Prices of Games

[SenseOfTumour]

This is an eternal subject for threads, and yet, I'm sure when I was bought my Atari 2600 around the turn of the 80s, yes, the one with the wooden panelling on the front, I seem to remember the cartridges being around £40 each.

What were those cartridges, about 4K if full? Yet now we have full DVDs, 10 hour soundtracks of licensed music, 3-5 year development cycles with teams of hundreds working on a single title and still they're selling for £50 retail. I'd say a 20% raise in price over 30 years aint so bad. Considering we're not really comparing like with like.

The amount of work needed to program a 2600 games probably goes into modelling a wheel or an NPC's eyebrow nowadays.

Of course, doesn't mean I've paid more than £18 for a game in the last 5 years however.

Paid £18 for GTA IV on Steam, paid £15 for Fallout 3 GOTY at Tesco,most other stuff has been picked up in sales in stores or on steam for under £10.

It's a free market, either pay £40, or shop around...or wait and pick it up under half price about a month after release. Resist the hype, don't queue for midnight releases and you'll save money.

 

[Gigaguy64]

Ehhh.
It doesn't really bother me that much.

Most of the really popular games i notice get into the range of $60-80 USD but, for the most part all i see is $30, $40, and $50 USD, which i feel are fair prices.

If i cant afford it i either save the cash, buy used, or go without.

 

[Glamorgan]

Well, in Australia, most new games are $119. I'm not sure what that is in CAD, but we've always been forced to pay more.

But, hey. It's just easier to blame Michael Atkinson.

 

[stabnex]

my stoer si cheper!

codfore muwatuu IS30

dsik poerfct

 

[TheKKCQ]

I have to say that as the games price goes up, so does the level of piracy.
Yes, the hardcore gamers will save up or whatever.

I don't pirate, personally.
But, I also don't play a lot of video games because A) Can't afford them. Case and point.

The prices are "understandable" but still a bit... Overboard for some.

 

[Vilcus]

I don't mind, because not many games I care about come out all too often. However, the second I see a normal edition for a game being sold for more than $90.00 I will rage (yes I'm willing to pay up to $90.00, but after that I draw the line).

 

[captaincabbage]

Here in Australia an average price for a game is about $109.95, which translates to about $97 USD.
How fucked up is that? I'm really getting sick of americans whining about paying about $70 AUD for the newest triple A titles.
When the price hike gets to $100 USD then you can start complaining.

 

[Tarakos]

Well to me, it seems that the average price for a new game increases by $10 each console generation. Like how games were $50 a few years ago, and now they're $60. So my point is that it'll only get worse. Look for games on your Xbox 720 and PS4 to be at around $70, and so on.

 

[aaron552]

The amount of work needed to program a 2600 games probably goes into modelling a wheel or an NPC's eyebrow nowadays.

You've obviously never programmed for an Atari 2600. Those things only had a 1.19MHz processor and 128 bytes (yeah, bytes) of RAM. All sorts of hacks were needed to make anything even resembling a game. Cartridges started with a limit of 4k, but ways were found around that (bank switching).

Right now, sitting next to me on my desk is a HCS12C32 microcontroller kit, with 32k of flash ROM and 2K of RAM. Programming that to do anything useful is pretty hard with those limits (try fitting a TCP/IP stack in 2K of RAM).

Making games has become much easier, but not cheaper. But games ship an order of magnitude more copies now. The price of an individual unit is not a good measure of how how much work goes into a game; the studios set the price before they even start making the game.

At which point do you say it's too much? 60USD? 80USD? 100USD?

Over here in Australia, most games start at 99.95AUD, with PS3 titles at 109.95AUD. Many games are appearing for 119.95 now and that's just regular editions. Expect to pay at 30-50AUD on top of that for special editions.

 

[Govant]

wow...that does suck even more

 

[DeaconSawyer]

I buy most my games off steam, new AAA releases normally cost 50$ CAD.

 

[gamer_parent]

The amount of work needed to program a 2600 games probably goes into modelling a wheel or an NPC's eyebrow nowadays.

