Poll: what's your opinion on the price of videogames?

[Oly J]

I'm sure this will have been done before at some point or another but what the hell, I'm curious what everyone else thinks on the price of videogames, I'm putting this question to people from the point of view of consumers

my opinion is that games are a little too expensive, as a consumer I can understand why trends that annoy me exist (for instance, games like Call of Duty and Fifa (just as examples) shattering sales records despite being fundamentally the same as it's predecessor...mind you I'm not really into sports...and all shooters look alike to me, though I did enjoy Resistance 3) the reason sequels sell so well and innovation does not (generally) is because people aren't going to be willing to pay full price for a game they know nothing about

£40/$60 is a lot of money and if you're going to spend it on one thing it's going to be something you're reasonably sure you're going to like so I don't begrudge people who just buy Fifa or Call of Duty or anything like that, it's a lessened investment risk but it does kind of open a door for sequels making maximum profit with minimum effort (sometimes)


my point is that if games were a little cheaper, I think more people would be willing to take chances on games and so new ideas would flourish more, and be less likely to be overshadowed

also if games were cheaper (even just a bit at say £30 or $45 more people would be able to afford brand new games and less people would trade in (in theory)

howeever I am aware of the flipside to this coin

games are insanely expensive to make, so publishers are going to push the price as high as they can get away with, and lowering the price would be quite a risk, because it means that even the popular franchises might make less money, but it also means that games are that little bit more accessible

so what does everyone else think?

 

[Iori Branford]

US$6-10 For The Win! [http://www.gog.com/]

 

[krazykidd]

I don't mind the price as it is . What needs to happen in my opinion is not the prices of games that should be lowered , but the cost of MAKING games needs to be lowered . Something needs to happen on the developper/ publisher side to lower the costs . They need to find a more cost efficient way to make their games ( while keeping or inproving the quality of their games ). Until that happens the cost of games won't be lowered .

Now with the actual cost of games it works both ways. I'll give you an example ( and i don't buy digitally so i'll give example with physical copies ). Mario galaxy , is 40$ right now where i live. Since it's an old game it should be way lower than that maybe 15-20$? But it isn't ,why? Because people are still buying it . It stayed at full price for a long time ( 2 or so years) then the price dropped just a little .

Now Duke nukem forever , dropped to like 25$ in the first month . Why? Because no one was buying the game . Even at 25$ few people bought it . It was a massive flop .

Therefor even if prices were lower , people will not buy a game just because it's cheaper . There is more to it than just the price . Those were just two obvious examples , but it works like that for almost every game . The price changes little on who buys what. Games drop in price quicker if it doesn't sell well , and still doesn't sell THAT many more copies , prolly just a few hundred or thousand copies more . But popular games will sell like hot cakes even if the price is high. Which leads to believe that most people don't mind the 60$ price tag .

Even if we were to lower the price of innovative games to 40$ , i don't think it would sell a significant amount more copies to make it worth while . Whereas selling CoD games at a lower price is nothing short of stupid , since they sell a stupid amount of copies at full price .

 

[Lilani]

I'm not comfortable paying more than $50 for a new game. That's already a very steep initial investment for something that you really have no clue how it will turn out, unless you played a demo (and even then demos can be radically different from the actual game).

I'll I'm pretty behind on the latest AAA games, I only started playing Mass Effect 2 last week. But lately I have gotten several new games, and all through Steam. They have frequent sales, prices even for new games are usually cheaper than what you'd pay in a store (even if it's just the lack of tax), and there is no DRM. You can download however many times you want on however many computers you want, which has been a great advantage for me (TF2 has been crashing on my Mac a lot lately, so I just downloaded it on the Windows I have dual-booted and it's just fine). Plus I don't have a million discs and product key booklets to keep track of (something which ME2 has reminded me how painfully annoying that is).

 

[DustyDrB]

I don't have a problem getting the games I want, and I'm not informed enough to know what it takes for a normal developer to make a living in this business. So I'd really just be talking out of my ass if I said they should lower or raise the price.

 

[Wolfram23]

I pretty much bought 1 full price game per month this year, which isn't entirely unreasonable as I do have a full time job and all that. Still, it is quite a bit of money and there's quite a few games I probably would have bought if prices were lower.

 

[malkavianmadman]

Here in NZ you pay at least 95+ NZD for a new release game, and given the usually low quality of most games I find this to be way too much. Hell a few weeks ago I saw teh Diablo 2 battle chest for like 60 bucks and that games what 10 or 11 years old!?

 

[Fishyash]

Hmm... to be honest I am fine with the price as it is, and to be honest, it won't really get better than this. I think games seem to be getting cheaper even though they are getting more expensive to make...

 

[Twilight_guy]

Actually, I think if we look at Steam to see the sales distribution of dirt cheap games, we'd probably still see certain games sales much better then others. More then price goes into decisions to buy games after all.
I'd like them to be cheaper, but I understand how the market works and I know people are willing to pay so its not going to change until that does. I choose to wait to buy games so that price comes down first as a result.

 

[Captain Booyah]

It's verging on too high. On the one hand, paying £40-£50 for a new release (I assume that's somewhere around the $60 mark in America) is reasonable when you consider how people will gladly pay hundreds to spend a few hours jumping about at a concert, and how expensive a process it is to actually make games; but on the other, it's a pretty hefty price tag when it seems as though developers are increasingly asking their customers to take more and more risks. This isn't even considering that most people don't just throw away that kind of money with the economy the way it is.

To be honest, I'd prefer it if some kind of pricing system was worked out; as in, don't charge the full £50 if the game in question is about five hours long. I've no idea whether that could work in reality, but it'd be nice.

 

[DementedSheep]

In an actual store, too high for most games. I?m not paying *$100NZD. If I?m going to pay that much it better be an awesome game that I can sink allot of hours into, come with art book or somthing and I would have to know for a fact that I'm going to love it. I don?t buy games unless they are less $90 and I?m not going to pay that much unless I know it?s good and I'm already a fan of the IP. They also really need to adjust price when it?s a short game which at the moment they don't do. You pay the same for games like Skyrim as you do for games like Portal 2. Paying $60 for games that are over 5 years old is ridicules. Before I was using digital distribution I would usually buy a game when they hit $50/ $60, tho if they released at say...$80 I would actually consider buying new release games. That?s still expensive but you pay considering how much you pay for things like movies and how many hours it takes to play most games it not that bad compared to other forms of entertainment.
Digital distribution is much better generally. The standard price is usually more reasonable even without sales and they drop in price more overtime.
*I live in NZ, our minimum wage is much higher than the US so it?s not as bad as it seems

 

[enzilewulf]

I am fine with the price as is. I really don't know how developers make games and the cost of said process to really say anymore. I can make 60 in a month so buying games per month isn't to bad.

 

[zehydra]

It's about right. I'd say most new games are about 10 dollars too expensive.

 

[Random Fella]

At a game store they are very overpriced, even the older games are still over $100 because the prices are never brought down
Online the prices are normally about right

 

[isometry]

I'm happy with pricing on PC. Through steam I buy most games for $5-$20, and once in a while if it's a game I feel like supporting I'll pay $50-$60. The last two games I payed full price for were Civ 5 and Skyrim, if a game is not in that league I just wait for price drops and sales.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

It depends where you live. In Aus things are pretty awful, but everywhere else is pretty good to the best of my knowledge.