The Price of Games is TOO DAMN HIGH

[Zetona]

This idea has been stewing in my mind for a while, but some recent visits to Amazon.com really drove the point home.

If there's any indication of how overpriced retail games are, it's how quickly their value drops off. Mass Effect 3, a AAA game launched less than two months ago, was 50% off on Amazon the other day. The sale has ended, but its price is stil $20 less than it was at launch. Many big-name titles from last fall are now in the $30-$40 range on Amazon. Only the very best, highest-rated titles are still worth $50+. Driver: San Francisco came out in September. It's now going for less than $20, as are most games a year or more old. No other medium has anywhere near this level of dramatic price depreciation. The standard price of a Blu-Ray movie on Amazon, for instance, seems to be about $25, the movie's age be damned.

Oftentimes it seems like games and game systems are priced so as to punish the early adopters, or at least make them regret their early adoption. Pay $60 within a launch, buy all the DLC, and then watch as they release a $30 Game of The Year edition with all the bonus content included at no extra charge. I got my Xbox 360 in late 2006. The price was $400 for a 20GB hard drive and a unit that has RRoD'ed on me twice. Now, for the same price, someone can buy an Xbox 360 Slim, which runs quieter, uses less energy, and is more reliable, has a 250GB hard drive, and comes with Kinect and two (admittedly mediocre) games.

I feel like this merits more resentment than I generally see, and it's obviously a factor in used game sales. What do you all think? Should this change? Is it something we'll just have to live with?

EDIT: Given some of the responses I've been getting from people in countries where the price of most games is US $100 equivalent, I'd like to know if the prices drop with time anywhere near as much as they do here in the States.

After thinking about this more, I think my real complaint isn't really with the starting price?after all, I have it pretty good here in the US. It's this idea that you can get more for less if you just wait a year or so, and it's especially annoying with this generation of consoles that are constantly being improved.

 

[Qitz]

Fluctuating prices is prevalent in EVERYTHING, not just games. As the next bigger and better comes out yeah, the older is going to be demanded less so it'll be valued less.

$60 for the game right off the bat isn't so much a punishment for being an early adopter as a by-product for the game being in high demand.

That's why a lot of indie games are around the $10-$30 mark, they're not in as high demand as a developer with a longer track record so they're priced accordingly.

Game of the Year Editions usually come out a year or so after the games release, well after most people who were going to play it have and long after the hype about it has died so it only makes sense to sell it for less with the DLC because that wouldn't have sold anyways most of the time.

Should it change or should it be dealt with? It kind of has to be dealt with, until selling the next big sequel or game at $60 stops becoming profitable, you wont see any changes.

 

[RJ 17]

Please tell me the title of your topic was inspired by that guy who ran for office under the "The Rent Is Too Damn High!" party.

Anyways, this kinda ties into the whole war against used games argument of "Well developers hate used games because it cuts into their profits!" Now I'm not claiming to be a fiscal analyst (I'm a frickin' English major for god's sake) but I highly doubt Amazon would be selling products at cost or at a loss. I'd imagine they're making some profit with each sale. This makes me wonder what the cost vs profit model actually is for a single copy of a game. How much does it cost to put the game on the disc put the disc in the box with a manual and a bunch of other crap. Obviously it has to cost less than $60 per game or no one would be making any money. So I really do wonder how much on average a game company makes per copy sold of their game...because I'm guessing they could lower the prices a bit and still be doing fine.

 

[TheGreatAndPowerfulZOG]

Comparing games to film or music though; games are often made virtually obsolete by future installments. There are plenty of supposedly good games that i'll just never try due to there being a supposedly better sequel. If a game isn't great, there's really not much reason to pick it up after the year mark, because there are too many great games that just came out. Games do depreciate in value, whereas a film will be just as palatable for at least a few years. I think this is probably also WHY they're so expensive. They have no "tail"; they do most of what sales they will ever do in the first few months.

 

[Aircross]

That's why I built my own gaming PC and buy games on Steam when they're at least 66% off.

 

[Epona]

No. No, the price is not too high. No one forces you to buy the DLC, 60$ is less than games costed on NES and you don't have to resort to big titles only. My best gaming expiriences of the last years came for a big part from <20? titles.

NES games were $50 and there was no DLC. Now maybe you do math differently than I do but I do believe that $60+ is more than $50.

 

[TakeshiLive]

I will live off of used games once I'm at Uni... but until then I can somewhat afford to pay the uncomfortable price of 60 euros a game. That's ONLY if I deem the game to be worth that value. If not, I'll try to borrow it or buy it second hand.