You've obviously never programmed for an Atari 2600. Those things only had a 1.19MHz processor and 128 bytes (yeah, bytes) of RAM. All sorts of hacks were needed to make anything even resembling a game. Cartridges started with a limit of 4k, but ways were found around that (bank switching).

Right now, sitting next to me on my desk is a HCS12C32 microcontroller kit, with 32k of flash ROM and 2K of RAM. Programming that to do anything useful is pretty hard with those limits (try fitting a TCP/IP stack in 2K of RAM).

Making games has become much easier, but not cheaper. But games ship an order of magnitude more copies now. The price of an individual unit is not a good measure of how how much work goes into a game; the studios set the price before they even start making the game.

At which point do you say it's too much? 60USD? 80USD? 100USD?

Over here in Australia, most games start at 99.95AUD, with PS3 titles at 109.95AUD. Many games are appearing for 119.95 now and that's just regular editions. Expect to pay at 30-50AUD on top of that for special editions.

the real question though, is if game dev/distribution costs were to go down significantly, how much of a drop in price can we really expect?

 

[Drexlor]

In the US games are $60 and I hate paying that much for a game. I want it back to when $50 was the highest a standard edition would cost, at least that was reasonable.

 

[Krion_Vark]

Yeah they are pretty high here. I even saw Eb games (Gamestop in the US) trying to sell the new tiger woods game for $75. But even at 69.99 with the 13% tax your nearly looking at $80. When a new game is a third the price of a new system things have gotten a bit extreme. I just wait for them to go down a bit then buy them. I have a Huge backlog i need to get to right now anyway.

Same there are a few games that I would like to get on release so that I don't have anything about them ruined by people. (Halo:Reach is one of them) but quite frankly I haven't bought a new game since AC2 and even then I bought it after Christmas.

 

[rees263]

Just wait before you buy - unless a game is a top seller it will drop in price within a couple of months max; probably before. It's rediculous how cheap current gen games are now. There's plenty of games I haven't played that are a bit older and which cost very little. I'll by them cheap and by the time I want some more games the newer ones will (hopefully) ahve dropped in price as well.

 

[justjrandomuser]

Alan Wake was 59.99 for about 2 weeks to a month. Now you can get it for $39.99. Give just about anything between 2 weeks to a month after release and you can find it it for $20 to $30 off. Heck even Mass Effect 2 is only $29.99 and Assassin's Creed 1 & 2 can be found in the Walmart bargain bin for $9.99 each.

 

[gamer_parent]

Absolutely jack shit, just more profit for the publishers

And that's not a knee-jerk "Corporations are evil!" line there. That's sensible economics.

If you can decrease expenses without decreasing revenue, you just get more profit. That's how industries become profitable. They start out horribly inefficient (read: unprofitable) then as time goes on and more money is entered into it/burned through, more efficient processes are developed. Which then make the industry profitable for those initial investors.

Point is, we would see no price drop. NDA's can make leaks all but useless (easily spun into "FUD from competitors") and we would never really know if we're paying more than we have to.

Which we are already.

but then, a case can be made that by lowering the price, the company could move more units and thereby gain greater market share. In doing so, solidify their position further within the industry.

This is even more important if the company's main source of revenue is not coming from unit sales, but from other forms like microtransactions, subscription fees, and merchandizing. In these particular cases, more units moved = better marketing synergy.

 

[Vivace-Vivian]

Games have always been expensive though. Far as I recall an NES game could release at 90$. It's not that the prices are going up, it's that the quality is going down. less cheese for the same price, as it were.

 

[DementedSheep]

Most games in New Zealand start off at around $100-$125, so that's about $80 USD I think
and they never really drop past $80 (tho most sit around $90-$100) unless they are several years old (and even then only if it's not popular) or a sequel comes out.
We get ripped off with the price of games...internet and texting costs are ridicules here as well, I think it because we are a relatively small market and there isn't much competition to keep the prices down.
Tho from what I hear Aussie has it even worse than us with the price of games.

I generally don?t like to complain about prices tho, Video games take allot of effort and time to make after all so they should be expensive and if you don't like the price don't buy. It sucks but games arn't exactly a necessity.