So MSNBC would have you believe…
–Dave
…but computer game prices technically are going down. I think it’s called inflation…
- Alan
That would seem to go against the normal trend that sees prices driven down as a product goes mass market.
I don’t think the publishers can get away with $59.95 unless they give the retailers a deeper margin and all the big publishers more or less agree to raise prices. I think it would backfire, too.
That headline is basically wrong.
The article actually makes more of an argument for the fact that game prices will not go up.
“And that’s what appears to be happening. Rather than boost the prices, many console game publishers have taken the Hollywood approach to increasing revenue: The blockbuster.”
Also even though the statistics cited in the article are of some interest, the main evidence he looks at – the average price of all video games for a particular console platform such-and-such years into its lifecycle – is completely useless.
The average price goes down because the longer a platform has been around, the more the early titles are discounted. <genius>
It doesn’t have anything to do with the price point of new games in the marketplace.
2002 sports games are not going to sell for full price a year later. Halo isn’t going to sell for full price once Halo 2 is on the streets. This seems pretty obvious, and it’s pretty obvious that his statistics are derived not from any trend with the price of new games, but due to the increasing number of aged titles washing around in bargain bins after a console has been out 3 or 4 years.
I am amused as hell by the fact that “bits” is used to seperate consoles. Just wait, there will be one component of all the next generation consoles which will be 256 bits and then they’ll all be called 256 bit game consoles.
I don’t find game prices funny at all. As one of the non-entitled, non-reimbursed unwashed non-journalistic gaming community illiterati out there, I can tell you that $50 is a lot of jing-jing to be burning per gaming title. It’s gotten to the point where, to feed my jones, I hardly ever buy new games any more. I wait around until I score one for greatly reduced price either by:
-Getting it used, or
-Getting it marked down.
I’ve got to want a game pretty badly to go full-proce for it anymore. I think the last one I did full-price was AOM. I would’ve done it for Freelancer, but couldn’t find it locally.
When a console is advertised as 128 bit, that means that all of the data in it is being shifted around in 128 bit chunks, doesn’t it?
Determining how many “bits” a console is has never been an exact science. Generally speaking it use to be register width of the CPU. But nowadays with how important the graphics subsystem is to the actual capabilities of each system that’s being blured. Sega promoted the Dreamcast as a 128 bit system based on the video ram’s memory bus. It’s CPU was actually a 64 bit Hitachi design. The PS2 is a true 128 bit system in that the Emotion Engine is a 128 bit CPU. Using Sega’s methodology they could have said it was a 2560 bit system, as that was the width of the embedded DRAM bus on the Graphics Synth chip. The Xbox has a 32 bit CPU capable of 64 bit SIMD operations with a 128 bit unified memory bus and a GPU with a 256 bit “design”, whatever that means.
It’s highly unlikely that prices will go up. I just bought Mega Man Network Transmission for the Gamecube today and it was $39.99. That’s the price on a number of the upcoming 3rd party GC games. Sony is also selling all their first party games at $39.99. It seems more likely that as long as the mass market keeps getting more massive, the prices will eventually come down.
On the whole, with so many games available across so many platforms these days, it doesn’t take long for titles to reach a $20 price point. So buying a lot of stuff at full price doesn’t make a lot of sense. Hence the average price of purchased games will likely fall rather than rise over time. Unless we have a big shakeout in the near future…which isn’t exactly out of the question. There are so many companies and so many games these days, something’s going to give eventually.
–Dave
Check out gamefly.com or gamelender.com. Great services for people who want to play more games but don’t have the money to buy new ones all the time. I use gamelender personally.
I think I’ve posted on this issue before on this forum. Or maybe not.
With the rising costs of development, one of these things has to happen…
A. Game shelf price rises
B. Game developer salaries fall
C. Game content is reduced
D. Game is developed as a budget title
The industry has primarily chosen C, Game content is reduced.
Ever notice that games are becoming shorter and shorter? This isn’t a temporary issue… its Evolutionary you could say. It takes more developer hours than ever before to make a competitive game. In order to reduce the cost of development (in man hours), game length is sacrificed.
D is occurring to a small extent as well. There is an ever widening gap between the shareware or budget title and the AAA title. I can see games like Serious Sam becoming a serious part of the future landscape.
No, I haven’t. What’s your logic?
Oh. What about the Gamecube. What are its stats?
The PowerPC based Gekko CPU is a 32 bit design with a 64 bit FPU co-processor and may possibly be capable of Altivec operations which I think are 128 bit. The GPU situation is really complicates, and I don’t have time to do the math tonight. Anandtech has a pretty good article with lots of info here.