On another note, when I was getting Skyrim, I was definitely prepared to pay the full 60 euros. I went into a Bart Smit (dunno if anyone else knows this store) and picked up Skyrim during December. The xmas sales were starting and I wasn't really expecting Skyrim to get any discount at all. But to much of my suprise, 60 euroes WAS the game on sale. Cheeky bastards had the guts to charge an enraging 80 friggin euroes?! I'm never giving any of my money to Bart Smit ever again. There's compensating for like 2~3% of inflation year to year but this is just BS.

 

[Strain42]

I haven't paid $60 for a game in about a year now (last game I paid $60+ for was last year I bought the Catherine: Love is Over Edition)

For starters, a vast majority of games I play usually aren't even released with $60 price tags, and when one comes out for 60 that I actually do want to pick up, nine times out of ten I'm perfectly fine with waiting for a price drop, or in certain cases like L.A. Noire, UMvC3 and (eventually) Skyrim, I'll just wait for the fuller version to release with the cheaper at launch price tag.

So far this year I think there are only three $60 games I wanna pick up. Lollipop Chainsaw, Persona 4 Arena, and Bioshock: Infinite. The first and last on that list I'm gonna wait for the price drops on.

So really, it's not that the cost of games is too damn high, it's that many gamers are in too much of a rush to part with that money.

I understand if it's a game you REALLY wanted on launch day (Like I said, I bought Catherine and I'm picking up P4:A) I'm not saying that nobody should buy any games on launch day when you know there are gonna be price drops around the corner.

But if you've got someone who buys a new $60 game every other week or even once a month just because it's the hot new thing and it looks cool, that someone shouldn't have much right to complain about the money they lost because I guarantee they could've saved a lot of it if they just showed some self-restraint and thought about it for a moment.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I think 90% of my games have come off Steam during sales over the last couple of years. Where they've cost anywhere from $10 to a whopping $2.

I guess they could be cheaper, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how.

 

[MPerce]

I wish prices were lower, but they won't drop until:

1. We stop buying them (that's not gonna happen)

2. The average production costs for a game go down (very possible).

Retail games can cost more than movies nowadays, which is pretty ridiculous considering that the video game audience is a fraction of the movie-going audience. Yeah, you have 1 or 2 games a year that go mainstream and make a ton of sales (last year it was MW3 and Skyrim), but most of the time sales numbers are way way lower than movies. So, they gotta make the games cost way more to make up for that.

There are way more factors than that involved, but that's all I feel like talking about right now.

 

[Epona]

NES games were $50 and there was no DLC. Now maybe you do math differently than I do but I do believe that $60+ is more than $50.

That would be roughly 90$ today. Inflation is a *****.

Maybe you should have said "adjusting for inflation" in your original post. Also, you said "costed" as in past tense. No, in the past NES games costed $50.

 

[DoPo]

I think 90% of my games have come off Steam during sales over the last couple of years. Where they've cost anywhere from $10 to a whopping $2.

I guess they could be cheaper, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how.

Well, they could be free.

OT: Why buy at release date at all? I see very little point in that. A few days ago there was a thread that discussed the merits of buying early and pretty much the conclusion was that there weren't any direct benefits. Well, you won't have to avoid spoilers (if that's your thing) and you won't be able to participate in discussions about the game (arguably true) but is that worth paying more for a game? Unless you want to play it right now, I'd say that you can always wait a bit.

 

[Epona]

Maybe you should have said "adjusting for inflation" in your original post. Also, you said "costed" as in past tense. No, in the past NES games costed $50.

Well, you are right. I am just a little sleepy and forgot to add that. I am actually editing the post right now!

It's cool. It's just a pet peeve of mine that people claim that they HAD to pay $80 for Chrono Trigger in 1995, it was $50 at Wal Mart. If people paid that much for Chrono Trigger, blame the retailer. Nintendo has always had the same MSRP for games, $50, it's true today as it was in the NES days.

Technology should get cheaper as it gets improved. A blu-ray player is much cheaper today than it was 5 years ago and it has better technology under the hood too.

 

[Folji]

Yeah, the price of games is a pain. For... people.

I guess.

I don't know, I buy most of my games during Steam's "let's cut most of the price tag off" sales.

 

[Strain42]

I also play a lot of games on my iPod Touch, and they constantly have games going on sale for FREE, so I've gotten well over 100 great free games that have eaten up a lot of my time.

And when I do decide to buy a game on the app store that isn't free...big deal. I think the most expensive game I've ever bought on the app store was $2.99

I'm not a big Penny Arcade fan, but to paraphrase a Penny Arcade joke: "You buy one game, I'll buy sixty. We'll see who has more fun."