The Point I've been making all along ($60 games)

http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/why-end-60-video-game-near-181412574.html

Anyone who's been around here long enough knows that I've been one of the harshest critics of companies selling games... especially PC games... for $60.

It started with Modern Warfare 2 and I told everybody (who would listen that is...) that they were just doing that to see if they could get away with jacking up the prices of ALL new games to 60 bucks... and that, once they did that, they'd start looking at getting the prices even higher.

Well look at where we are today.

Fortunately, with the state of the economy, this is non-sustainable.

And hopefully, some time very soon, prices will be forced back to earth.

Rainless, you are OCF's own modern Nostradamus.

All joking aside, I agree now (as I'm sure I did back then if I had read your post) that $60 a game is just too much for the majority of titles.

I'm still on the fence about whether or not I want to drop $60 on D3. Sure, I've had a lot of fun in the beta and I really want to see where it would take me but do I really want to spend that much on a game?

yahoo said:

Psychologically, $60 just sounds expensive. This isn't anecdotal, this is common sense.

Click to expand...

I know that I spend more than that on more frivolous things and that a game would offer many, many hours of enjoyment but it's the "sticker shock" that keeps me leery.

Ironically, raising the prices has saved me money. It made it far easier for me to wait for games to get cheaper on steam sales and the such.

$60 is decent.. not everybody has $60 to spare, but people have to get up and go to work every day for months to make a game and they should get paid for it.

Never-ending cycle. Companies blame prices on piracy, pirates (at least some) pirate because of the ridiculous prices. For me, same as for Supertrucker above, increased prices saved me $$ because I had to be much more scrupulous with my video game purchases. I used to buy 5-10 games a year, now, I'm lucky to break half of that.

I agree that people have to get paid for their work, however, that doesn't justify the increase in the price. Especially when you consider the fact that many, if not most, games are available and sold as digital copies that do not take up storage space nor do they require physical media. The manuals can barely qualify as flyers. And lastly, marketing for a lot of $60 "premium" titles are non-existent. Publishers are cutting corners, games are released as "glorified betas" riddled with bugs, and the consumer consistently gets less for more, yet the prices are going higher? Yeah, no thanks. It's greed, pure and simple...


P.S. Don't even get me started on DLC...

I guess the one thing that you can say is that of all things, games are one of the few entertainment commodities that haven't been affected by inflation (look at movie ticket prices, etc). New games for the past couple of decades have been around $50+ dollars [mostly console games] and now $60 which if they were following inflation should be in the $90+ range.

It is also important to note that the cost of creating a AAA game has skyrocketed, and due to that publishers (and thus developers) have to play it safe far more than they used to, leaving us with minor 'upgrades', copies, or sequels to games.

Thankfully there are a lot more resources one can use to research games before they buy. (YouTube, Metacritic, forums, various review sites.)

I think 60$ is a safe investment on any blizzard title. I have _THREE_ 60$ starcraft 2 accounts, and have paid 100$ total for training. This makes 280$ I've spent on one game.

My rule of thumb is if I can get 1$ per hour of gaming, I'm doing quite well. Blizzard titles usually skyrocket to the thousands of hours, so 60 hours is a given, and for most people, 600 is also.

This is a good rule to follow when it comes to buying games, if you can expect to meet or beat this figure, you'll get great deals going forward. And remember kids, these prices don't last long unless they're AAAA titles, even the triple A titles only stay at that price for a month or two before absolutely plummeting.

Janus67 said:

It is also important to note that the cost of creating a AAA game has skyrocketed, and due to that publishers (and thus developers) have to play it safe far more than they used to, leaving us with minor 'upgrades', copies, or sequels to games.

Click to expand...

That may very well be true, however, majority of the games with a $60 price tag are a far cry from a "AAA-game" title. Yet everyone seems to think that their half-finished game warrants a $60. And again, development costs may have very well have gone up over the years, however, publishing overhead has gone down due to the prevalence of digitally-delivered content. On top of that, when you create a single title and port it to multiple systems results in a delivery of an "average" product at a premium price...

But, I am only a social science major with little to no business/economics background...I could very well be wrong, just saying it as I see it.

The one main important thing is that people vote with the dollar. As with most things you have a supply and demand (now this isn't a perfect analogy as supply is effectively infinite given a digital distribution system), if the demand is low at $60 the companies/publishers/etc will be forced to drop the price of the product until it is at a low enough price that x-number people will pay the amount for the company to both make a profit and reach x-number of sales.

For this reason we are lucky to have distribution systems like Steam which have pretty consistent sales (be it 5-10-25-50% off). Generally if there is a high-profile game that I am looking forward to but I have too much on my plate at once I wait for the Steam (or similar) sale.

