Do Video Games Cost Too Much?

Valve's Gabe Newell gave the keynote address at this year's Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain (DICE) Summit about the cost of games, the effect of piracy, and how to reach new players. Valve undertook an experiment recently to test how price affected the sales of their popular survival-horror FPS, Left 4 Dead. They Reduced the price by 50% on Steam, which "resulted in a 3000% increase in sales of the game, posting overall sales that beat the title's original launch performance." They also tested various other price drops over the holidays, seeing spikes in sales that corresponded well to the size of the discount. This will undoubtedly add to the speculation that game prices have risen too high for the current economic climate. G4TV ran a live blog of Newell's presentation, providing a few more details.

Comments

Yes

[houghi]

Yes. That was easy. Next!

Re:Yes

[cowbutt]

Actually, there's a more salient point there - older networked multiplayer games tend not to actually get many players. I recently installed my copy of Unreal Tournament on my new machine and went online only to find mostly empty servers. Even when I bought it (budget re-release, and used even) they used to be rammed.

Re:Yes

[ScottCooperDotNet]

The Unreal Tournament series is largely undefended against cheating, and that's a major problem for an FPS. Epic has made their cash, and what's the incentive to resolve the problem now?

Re:Yes

[daVinci1980]

Are you including games and music in that 'information should be free' quote?

Because people pay money to develop that information. They feed their families by their ability to make that information, because the companies they work for expect to be able to sell licenses for people to use and enjoy that information.

Would game developers and musicians just charge for 'support' of their games and music? Does that mean I get to call Billy Idol when his mp3 doesn't play properly in my car? Based on the number of MP3s that haven't worked properly for me in the last 12 or so years, I think Billy might have to find a day job.

The trouble with good ideas is that people tend to want to overapply them. There's nothing wrong with free information, when it's your choice to discover and release that information for free--I write and release free software. But requiring that all information be free is just as bad as requiring all information be closed. They're opposite sides of the same coin.

Of course, being as this is slashdot, I expect to be modded down to -9001.