Namco Bandai: Selling Games At Full Price Is No Good

Well this would probably be the end of me buying anything but ps3 exclusives if everyone went this route. If all companies decided to do this, it would just end up with some companies (activision) selling partial games for $60 and then selling the rest of the game for even more money.

Some companies if they go this route might only charge $20 up front, but if ppl are actually buying games this way, then some companies will just expect that it's ok to sell part of a game at full price and then expect you to pay more even tho you already paid full price.

Some companies are kinda doing this already. It's one thing to make your game and then work on some dlc, but how many times have we seen a game released for $60 and the day it releases there are multiple dlc packs ranging from $5-$15. Technically they are already doing this to us, and some ppl are buying into it.

I'm sorry but if you buy a $60 game and you get home and buy 2 map packs for it, for $15 a piece, you just got robbed because you just paid $90 on release date for a game, a game that most likely isn't that great or long anyway.

Truth is, gaming companies will attempt to gouge us for all we're worth because some ppl out there will pay it.

Okay, breaking my sabbatical as a result of this article. I agree with what many of you have said, in that a poorly made game will not sell, and will quickly drop in price. But look on the other hand, games that sell extremely well also tend to drop in price quickly. It is the midpoint games that sit at a high price point. Case in point: FFXIII sold a ton, sitting at $55 when I saw it on the weekend. Naughty Bear, piss-poor game, I doubt the sales were high at all, already down to $70. White Knight Chronicles, supposed to be a fairly good game, but certainly didn't set the sales charts on fire, $99. (All prices AUD)

It's not only bad games that drop price quickly… they just tend to be the fastest.

As far as this fool is concerned, the idea could work, provided that each episode can be played as a full experience, ala Ratchet and Clank Future: Quest for Booty. Were they to offer perhaps four hours of gameplay for fifteen dollars (better value against most games nowadays), and make that a full game, but with the promise of extending it, then I see no reason why they should not try that. If, however, they create these four hour titles and it is clear to the player that they are just pieces of a larger puzzle, rather than a completely self-contained story, then they can go to hell.

Peace.

I've got an idea, since this multiplayer stuff is killing games, hows about selling me the full single player campaign for $30, then I wish you luck trying to sell me the multiplayer for $30 🙂

giving the games away for 30 bucks or so than charging a monthly fee for whoever wants to play it after the first month would be a great idea!
that way i only pay 30 or so bucks instead of the 110 or 120 AUD im constantly having to play for every game.
i mean if i play a game up to a month, why should i pay the same amount as a person who plays said game for 3 months?

pay per play is a brilliant idea!
only in this industry would someone be charged the same amount as someone who uses it 100 times more!
this is the biggest injustice since insurance prices!

i was so pissed off today im thinking of getting a alfa 147 GTA so i rang up to get a insurance quote not happy with the price, well in fact i almost fainted it was so high!
my cuz rang up who has her reds apposed to me being on my fulls, and since shes a girl she gets 400 bucks cheaper insurance than me!
WTF?
she has 1 tenth the driving experience than me, shes been driving for just over 2 years, she has had 3 accidents in the time i have had 0 and she gets cheaper insurance than me.
where is the point in that!?

@Worlds – agreed 100%. If I *buy* a game I should be able to play it from now until the end of time. If I rent or subscribe to a game, then I know and accept going into it that I only have the game for the duration of the rental or subscription. Buying is different, regardless of whether it's a digital download or a physical disc.

Something off topic but Namco-related, does the PS3 Tales of Vesperia comes with english text?

If it does I'll import it.

What i don't understand is how these dolts can't see Sony fans support JRPG's and Xbox fans don't. That is why have lost a lot of money. Trying to sell anime RPG's to people who like Gears. No wonder no one is buying their games.

Still pisses me off that Tales of Vesperia is a Xbox exclusive here in the states. Why can't they freakin port it to PS3? It's already localized is it not?

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic 🙂 Make good games and they'll sell well. Make mediocre/bad games and you can come up with any sales strategy you want, but they won't sell.

Game prices are just fine. The price goes down quickly enough. I mean look at Assassins Creed 2, Bioshock 2, god of War 3 they all cost a fraction of the original price now. Nintendo however NEVER marks down their own games: the original Mario Galaxy, a three year old game is still full price a's I Zelda which was a LAUNCH title. What needs to happen is that all DLC should be free. That's where the ripoff is.

