Slashdot Mirror
Why Games Cost $60
eldavojohn writes "Crispy Gamer is running a very interesting article on why games cost $60. Many games start out at this retail price — but why? Did the makers of The Beatles Rock Band game just happen upon $59.99, as did the makers of Batman Arkham Asylum? After all, those two titles surely took different amounts of man hours to develop, and result in different averages of entertainment time enjoyed by the consumer. They interview a director at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, who breaks down the pie as $12 to retailer, $5 to discounts/returns/retail marketing, $10 toward manufacturing costs and shipping. That leaves $30 to $35 in the hands of the publishers. Though lengthy, the article looks at three forces of economics on why game publishers continuously end up in lockstep for pricing: sensible greed, consumer stupidity or evil conspiracy. When asked about the next step up to $70 or $80, Hal Halpin (president and founder of the Entertainment Consumers Association) says, 'I'm not sure that we'll see a standard $70 price point at all. To my mind, emerging technologies, subscriptions and episodic and downloadable content should all enable price drops — increasing accessibility to a much wider audience.'"
One time many years ago, a bunch of us were hanging out at a friend's place watching movies, drinking beer, cracking jokes, shooting the shit, and just chilling out. This was back when most of us were still living with our parents, and the guy who's house we were at - I didn't really know anything about his family or anything.
So we'd been there for a couple hours when all of a sudden his younger brother - who I didn't even know existed until that very moment - comes tearing into the room and starts running around the furniture in circles. He's panting and making really strange guttural sounds and every now and then he'd blurt out random words. It was all just really mentally jarring after the relaxed, sociable time the bunch of us has just been having.
The guy who's house we were at stood up after probably 30 seconds, scooped up his little brother by the waist - not in a pissed off way but in more of a fun, playful way - and hauled him out of the room. I heard voices in another part of the house then a minute later the guy came back, sat back down and said "sorry about that guys, Kyle has downs syndrome."
I nodded and tried to turn my attention back to the movie, but part of my brain was still going "what the fuck was that?"
The above post left me with the exact same feeling.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
One person simply not buying a game may not do much to bring down prices. It takes complaining sometimes to get others on your side and assist in a boycott; which may or may not get results.