Canadamus Prime said:
Lufia Erim said:
Canadamus Prime said:
Lufia Erim said:
Gamers are not idiots, i truly believe that if the company was to make a poor decision, such as raising prices too high or delivering a poor product, gamers would simply protest. WE saw it with the original Xbone announcement. We can and will band together if something is too unfavorable for us. That in and of itself is enough to keep the company providing our entertainement in check.
Look at all the crap the industry currently pulls that gamers not only accept, but actually defend, and tell me again that gamers are not idiots. I beg to differ.
No offence, but you are incredibly naive to think that having only one console would benefit anyone other than the company behind that console.
Kibeth41 said:
No not really. people use different systems for different things. The Switch and 3DS for example, fulfill a different function to the PS4\Xbox One\PC.
And a monopoly is never a good thing.
Lufia Erim said:
HA! Great joke.
My question is hypothetical and it truly may be a horrible idea. Except both of you failed to give me a reason why other than the kneejerk implication that gamers are indeed idiots.
Hey maybe you guys are right and im just a naive optimist who should just give up on the dream of a unified console base. But concrete reasons with conrete examples would be better for discussion value. Or at the very least educational purposes.
As stated in the title, i am fully aware that competition is good, but the main argument seems to be less that monopoly is bad, and more that people have no faith in the companies that supply us our entertainment. Which to me is weird that we openly support companies we have absolutely no faith in. Which in and of itself may point to an underlying problem in the gaming industry.
But thats a topic for another thread.
The fact that gamers are idiots is beside the point.
It's a matter of simple economics without competition to drive the prices down the company could literally charge whatever they wanted and we'd have no choice but to pay it. They could also do whatever else they wanted because there would be no alternative for us consumers to get that product. Even if gamers weren't morons, no amount of whining in the world would do any good because the company would have no obligation to listen to us. Not that companies do now because, as stated, gamers are morons.
That's a fair point. However, i would argue that the benefit for a luxury item such as videogames and specifically videogame consoles, which this thread is about, to increase their prices would be slim.
Firstly, as it stands at the moment, most gamers wait for price drops for games as well as consoles. If prices were to raise, it would give gamers an added incentive to just wait for price drops. We see it already if games dont sell a large amount of copies in the first few weeks of telease it is regarded as a failure. If games are too expensive then more people will just decide to wait for price drops, publishers and devs will be displeased.
This goes double for consoles. Remember the Ps3s launch? Dispite playing blu rays as well as games, the pricepoint was so high that few people could afford to buy one. For the first few years of the PS3s life it was regarded as a failure. Not only was it expensive, but it was hard to develop for. Remember the meme "PS3 has no games"? It was just too expensive.
Secondly. It would not be a true monopoly, because PC gaming would still exist. We already see a flux of people leaving console gaming to go to PC gaming. What do you think would happen if Console gaming became more expensive that it is now? More people would flock to PC. And that would hurt more than anything else. PC gamong would keep the console market in check. Why would i pay more for a console game that i would a PC game?
The same goes for the tech. Console at the moment have inferior tech than Pcs. This is mitigated by the fact that consoles are plug in an play ( to a certain extend), don't need to be upgraded ( for the most part) and are cheaper than PC gaming ( to buy or build a gaming capable rig). If a consoles specs were so far behind a PC as well as being more expensive, any incentive to buy a console is gone. Any advantage consoles had would vanish and it would then become obsolete in comparaison to the PC. A position that people are arguing already. [ Insert Pc master race joke here].
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Sure monopolies are bad, but videogames are a luxury item, if they screw over the enthusiasts too much, or put their product out of reach, the consumers will just drop it and find something else to do with their money. You talk about economics, but price point also factor into econimics 101. If your product is too expensive you lose buyers, if your product is too cheap you lose profit. The point is the find a balance.
