Have ordered from play-asia.com, shopped smarter and have purchased games from used game places.
That said, I’ve purchased more games for the 360 than an other system before.
I assumed he would prefer being called a liar to being called an idiot.
He bought ONE game and it was DOA4? That’s an idiot.
He doesn’t buy games because they are $60… but he ignores every game that isn’t $60? He’s gotta be an idiot.
He doesn’t buy games because they are too expensive, but never checks out used games?..idiot.
or, smart person who is lying. whichever he would rather be.
I’m not ready to call anyone a liar. But going from more than 1 game per month to 1 game in a year cannot be attributed to just a $10 price increase. There has to be other factors involved. As another person posted you can almost always find the games for $50 or less somewhere if you really want to.
I don’t think the higher price point has made me buy less 360 games. But I do look much harder for bargains than I used too. I bought 6 for the price of 4 during the TRU sale a while back for example.
I gotta vaguely side with rj on this one, although he’s oddly hostile. It’s $10, man. So instead of six games you buy five. Big fucking deal. Like quatoria, the $60 price point has pretty much eradicated my impulse buying, but it certainly hasn’t put the e-brake on my game purchasing when it comes to what I know I want.
It’s simple economics. You raise the cost of goods, consumption goes down. If games go from having an MSRP of $49.99 to $59.99, you should see consumption drop if there are no other mitigating factors.
Even if you “shop smart”, that higher MSRP is probably going to result in higher discount prices than you paid in the past.
still, from 15 games a year to 1 doesn’t jibe with a $10 difference.
if he’s telling the truth and $60 looks like $100 then I apologize, he’s not lying or an idiot, he’s obviously suffering form a mental disability that causes some sort of odd price dyslexia.
The more important issue(briefly touched on above) is that clearly all the “$60!!! HOW CAN I FEED MY CHILDREN NOW!” crowd must be all too young to remember the many, many SNES games that cost $60 over a decade ago.
I’m siding with rjcc here too. This is obviously a pet issue of Fury.
Look, rjcc, you’re the one being less than intelligent.
It’s not a matter of total dollar expenditures, because humans do not make decisions rationally, especially when it comes to entertainment products. The issue is how appealing is the idea of buying an X360 game, in general? That determines how much attention you pay to what’s coming out, how often you think about which games you might like to buy, etc. Which in turn can lead to buying a lot of those games, or buying few.
If the jump from $50 to $60 is enough to bump the general concept of “Xbox 360 game” from the Appealing category to the Unappealing category, then you can expect large purchase declines for lots of people, not just Fury. If the basic idea of Xbox 360 games is not appealing, I am not going to spend enough effort bargain-hunting to discover I can actually get Gears of War for $44, or whatever. Because I didn’t even put myself into that market.
Furthermore: people don’t buy a game in order to mechanically function as the player of a game. They buy a game for the experiences and feelings that they get with it. If part of those feelings is “I feel kinda uncomfortable having paid $60 for this”, then the value of the game goes down, because the overall bundle of feelings is not that good.
Let me reiterate that, because it’s a subtle point: when you raise the price of a game from $50 to $60, you are not only increasing the price, but you are also decreasing the game’s value, for a great many people. In order for the game to remain a good value proposition, the game at the $50 price point would have had to have been worth some arbitrary number higher than $60 – like $70 or, hey, I don’t know.
So please stop saying “idiot”. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yeah, that’s also a good point. I remember lining up on release day to buy Phantasy Star IV for $99.99. I’ll start panicking when game prices get back up to what they were in the 16-bit era.
What if you consider it $10 more for the added HD fidelity and near-universal integration of online functionality that is the usual standard in next-gen titles? I understand your point there, I just think it’s ridiculous to see it that way.
Shop S-Mart?
Furthermore: people don’t buy a game in order to mechanically function as the player of a game. They buy a game for the experiences and feelings that they get with it. If part of those feelings is “I feel kinda uncomfortable having paid $60 for this”, then the value of the game goes down, because the overall bundle of feelings is not that good.