"It isn't that complicated, if they want to post bigger losses and cut more staff they should go ahead and do this."

Do you even understand the laws of consumerism? Anyhow low prices would mean "MORE" individuals would buying a product, the more individuals buying mean said entity will recoup and profit faster from their investment, the winner being both the consumer and company selling the product.

Looking at the current(and past)pricing system, gamers technically are being nickled and dimed with $50-60 games and what gamers don't understand is fact the prices don't even reflect the true developing development. Not only that, but the low turnaround the industy is experince as demonstrated by the monthly NPD have all but suggested that gamers are through with paying $60 for a game.

"Once again this goes back to what lots of people have been arguing. Used game sales and piracy are hurting developers and publishers. So now they are fighting back the only way they can."

As an individual who actually purchase used games most of the game, the more low prices on new the better for me a consumer. Why? People don't understand that used gamed and piracy are merely an market option of offering a product at a low/competitive price and its for this reason why I think both piracy and used game are healthy for game industy.

Overall I agree with Namco that selling games under the current pricing is doing no good for either gamers or publishers.

Another note, Piracy is NOT healthy for any industry. Not only does it hurt sales It's theft.

"Game prices are just fine. The price goes down quickly enough."

No they are not because in the end $60 has a negative effect and the current trend of underselling titles show. In fact when gamers complain about a game not selling, its not selling due lack of marketing, but rather the price itself scaring consumers away.

"During the old SNES, Sega Genesis 16-bit days of cart based games, the price for those games was selling for $59.99 and here some 20 plus years later, the games are now selling for voila $59.99 !"

Bad argument, but back then those prices actually reflected the true nature of game as solid-state storage(which is used in NES, Genesis, and SNES used) was quite expensive. Fast forward to the 21st century and games are being put onto media that cost nothing but in the area $0.01 to manufacture, and gamers still paying outrageous prices.

overall like most people in this discussion, its quite clear you don't understand simple economics in relation to consumerism.

It's also clear you're clueless about the industry, all the while attempting to lecture everyone (as usual).

There is no "current trend" of underselling titles; the underselling titles turned out to be underwhelming, and thus, didn't sell as well as expected. There is no price barrier when popular games break 5, 6, 7, 8+ million shipped and sold, as did the very recent Assassin's Creed II and Modern Warfare 2.

Multiple studies have been done asking about price points before, and the answer is always the same: essentially, if the game is good enough, it warrants the purchase. That has never changed, regardless of era.

Furthermore, if you knew anything at all about marketing and "consumerism," you might actually recognize the ridiculous difference in marketing capital required to advertise current video games. In the NES/SNES eras, they spent about 1/10000th as much, simply because they couldn't really afford to; now, they have giant marketing campaigns, games that cost 100 times more to create than ever before, and yet, including inflation, they still cost what those old cartridges did.

Slice it any way you wish, "genius of economics and consumerism." Based on the product in question, absolutely nobody is overpaying for anything. Rockstar has to sell 5 million copies of RDR just to break even, chief. It's getting increasingly difficult to make money on crappy games, and even on games that are excellent, due entirely to the amount of MONEY involved to make and manufacture them.

Last edited by Ben Dutka PSXE on 7/19/2010 11:02:53 AM

"There are plenty of people who are willing to pay $60. sounds to me like your a little cheap."

If this is the case, then explain to me why market research show gamers are turning more and more towards the second-hand game market:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18163

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28350/Study_Used_Games_Online_Makes_Up_46_Percent_Of_US_Gamers_Budget.php

"There is no "current trend" of underselling titles; the underselling titles turned out to be underwhelming, and thus, didn't sell as well as expected. There is no price barrier when popular games break 5, 6, 7, 8+ million shipped and sold, as did the very recent Assassin's Creed II and Modern Warfare 2."

2 examples? Anyhow 8-10 years ago game like Uncharted 2 or Killzone 2(given their acclaim) would've sold in the area of 5-8 million, but what do we see? games that have only managed to sell in the area of 2 million to date….a negative loss.

Lets not stop there, but even big name titles such as Final Fantasy, Forza, Gran Turismo just name a few are underselling and I even like how Micrsoft's Aaron Greenberg making mention of how a title like Halo 3 have outsold Ucharted 2, Killzone and the Resistance games combined, again proof that games are underselling.