I agree. Nothing is going to change as long as enough people are willing to drop $60 on a game. Until that happens companies have no reason to drop the price, all the while pointing the blame finger at someone else, such as the used game market....which I believe is a weak argument.

I really only buy release day games when I feel it is time sensitive, that is... if I want to play a game with a friend or waiting would cause suffering. Borderlands 2, Colonial Marines, and Heart of the Swearm are on my list this year.

I'm probably only going to play Diablo 3 drunk, but knowing full well the price won't decline for quite some time to come and knowing the product quality and support will definitely be there due to months of game time (combined) in blizzard games, I feel safe just buying it on release day also.

I am not the type to get all up in arms about things, but I won't buy a game unless it meets the rule I described above. I think that's a good way to judge if the game is worth 60 or not. If it's not, wait for a price dip.

The used game market is a huge drain on publisher income, this is one of the main causes of EA and other publishers adding an 'online pass' to their games in order to help recover some of the lost revenue from used game sales. The used game income is never seen by them, so the only people that see that money is the retailer [gamestop/et all] or the person if they sold the game themselves [craigslist/etc].

Now with that said, do I agree with all of the extra charges/etc, not really. I don't really buy any used games either, though.

At least $60 is less than the $70-75 I paid for SNES games years ago...

When you consider inflation, games have actually come down in price, but I still hate shelling out 60 clams

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/...ruth-game-prices-have-come-down-with-time.ars

The used game market is in-part driven by high retail prices and less than stellar products. A lot of people do not want to spend $50-60 on a game that they can play and finish in 6-8 hours, so they turn to renting/buying used. Virtually every industry has a "used" goods market (look at ebay/craigslist/OC classifieds), yet most if not all of those industries aren't crying about how people buying their products used/second-hand is killing their revenue. What's really hurting the game companies is the quality of their product (often driven by publishers pushing for early deadlines) and not the second-hand market. If you make a great product/game people will want to buy it.

Instead of crying about it, maybe game companies should institute a buy-back program for their games and then re-sell them as used at a discount. Just a thought.

I think that some titles are no were near worth the $60, but games I really want to play I will buy at release. Most of the time I wait for games to go down in price. The last two games I have bought for full price are Borderlands( I also bought all of the DLCs at full price) and battlefield 3.

I had no problem paying $60 for either of those games. I just bought the game of the year addition of Borderlands for xbox 360, to play through it again with some friends before the new one comes out. Well worth the $30 dollars to me.

I normally wait for a game to hit <= $30 before I buy it. I also stay away from used, unless it is an older game. It is supply and demand. If people are willing to pay $60 for a bad game then companies are going to charge it. Vote with your dollars. That does not mean that you don't buy a game eventually, just wait until it hits a price point you feel it is worth.

I don't care how you argue it, $60 for a game--ANY game--is ridiculous. How I spend my money is important to me and I spend an inordinate amount of time considering returns on investments. The more money you have or the more ignorant you are about the value of a dollar results in people not caring how they spend their money and a lack of consideration for the value of a dollar.

When Xbox games began retailing for $60, I knew PC games would follow. It took a little time, but it happened. Stupid move. Pirating is running rampant and for good reason. While some may simply want a free game (it has always been this way and always will), others want to try it out before they clunk down a large sum of cash.

The key is understanding what disposable income is. There is a heck of a lot you can spend this money on. After all the bills are paid, $60 (PLUS tax) suddenly becomes a sizable chunk. To rationalize $60 as 'adequate' while the price of everything else is going up is simply absurd.

That being said, I will NOT buy D3. I considered it when the Egg had it for $50, but I decided it was not worth the return for my investment. For $40, I'll buy it. Until then, I will find another game to play cheaper.

Down in the land of Australia $60 would be cheap.
Most games are released at ~$90, of course there's options to cheapen this up for yourself but this seems the median for games here.

That said - I really only buy the BIG titles - and I usually shell out $110+ for the collectors editions.

World of Warcraft I have every available collectors edition (And pre-ordered panderan)
D3 I'm getting collectors
Assassins Creed I have mostly collectors
FF13 I have collectors

But they're also the only games I play so I can easily make the $1 / hour argument for most games I purchase.

That said - games are still insanely high. I get they blame the pirates and the pirates blame the prices but in reality - as it's been mentioned - it's what people will pay for the game that sets the price. The companies are obviously happy with their sales @ $60 and they will continue to be until they decide profit margins need to rise.

Honestly $60 isn't too big a deal to me, if I recall right games were around $50 about the time the Playstation came out and stayed about that for a while. It's the constant $15 "Add-ons" and Expansion Packs that **** me off. Those things used to free but now they charge $15 for a couple maps and a rework of the same items with different colors or something similar. I think Black Ops did it the worst when they gave the server's and the admins the upgrade free forcing other players to buy it or not play most servers.