Well be selective. Don’t buy every single game that comes out. If a game only lasts 10 hours then simply don’t buy it. Or you can simply wait 6 months for the cost to go down.
I paid AUD$90 for Rome Total War. It’s the best $90 I have ever spent. I paid $70 for Port Royale 2. That was even better value. None of the IL2 games/expansions have cost me more than $60 each - 100’s of hours of entertainment there. I purchased Joint Ops for $86. Great value at $86 for the money I spent and the amount of entertainment I have gained from it.
Seems to me people are griping for the sake of it with no real reasons to back up their arguments.
When games are developed using 50-100 member teams then $10 million + costs are not unrealistic. They all want to put food on their tables and I am sure they all look forward to pay rises and other benefits, and pay off their mortgages.
I dunno - I’m certainly not a corporate big wig by any stretch of the imagination but I do have fairly regular access to the execs in our company. I can say for sure that there’s no conspiracy or cartel situation going on, at least that we’re a part of.
We’re just trying to make money, and it ain’t easy. If I could show you the books I would, but let me assure you that more of our games lose money than make money, and we’re not spending crazy dollars on marketing. And it’s not like we’re pumping out crap - not all our games are winners, but when we can’t make money on great games like Riddick and No One Lives Forever something’s gotta be done.
Games cost a lot to make and it’s a risky business. The audience hasn’t grown three-fold like the costs have. Believe me, I’d rather see the cost of games shrink to $19 rather than go up to $59, but there are all sorts of marketing reasons why it’s not easy to make that happen.
It’s all good anyway - if you don’t want to pay $59 for a game I highly encourage you to wait until the price drops to whatever you think is fair and then buy it. Or buy it used off eBay or rent it at Blockbuster. It’s all legal. What I can’t stand is people who complain that the price is too high so they’ll just pirate the game. But of course that’s a different thing all together.
Well it’s more like a fixed price point and almost no fluctuation of quality, which mostly effects published goods. There’s also little benefit to price competition: Wine Tasters Weekly is not really competing with Maxim, so when one publisher hikes up the rates, there’s no reason for the other not to.
Cigarrettes, gasoline, and other branded same-price point goods are pretty much the same.
We’re just trying to make money, and it ain’t easy.
I don’t think anyone should begrudge a corporation the right to make money. It’s more an image issue than anything else. Gaming appears to be going through a phase of discontent at the moment, bumping up the price is probably long overdue, but it’s likely to receive exactly the sort of reaction that nutsak posted, rather than people realising that prices can’t stay fixed and that this is not gouging.
It’s all good anyway - if you don’t want to pay $59 for a game I highly encourage you to wait until the price drops to whatever you think is fair and then buy it. Or buy it used off eBay or rent it at Blockbuster.
I admire your position on this. There was a discussion at Matrix regarding this, and one of the Matrix employees went nuts calling bargain shoppers the same as pirates.
I’ve been avoiding new games, the last one I bought was March. By the time I get around to buying now there’s a patch, and the price is reasonable. Unfortunately some of the games I would buy are now download only, so the price will stay high, but at least it will work by the time I get round to it :)
Adam- But you guys do know that raising prices will lead to more piracy, right? That’s like a straight line, no question, A causes B relationship.
I can’t believe you trotted out the costs thing. If that was true, how come every game costs $50? Why does Dominions 2 retail for the same price as Rome: Total War?
Normally when all the suppliers in an industry bump their prices at the same time it’s because an input cost they can’t avoid has gone up - airlines increasing fares to deal with rising fuel costs for example.
The thing that confuses me is that “we keep making fancier looking games” doesn’t strike me as an “unavoidable increase in production costs.”
If the art costs are being driven by one-upping competition with other game producers, in a competitive market you wouldn’t see cost increases at all.
If the art costs are being driven by ever-increasing user demand, you should see the market split into high & low cost segments - but that’s not what’s happening. They’re increasing prices in everything, right?
Are you shitting me? Are you suggesting that I’m lying about development costs going up? Seriously, you’re on THIS board talking to ME about development costs?
I’ve been nothing but honest and forthright about everything and it’s insulting that you would suggest that I’m lying about something as clear as the rising cost of game development in this industry.
These are FACTS. There isn’t a single person who knows anything about what’s really going on who would disagree - the amount we pay for games has tripled, at least, in the last five years. The market hasn’t grown as fast.
This ain’t about piracy. It’s certainly not about duplication costs. It costs more money to make games that people want to play. Jesus, you think we’d be spending $10 million on a game if we could just pump out Super Mario Brothers clones for $100k a pop?
