was wrong.

Wii and it's wii-mote are something different, and flunk or fail, actually innovative.

Of course it's all about the games, and a "killer app" can change everything overnight. Halo was MSFT's crutch for the XBox, but that seems like a fluke. It won't happen again with Halo 3. So far I see nothing coming down the pipe from Sony or MSFT that piques my interest. But damnit, I want to play some FPS with that pointer, and I want to be able to cheaply download some of nintendo's past hits. Right up my alley.

IMO, Wii is the only truly "next generation" system. It actually offeres something evolutionary over the last generation. All PS3 and XBox 360 seem to have is high prices, faulty hardware, and "new features" that would cost me 5 grand to be able to use.

I think Sony and MSFT going the high-end route is going to hurt them, and Nintendo just might rise back to the top. They seem most likely to put out the next "killer app" at this point.

He went on to say...

[One Louder]

"Clearly, we're intent on preventing anyone from actually buying or using this product" he said, "but, just in case, we've also added a small amount of plastic explosive to the power supply and dipped the game controller in anthrax."

RTFA?

[Moraelin]

Actually, the summary on Slashdot is highly incorrect. If you read what the guy says on Gamasutra, it's

A) in response to Activision's making a fuss that games should be more expensive, since apparently Activision's development costs are too high to be covered even by $59, and

B) all that the Sony guy basically says is along the lines of "well, we can't go much higher than $59, because people expect games to be between $59 and $39. We can't suddenly price a game at $99, because noone would buy it. Even if we could slightly increase the price, it would be at most a very small increase, not what Activision wants."

Basically that's all there. It's _not_ about Sony wanting to raise game prices, it's Sony telling Activision "dude, put down the bong, we _can't_ sell your games for $99." I.e., pretty much the opposite of what the Slashdot summary says.