Ben-DutkaAccording to one publisher, the industry needs to address falling software sales by changing the price of that software.
As Namco Bandai Partners vice president and head of sales and marketing Olivier Comte told MCV , publishers are "racing to find secondary business models to support retail sales." Some options include selling games at lower prices, delivering them digitally via episodes, and even trying to entice format holders to lower the cost to produce console and handheld tites. Comte wants all the big game companies to sort of pool their thoughts and opinions and discuss the future; he also compares games to music, an industry that makes money by sales of CDs (admittedly decreasing) and concert tickets. Film is in a similar situation. But gaming is a massive industry as well and as he points out, there's really only "one model," and it seems we require a "secondary model." Said Comte:
"I am convinced that in the future we must change the price of video games – they’re too expensive for the audience. With the cost of development and the retail margins, £40 is a fair price [to us], but for the consumer it is too much. From September to December there are three new blockbusters every week, and consumers just can’t afford to buy all that.
A good price of a game should be around £20 – but for this price we can’t make a ten to 15-hour adventure. So for £20 we should offer consumers four to five hours of gameplay, then after that we can make additional money with DLC."
It's sort of a double-edge sword, though, isn't it? If we want the huge blockbuster productions that push the hardware and provide the gamer with cutting-edge experiences, the cost to the developer will be high. Hence, the cost to us will have to remain the same. If we want to pay less, we'll probably get less. And we should remind everyone once again that 25 years ago, cartridges that boasted 1/1757th of the technology we have now cost the same as games do currently. Take inflation into account alongside that unbelievable technology increase, and we should all be down on our hands and knees thanking the powers that be that games don't cost at least $100.
Granted, game prices fell with the PlayStation generation; new games cost $40, then they went up by $10 increments over the next two generations. But even short games take at least 6-8 hours to complete and most take much longer…if you do the math, compare the prices of DVD/Blu-Ray movies, CDs, etc. to games, and how many entertainment hours we get, $60 isn't a bad deal. That being said, Comte is indeed right: most people can't afford to pay $60 just about every week.
FWIW the $70 version probably included the $10 map pack (GOTY edition). Nonetheless, the prices for COD4 and WAW are still absurd.
depends on what market your talking about.
in the US games cost 60 bucks, i think that is more than fair especially for some of the games were getting now 60 is a steal!
but here in AU were getting fu*king ripped off!!!
since when is 60 USD 120 AUD???????????????????????
have a look in the new AU gameinformer mag they did a comparison table and no country in the world besides SA pays more for games than us.
why are we paying 120 bucks for games these days thats fu*king pathetic!!!
180 more bucks and i can buy myself a new 360!!!!!
game guides are a fu*king rip off too!
i bought the alan wake guide today, and while its a great guide, heaps of good stuff its no where near worth 50 bucks!
Don't buy game guides and figure the game out on your own. Money saved.
i dont buy game guides to help me get through the game that would be stupid since theres heaps of sites that do that for free.
i buy game guides on some games im really interested in because it gives you a indepth look into the storyline and other things.
like assassins creed 2 guide, it explained what all the symbols above desmonds bed at the end of AC2 meant, without the guide you would of not known all of them just a few main ones.
I'd be interested to know where the extreme mark-up on game prices in Australia comes from. Due to the weak pound at the moment, I can buy games online for about half of the price that I'd be paying retail over here.
As it stands at the moment, games cost upwards AU$120 which is about US$100. I'm pretty sure that no one in the states would be happy to pay that.
its because of the way imports are set up, all our games well everything that comes into this country goes straight to Melbourne.
thats our only docking station, so they have to send the games from Melbourne to all the other states, where most countries have several docks so that means much less shipping requirements.
someone needs to get paid to distribute the games from the one dock to all of the countries game stores.
that said, prices are still way too high.
funny thing is if you buy games from HBHIFI all the new releases they have for under 90 bucks, thats why if theres a game i want to keep ill buy it from them, they are always at least 20 bucks if not more cheaper than EB or game.
I personally like to compare video games to other types of hobbies, such as reading a book. I can go buy the new bestseller book for $10-$30 the day it comes out and spend at least 8-10 hours reading it. I can do the same with a PS3 game, yet it cost twice as much for the same amount of my time. I feel there is a simple solution here…an example would be the new Red Dead Redemption (30 hour game) that costs $60. That is a justified price based upon the length of game play. So from there you plug in the formula. 60 game / 30 hour gameplay = $2 per hour of gameplay. Therefore is you produce a title that only offers 10 hours of gameplay you would be obligated to sell that title for a excellent price of $20. So if there was a regulated per hour rate for which they could charge you then things would start to be more fair to the consumer. It obviously can't cost as much to produce a 10 hour game as it would a 30 hour game, yet they feel that all games are equal from a money standpoint, which is all a load of crap. Whatever happened to the whole you get what you pay for? The video game industry has throw that business model right out the window. Anyways we can take them down collectively. If everyone in the world rents instead of buying games, we could single handedly bring the industry to their knees!!!
Last edited by DeejayDeez on 5/21/2010 11:21:53 AM
That's messed up logic. The typical movie blockbuster costs $100M to $200M to make. Avatar had a budget of approx $237M. So with this kind of logic, the Avatar blu-ray movie should cost like $500 then right?
There's no reason why cheaper games would have to result in less quality, shorter or lower budget games, since if they were cheaper they could (and probably would) sell a lot more copies instead. Especially when there like now are a lot of new AAA games out there, people aren't magically going to spend $500 at once on all the new cool games out there.
Considering that the physical costs of a game is minimal (which is why WalMart can sell an old DVD for $5 and still make a profit) by lowering new game prices to $30 they would basically turn the same profit by selling twice as many copies, which doesn't sound very unlikely. Not to mention that lower prices on games would probably be one of the best ways to drastically reduce the reason for people to buy games used
How many millions of copies of RDR sold on the release date? On top of which, your paying for an interactive experience which lasts much longer. Movies are almost $10 a ticket and they're only 2-3hrs. Compare that to Heavy Rain… I think it's worth the extra cash.
Just because movie tickets are ridiculously over-priced doesn't mean games should be as well.
Seriously, who goes to the movies anymore?