No, I haven’t. What’s your logic?[/quote]
More observation than logic, but besides what I’ve already mentioned the logic is an increasing move toward catering to the mainstream (who don’t spend much time playing games) by making games shorter and thus finishable. Spector stated that Deus Ex 2 was being made shorter (than Deus Ex) in order to allow more players to finish it.
The observation is classicly noted by Max Payne, whose design (short but sweet) is influential. Sprawling games like Baldur’s Gate 2 and Morrowind still exist (for now), but ALL RPGs used to be sprawling. I’d like to do a sampling of data to prove my point, but I don’t have that kind of access. Perhaps Desslock can help us out.
In the old days unless you were a super-geek it didn’t really matter if games were replayable… plenty of gameplay occurred the first time around. Now replayability is a must, precisely due to the decreased gameplay for a single trip through the game.
No. That means it’s being marketed as 128-bit. That’s about all.
There’s really nothing “128 bit” about the current consoles. Perhaps the odd memory bus here or there, but that’s an aggrigate bus width: the chunks being shifted around are still usually 32-bit or 16-bit (depending on data type) and the CPUs are all operating on 32-bit word sizes and stuff. Even some of the specialized “64bit” CPUs, or “128bit” CPUs in moderns consoles don’t actually execute 128bit code. The PS2, for instance, considers the Emotion Engine a 128bit CPU. Well, it’s got a bunch of components like these two vector processors that are “128 bit” and are connected through 128-bit data paths. The actual MIPS III CPU core has 64-bit ALU registers. The whole thing is totally incapable of executing 128bit operations, or even 64bit operations. It can do 8 32bit operations a cycle, or 16 16bit operations per cycle, that kind of thing. That’s not really the same as being 128bit.
In the sense that an Itanium or Opteron is a 64-bit CPU, there are no 64-bit CPUs in any home console, that I’m aware of. Much less 128-bit.
Not that you would benefit from that. For what modern games do, there’s no need for more than 32-bits. Even if you had a true 64-bit CPU capable of executing 64-bit instructions and 64-bit memory addressing and all that jazz, you would limit yourself to 32-bit stuff just to save memory bandwidth.
Long story short: it’s all marketing bullshit.
Actually, I only see games becoming progressively shorter when taking the short view of it. It wasn’t so long ago that forty-five minutes was pretty standard for a lot of games, and two hours was kind of long. Now, I can only think of one game in recent memory that only took forty-five minutes to finish.
Or here’s something that just occurred to me: maybe it has more to do with the fact that console and PC gamers are become less and less distinct. There is so much more crossover now than there was in say the late 80’s/early 90’s; perhaps the games are converging as well, finding a middle ground between the traditionally shorter console games and the traditionally longer PC games.
While cost of development is certainly part of what’s going on with the trend towards shorter games, it’s not the whole story. The other side is that gaming market is aging. When we were all 15-year olds with free summers, a game that could be played for 100s of hours was exactly what we wanted. Nowadays, there’s a lot of former 15-year-old gamers who are working professionals with families. For this demographic “100s of hours of gameplay” is a negative bullet point, whereas a review that says “it’s on the short side” may be seen as a positive factor, as long as the quality of that short time is high.
I think people tend to remember older games being longer than they really were. It’s easy to select random examples and tout them as proof that recent games are short, but there were plenty of short games in the 80s and early 90s, too. How long did it take the average person to finish Prince of Persia? A couple of hours? I finished Wishbringer in less than two. I can’t think of any older adventure games that were as long as the Longest Journey, which was relatively recent. Most early action games (particularly platform games) were extremely short, content-wise, and padded their play time by providing no saves (so it might take you a while to finish, but that time was spent playing the same bits over and over again).
I think strategy is the one genre that has moved towards shorter games, at least in terms of solo play. That’s mostly because of the move away from open-ended gameplay (unlimited replayability, Civ-style) and towards scenario-based games. That’s one trend I’d like to see reversed, I have to admit.
I distinctly miss all the cool options in Warcraft 2 and Starcraft that were stunningly absent from Warcraft 3. Beautiful engine and unit design, but totally targeted at hardcore multiplayer IMO.
As for game prices: they used to be $39.95 to $49.95 back in 1980. It seems inevitable that the cost of a creative process that’s taking longer and longer will rise. And since the audience for most games is <10,000 people worldwide, it seems like broadening the audience is not an option either. The solution seems to the blockbuster shotgun: make a bunch of big-budgeted blowouts and pray to the gods that one or more of them succeeds.
I’m amazed games aren’t $100+ now. Human psychology is such a fascinating thing.
Check out gamefly.com or gamelender.com. Great services for people who want to play more games but don’t have the money to buy new ones all the time. I use gamelender personally.[/quote]
Thanks for the tip. I’ll check 'em out.