Er, not to correct you, but this makes you absolutely crazy. Seriously, if that’s the problem Fury, seek professional help because this is likely a symptom of something more serious.
I probably make less impulse buys than before as well. I still buy quite a few games though. I also look for deals more often. I grabbed Viva Pinata for $25 the other day. I also signed up with Gamefly to try some of the I want to try but not buy games where I might have just bought some of them before. I tend to agree with rjcc’s point that a price increase of $10 couldn’t be the sole reason for a decrease from 15 games to 1. It doesn’t really make sense.
oh no, it means exactly what I think it means. If someone owns an xbox 360 and only bought ONE game, which was DOA4, becuase “games are too expensive”, they’re a fucking moron. You can look that up in the dictionary, or at least wikipedia after I finish vandalizing the page for “idiot”.
He could’ve bought an original xbox and two copies of DOA Ultimate.
But I’m saying it’s not a rational consideration. It’s just a “how good do I feel playing this?” kind of reaction. If HD fidelity and near-universal online snappiness are things that make a game way more powerful than last-gen games in the mind of a particular player, sure, he’ll spend the extra $10 easily.
But if HD is a matter of looks really awesome for the first few months, then we are used to it and feel roughly the same about these games as we did the last-gen games, then the price that players desire to pay is not going to rise by much. It doesn’t matter if the HD game costs more.
Now, I do think HD makes a certain percentage of hardcore gamers have a fundamentally better experience this gen than last gen. But I have bountiful skepticism about whether that percentage is enough to support a $10 price increase.
Guys, this is really confusing. You are telling me that humans are rational decision makers and that I’m crazy and/or ridiculous to say that people make decisions for emotional reasons? That’s great, but you’re contradicted by like all of modern economics and psychology.
Every modern marketer knows what I am talking about. It’s not some big secret.
That’s pretty much what he said it was, from what I read. I figure people are allowed to have pet issues… I know I have my own. That doesn’t make him a liar or an idiot. Other people don’t have to get that or agree with it; he was just putting it out there.
Every modern marketer knows what I am talking about. It’s not some big secret.
And I’m saying anyone who honestly factors a $10 price difference into THEIR ENJOYMENT WHILE PLAYING A VIDEO GAME is fucking insane and probably stupid. I didn’t deny the existance of stupid crazy people.
But if HD is a matter of looks really awesome for the first few months, then we are used to it and feel roughly the same about these games as we did the last-gen games,
Ah, I see. You’re a Nintendo fanboy, right?
The fact that he bought DOA4 of all games seems to invalidate every other thing he says. That does make him a liar, or an idiot. If you’re gonna buy one game, why wouldn’t it be one of the several games that are available for less than $60 (no Table Tennis?). no, it should be a game thats a sequel, nearly identical to its predecessor except for HD graphics, and that costs $60, oops, i meant $100.
that doesn’t make sense no matter what.
a) As I keep saying, it is not a conscious process.
b) If the $10 difference between $50 and $60, according to your theorem, does not affect enjoyment one iota, then another $10 on top of the $60 couldn’t affect it either. Nor could another $10. Nor could another. By induction you can easily get the price of a game to $200. Now, I think most people would agree that the difference between $50 and $200 matters, at least in terms of your emotional expectations for a game (though I am arguing that other emotional processes happen as well, we’re going to disregard those for now). So if $150 matters, then it’s reasonable to think that $10 could matter 1/15 as much, and in fact it’s reasonable to admit the possibility that it could matter much more than 1/15th as much (though such ideas would have to be substantiated). Which by itself proves your theorem wrong.
c) Why do you think everyone prices things for e.g. $9.95 and not $10.00? Because it’s the potential buyer’s perception of the price that matters, not so much the magnitude of the actual price.
Ah, I see. You’re a Nintendo fanboy, right?
Well, that combined with all your “fucking insane and probably stupid” are my cue to leave this argument. Bye.
He might have bought it because …hmm…he might like the game? I know it must be odd to have that kind of behavior but i’ve seen other people do it too. Oops, sorry…by people i meant other liars & idiots of course!