In the end the whole idea of games underselling isn't new, but something that have been progressively going to for 10 years now and the numbers are there to prove it.

"Rockstar has to sell 5 million copies of RDR just to break even, chief. It's getting increasingly difficult to make money on crappy games, and even on games that are excellent, due entirely to the amount of MONEY involved to make and manufacture them."

Thank you for vindicating 2 points I've trying to through for the longest, 1)most games these days are unprofitable and 2) the reason why games are selling badly is due to the high price tag of game.

"Multiple studies have been done asking about price points before, and the answer is always the same: essentially, if the game is good enough, it warrants the purchase. That has never changed, regardless of era."

If a game warrant the purchase if its good, then why are many "good titles" progressively underselling?

"Another note, Piracy is NOT healthy for any industry. Not only does it hurt sales It's theft."

As with a functional second-hand market, every consumer industry product need piracy to thrive. Why? As with second-hand products, piracy actually play a role in forcing manufacturers to lower their entry level prices.

Look at this, but when a manfacturer complains about priacy hurting thier business, its not the "theft" that gets them going, but rather the fact that piracy actually is forcing them to compete because the product is being brought to market(by pirates) at lower cost to consumers.

Now I'm not advocating piracy, but rather demonstratng where you are wrong about piracy.

As for the effect piracy, technically it doesn't have any market effect as Sony and Microsoft have gone to acknowledge the fact that piracy have helped them in pushing console hardware.

Nonesense. Highlander beat me to it. Your trying to justify stealing. As he said its immoral and illegal. If anything its forced Sony to spend money and time trying to STOP it when that could have been spent one other features or services.

With your logic, it shouldn't cost $12.50 to see a movie these days. Ever since piracy hit the movie industry hard, prices have GONE UP not down.

Any way you cut it, ITS THEFT!

Last edited by Jawknee on 7/19/2010 1:19:46 PM

Theft has been proven to actually cause prices to rise, not lower, so what econ class did you take? I want to know so I'm sure not to go there, ever.

I think the price of games are acceptable as is. And I really don't like the idea of continued micro-charges, which may sneak it's way into multilayer effectively charging us for online gaming. Which, I know everybody here isn't the biggest fan of, but one of the pros to PS3 is free online access 24-7. I would rather just spend the $60 on a full game and enjoy an in depth experience than a chopped up cheap $20 title

Aren't the Australians paying $100 for a brand new game?

Yeah, well, the thing is that in 2009, the Australian dollar was worth about 60 cents, which makes that $100 (astralian) worth about $60. When the PS3 launched and prices we ser, I'm not sure what the 1 year average exchange rate of Australian Dollar to Yen was, but Sony set the game prices at the start of the generation was normalized based on the base price of $60 USD.

I think that the Australian Dollar was worth about 70 cents at the time, but the rolling average may have been lower. By the time you apply the normal exchange rates that you can get actually changing money, it could well have been closer to 60 cents. So the price was fixed at $100 Australian. They could vary the price depending on the exchange rate, but I have a feeling that wouldn't work really well either. So you're kinda stuck with the price you have. As are those in NZ, the UK, Europe, Japan and the US.

A few other thoughts.

Cost of games.

Since the start of this generation of games the cost of new games has been effectively frozen at $60, and yet inflation continues to occur in all countries around the world, so after 4 years for PS3 gamers, the actual price of games has fallen by close to 20% in real terms since the start of this generation of games. At the same time as that, the costs of development have risen with inflation since the wages of the development and production staff do not stay frozen in time. Even if those costs only rise with inflation, it's still true that the amount of revenue from a game has dropped in real terms compared to the costs.

Games are to some extend a commodity, but not in the same way as a bushel of corn, steel, oil, RAM, or HDDs are a commodity. Much like has happened in Hollywood you get shovel-ware that is cranked out according to a formula. If anything the casual game 'revolution' has marked the advent of commodity games software. the block buster titles that sell millions of units at full $60 prices are more akin to the Hollywood blockbusters. A game that sells 2 million units at $60 s piece is responsible for $120 million in 'box office' takings. That's still a bit modest by Hollywood blockbuster standards, but there are not that many movies that will gross $120 million this year.

