What would happen if video games were cheaper?

[Same River New Water]

If the price of a new-release game in Australia was reduced by 40%...

...it would still be a little more expensive than the same game in the United States.

 

[insectoid]

I would buy more!

 

[jimduckie]

you would buy more games but the quality of the games would suck , but also you can buy games cheap , buy used

 

[Antiparticle]

Wow, 60 dollars. Here new games are 60 euros, or 84 dollars!
As for what would happen if they became cheaper.. I'd buy more! There are many games these days which are cool, but not '60 euro cool'. So with games like that I always wait till the price gets reduced to 40 or preferably even 30. However, sometimes by that time my interest in the game has dissipated because a sequel or a better game in the same genre gets released, and I end up never buying the game at all. Well, unless I see it for 10 or 15 somewhere in a budget bin, but that rarely happens with good games.
So yeah. There are a lot of good games I never get to play because of the high default price of 60 euro. If that got dropped to 40 or so, I'd buy more games and quite possibly spend more money on games too! Games worth 60 euro are just rare (Fallout 3 is one example, and The Orange Box would have been worth it too, though it cost less (Valve <3)), but there are a lot more games worth 40 euro. Recent example of that for me is Prototype. After reading the reviews it sounds kind of funky, but 60 euro is really a lot of money. I'd buy it for 40 though...

 

[DM.]

I'm with Max on this one.

 

[Daveman]

I would never leave my house.

 

[Blaghman]

Let's say RRP of games were to drop by $15 in Australia, that'd put new ps3 games down to about $95, given that you can usually find games for considerably less than the RRP, that'd bring what you actually pay in somewhere like JB down to about $60 for a new game, and I'd probably buy a lot more, given that mostly, I have enough for that, but instead spend it on food or something stupid.

 

[Samurai Goomba]

I'd buy a lot more new games. When SNK started selling King of Fighters titles for $20 around here (on PS2) brand new, guess what happened? I bought them. When a new game is 15-20 dollars, I'll pick it up on a whim sometimes, especially if it's from a small developer I feel deserves the money (still waiting on my KoF XII, too!)

I was talking this over with my sister a while ago, about how I think the price for new Wii games needs to be lower. It doesn't make sense to me that some people would pay 50-60 dollars for a game that's about 6-10 hours long with very little replay value (like most Wii games, honestly).

As for myself, I'll just go buy some more Xbox original games for dirt cheap, like my recent purchase of UT2: Liandri Conflict for a fiver. Eat that, next-gen devs! Hah! Not only that, UT2: Liandri Conflict looks better than plenty of next-gen games I've seen.

 

[sneak_copter]

How cheap, you say? About £20 new? That would be awesome. I'd never leave the house.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Enlighten me, please.

You would be a PC gamer.

I never pay more then £25 for a new game. Even close to release date.

Console games are getting more expensive as time passes. PS1/2 games were £20, £30 or £40 whilst PS3 are £50 (not as much now though, retailers seem to have twigged that people do notice price hikes).

 

[irishdude]

it would help games that didnt have much replay value, like shadow of the colossus, i love that game but it didnt sell great but had it been 30euros it would have sold much better

 

[messy]

More people would buy them.

Nuff' said.

Don't think you can say much else after this (i was Ninja'd to this)

 

[The_Prophet]

If they costed here as much as they cost in the US I'd buy them.
Bloddy Yanks
(bloddy yanks was meant as a joke)

 

[velcthulhu]

Since games are 50-60 dollars, I usually only buy ones that are highly recommended to me, or that are from series that I like, because I'll pay 60 bucks for a great game, but not for a mediocre one. If they charged like 20 bucks, I'd just buy any that looked interesting, and would be a lot more willing to try new stuff.

 

[Jandau]

I'm fairly sure that if games cost 20-30$ we'd not only see users buying more games, but more users buying games and a drop in piracy rates. But I'm also fairly sure that such a business model is beyond the brains of most publishers...

 

[TheMushroomClub]

Amazon do a lot of new games at less than half price, for instance, I got the orange box for £14 (Quite cheap for you non-UK citizens)

 

[bodyklok]

I'd buy more of them...

 

[Surreysmith]

If games were cheaper I'd run out of space on my hard drive and since I couldn't bring myself to delete any thing I'd be forced to buy a new console so they would probably more money in the long run.