You might want to take off your tinfoil hat and take a look around - there are only a handfull people in this industry getting rich and believe it or not most of them are developers who make kick ass games and deserve it. I don’t know anyone who works at a game publisher who’s thinking about early retirement or planning a second career making rocket ships. We’re all just trying to make a living.
This is elementary marketing. The market has decided that $49.99 is the price for games. Anyone who comes out with a game at a lower price, say $29.99 risks consumers thinking that it’s a “budget title” and thus sucks. You can’t charge more either, unless you’re a AAA title because of competition. So the guys who make games for $2 million charge the same as the guys who make games for $10 million because that’s how the system works.
In any case, there is a pretty decent market for budget titles at $19.99 so your “argument” is moot anyway.
So, everything generally gets more expensive over time, even if it’s just basic inflation. Movies used to cost $6 a pop, now even crappy theaters charge $10-$12.
Games have basically stayed at the same price point for 10 years. What would this group consider legitimate grounds to increase prices?
To back up Adam, costs to develop games have skyrocketed in recent years as team sizes have increased dramatically. The average team is something like 40 - 50 people large now… back in oh 1998 or so that would have been considered a large team. Also consider that companies like EA are shifting towards 100 person teams… it is becoming very difficult for smaller companies to compete. Not saying that some of them don’t, it’s just difficult.
These are FACTS. There isn’t a single person who knows anything about what’s really going on who would disagree - the amount we pay for games has tripled, at least, in the last five years. The market hasn’t grown as fast.
I’m not seeing the reason you have to spend more to develop games - what, is someone putting a gun to your head and demanding more artists? I guess we’ll find out if it’s a good business decision if sales stay up there after the price shift.
A shift from $50 to $60 after years and years of constant prices can’t be explained by inflation - inflation has been going down pretty much every year since 1985 or so. And virtually everything in society gets cheaper in constant dollars.
Take a look at this chart, which Chatterbox found on a Web page about inflation that was forwarded to him and several other journalists by Jonathan Rauch, the economics columnist for National Journal. Observe that in constant dollars, movie-ticket prices more than doubled between 1935 (when they cost a quarter; that’s $2.93 in 1999 dollars) and 1970 (when they cost $1.55; $6.68 in 1999 dollars). Prices for movie tickets peaked, in constant dollars, during the 1970s. By 1980, movie-ticket prices had dropped to about $2.69–$5.46 in 1999 dollars, where they stayed until 1990. Constant-dollar movie prices dropped a bit more in the early 1990s, stabilizing during the middle 1990s at $4.70 to $4.80 (in 1999 dollars), where they remain.
Well be selective. Don’t buy every single game that comes out. If a game only lasts 10 hours then simply don’t buy it. Or you can simply wait 6 months for the cost to go down.[/quote]
Now that flies in the face of all gamer reason!!!
The above plan is perfect for those, like me, who are old, have less time, and a bit more cash. If I was single, in my teens or twenties, I would be bitching like a mf’er.
Can we not just take Adam at his word? If this was a P&R and he was another random dillhole (Midnight Son), he would have posted with links to some random chart with facts and figures to support his claim and then you would all reply in triplicate with other links that tell a different story. Costs go up, inflation, MSRP goes up. Granted all games will not be worth 60 bucks, but precious few are worth 40 or 50 now. Some company’s will remain at today’s price point and other’s will put in some perceived added value maps or posters to help justify the price hike. Until I hear more developer/publishers jumping on here backing one position or the other, I believe I will trust that Adam knows what he’s talking about.
Name another industry where all the suppliers simultaneously agree to raise prices because the cost of non-mandatory inputs to production go up. It just smells like an cartel to me until I see a good explanation of the microeconomics.
Gamers may talk a good game as far as “gameplay over graphics” goes, but the reality is that there’s a continually-rising bar of graphical quality that has to be reached for a game to be considered modern and desirable.
And yeah, that involves more content creators, of all sorts.
I can’t remember the last time that a different movie studios priced their releases differently for comparable products. Don’t know about VHS anymore, but DVDs are almost all on a uniform price scale on release.
Not much different from the music cartel I suppose. Magazine publishing is another one, magically, the increased costs are usually uniformly applied, regardless of the circulation.
So should game publishing really be measured to a different standard to those publishers?
There’s just no point in trying to undercut the competition. Aside from some sports titles, are there any others which are released, or whose lifetime would put them in direct competition with another game? So if only one publisher increased prices, it would be futile for the others not to match.
BTW, Matrix have already bumped their prices up, their last two games were $69/$59 for download only, or $79/$69 for physical products: War In The Pacific and Battles In Normandy respectively.