There are two ways to look at this IMHO, one way is the RDR way of huge budgets, timescales and teams that drive an absolute requirement to sell 4-5 million copies simply to break even on the development/production process. the other is the Joe Danger way of a small team quick development cycle and super quick return on investment with fewer than 50,000 copies sold on PSN required to repay the investment.

Let's be honest, there really is no excuse for a game costing $100 million to make. 100 people paid $150,000 (gross) a year amounts to $15 million in a year. Even if you run that out to 5 years, that's still only 75 million. Which is an obscene amount of money to spend on a single game's development. But you're not going to run a team of 100 for 5 years, the team will start off small, grow and then shrink as the development progresses. Not only that, but unless you are literally starting with nothing, you have a game engine from a previous game of yours, you have other assets to work with already. Spending $100 million developing a game is just silly.

But most games don't cost $100 million to make. Let's guesstimate that a typical AAA game takes two years and averages out at 100 team members including everyone from admin, to artists, developers, motion capture artists, voice actors, everyone. Over the course of two years very few of the team members will remain with the project for the whole time, so over the two years it will average out to perhaps 100. Let's just guesstimate costs at $150,000 gross per team member (total employment costs and other overheads). That's a $30 million budget. The developer/publisher's take from a retail sale is between 40% and 50%. So they will have to sell a little over 2 million copies to break even. I think that is a more typical picture of a 'big' game. Not all games have or need such big development teams, or require such long development cycles. So it's not beyond possibility that a major game could break even on fewer than 1 million sales.

Looking at the other end Joe Danger, a PSN game that doesn't sell for anything close $60, broke even on day one sales alone. The majority of game development projects lay somewhere between the two year team of 100 and the team of 4 able to break even after 1 day of sales.

As for the commodity games. Games don't have to be a commodity, but it's easy to make shovel ware, and you don't have to sell a huge number of units to feed your team, just keep re-making the same basic, formulaic games, with the same basic graphics, and sound and just a few differences to justify a new version number (yes, Cooking Momma is an example). These games might as well be assembled on a production line.

I don't think anyone can be expected to buy 5 full price $60 games a month. But I think people have become spoiled by the huge multi-million sales numbers. If you go back and look at PS2 game sales, breaking a million really was a rare occurrence. Just looking at the PS3, there are about 38 million consumers out there. How many games do you think will sell to 10% of that audience? How many will sell to 5%? Remember, it's not a homogeneous pool of gamers, it's an audience of many tastes.

A game that sells 2 million copies on PS3 has to hit about 5% of the total PlayStation audience. That sounds like a lot right? God of War and God of War II sold perhaps 1.5 million copies a piece. That's on the PS2 with a potential audience of more than 100 million gamers. Less than 2% of PS2 owners purchased God of War.

Yet we consider a game that sells fewer than a couple of million copies a failure? Really? 2 million out of 38 million is a little over 5%, that's better than double the rate of sales that God of War or God of War II achieved on the PS2, and they were considered a huge success. Not only that they didn't sell for $60 a pop.

Somewhere the numbers are not adding up my friend. Somewhere – and I think it's in the development/publishing arena, the numbers are not making sense. I think that development teams and budgets have swollen because everyone assumed that developing in HD was automatically going to cost twice as much or more. the initial investment in getting to an HD engine and HD assets and experience might have cost double the previous budgets. But now that they're at that level, how do you justify that level of spending any more? If an indie developer can put out a game in HD that breaks even on fewer than 50,000 copies sold at PSN game prices, then someone somewhere needs to take control of their development costs.

Perhaps those over paid producers who drive expensive cars and hire/fire developers like they are a commodity need to be taken to task for not controlling costs? Perhaps, but then that might cut into their next Mercedes purchase….

Perhaps the seeking of perfection is overrated? Are too many game producers trying for perfection, or are they trying to be bigger and better, instead of simply serving their audience? Are game developers and producers guilty of leaving games in the oven too long and fiddling endlessly with the garnish before delivery?

</rant>

I think I was reading it the way you meant it and agreeing with you that the industry simply cannot expect gamers to buy games at that rate.

Sadly i think a lot of people get mixed signals. There are some great games that have just been overlooked. Fortunately, those are few and far between and we probably wont have to worry about too many developers/publishers taking this route.

60 does top my price range after getting used to 50 dollar games but development costs have gone way up it seems. If some genius could come up with some really innovative development tools, maybe nobody would have to think of a million and one ways to make money by messing with the experience of their audience.