Why are gamers so cheap? Should games cost more?

[Arehexes]

snip

Most gamers can't afford that every month (luckily there aren't so many new releases), so when they give up something to buy a game and it turns out less than they expected... well... they feel they got ripped off (not saying they should, but that's another discussion).

And of course, there are the Trolls, professional and amateur, doing it for the sake of it or for the sake of someone or something else.

That's the whole point of the thread. More money for the developers would mean considerably better games. Not everytime, but generally.

Look at the quality and depth of games nowadays compared to before. It's considerably better. Yes it is partially due to better technology, but it also due to the increased revenue.

No it's only due to technology, games back then cost 50 to even 100 USD (I think Chrono Trigger was 80 USD for the SNES). Atari games cost a good chunk a change and devs had to build a game from scratch there was no such thing as reusing the assets from another project. It seems to me you have this stupid idea that if you throw more money at it, it has to get better. Well that isn't always true, if you throw money at gaming companies they are limited by the tech and to be honest the only thing holding them back no a days is making better graphics with reasonable loading times. We have more then enough space and memory for all the fancy game play ideas you can think of, it's just storing the HD graphics now a days is a big issue.

The most expensive games ever made where all done so in the past 5 years. By a lot. GTAIV cost 100 million to make. That's considerably more than the previous GTAs, and inflation alone would not account for that.

Rockstar has made a ton of money off the GTA franchise, every single one they make costs more than the last and in turn is more complex and detailed.

Technology alone is not the cause. It's blatantly obvious.

Why was GTAIV expensive though? Now I never played GTA IV in depth but from what I did play it is a huge game, bigger then San An. But why? Maybe the fact it's stored a DVD9/BluRay Disc to store the Models, Scripts/Events, Audio, Misc.. It could also be the fact the current systems have the Ram to load every thing from the Disc for the console to use (Remember a computer has to load it from the disc to the ram before it can use it). Could it be the video processors in our systems that allow the system to render the maps? All these things GTAIV is able to do is due to the tech advancing.

Look at Star Fox on the SNES, it is only able to run on the SNES is because it has a Super FX chip build on the cart. Because of that tech the SNES could render the 3D polygons it used, and it also raised the cost of those games.

 

[Emurlahn]

I already pay a 110$ for a new game, so I really wouldn't mind if you guys had to pay a 90 or 100$. If the price went up the same amount for me though (150-160$) I would be slightly pissed...

But the real problem is not that games are the wrong price, the problem is that publishers (not really that much) and retailers (way too much) want their share of the money.
And from there we are in on a discussion hundreds of others more qualified than me have said some smart stuff, I will rather you go through their stuff, and read what they said about it, cause I would only give a bad recap if I were to try.

 

[Cenequus]

A good example are MMOs vs normal games. Even if you only buy 1 new game each month it's still 50 euro vs 12ish. You might say the quality matters but it's not like each month there's some new great game.

On the other hand most people don't pay the full price for a game thanks to steam or if you buy some older game(3-4 yrs) you'll get it as cheap as 5-10 euro from GOG. So in the end I guess there's prices for everybody.

 

[Falseprophet]

While I do like some AAA titles, a lot of times I get tired of subsidizing graphics and voice acting at the expense of story, gameplay and QA testing. It'd be nice if somewhere between the $10-15 indie titles and the $60-$70 AAA titles there were more $25-$40 B titles with 5 or 6-figure budgets instead of 7 or 8. Especially for once-popular genres that do fine without bleeding edge audio-visual technology: tactical RPG, space combat sim, survival horror, etc. I think there's a market for niche genre games with lower budgets, if only more studios would make them.

 

[Arehexes]

If big games were $80, the quality and depth would skyrocket. These developers would have more money to invest into technology and developers and that equals a better product.

This is simply not true. For the most part, companies just want to spend as little as possible creating a product and sell it as high as possible while still getting sales. If gamers suddenly decided they were willing to pay $80 for games, the companies wouldn't spend this extra money on improving the games, they would simply have an increased profit margin. If people were willing to pay $80 for the same games, then we would get the same games at $80. There would be no improvement.

I'm glad gamers are cheap, it forces game companies to work for their money. I myself spend about half of my gaming time playing games that are completely free, and only spend money on games I know are going to be good. A lot of other gamers do this, and it leads to games that get good reviews and word of mouth doing well (usually), while others don't (usually). This improves the industry greatly, and means that games actually have to be good to do well.

No...

If that were true the cost to produce games would not be going up, yet it is. The more money these companies make, the more money they put into games. Do you think that the last Call of Duty games cost exactly the same to make as the previous ones? Of course not, it cost considerably more because they had all the money from the sales of the previous.

It takes money to make money.

errr....the last few call of duty games seem to run on the same engine if you ask me, just updated. And with 2 years for a company to update a already in place engine it doesn't seem to hard. Also look at the EA Sport games, they are more of less the same game every year. Same of Halo 3 and it's engine which is also used in ODST and Reach. It is more or less the same game with added stuff. Not every game is made from scratch unless the company wants it's own engine to forgo buying one, but even then they can just reuse and save. But no raising the cost of a game won't improve any thing. And the only reason the cost to produce a game is going up is to give a game those high res graphics everyone wants games to have now.

Modern Warfare 2 had a budget of 40-50 million. The head of Infity Ward Robert Bowling himself said that a higher budget makes a better game, and a better game makes more money for the company.


I don't know where you guys are getting the idea that these companies will just stockpile cash instead of using it to make more cash, but it's simply not true. No company out there to make money is going to not try to increase their profits by spending more.

EDIT [Wrong Link]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines
[fix'd]

This is a list of some known game engines used by companies. While it does cost money to make them a company can save money by re-using them. A lot of games does this (I know Castlevania on the N64 did this, same with pokemon Fire Red/Leaf Green reusing the Ruby Sapphire engine). I don't know where get this idea that all games are made from scratch like it seems you believe. Because most game budgets are spend on the visual aspect more so then under the hood most of the time. But yeah Robert Bowling is right, but look at a smaller company who might make a call of duty clone(plays just like it in every way) I can bet you it won't look as pretty or even sound as good. But most of it is done to make it look pretty.

 

[saruman31]

Gaming is anything but cheap. In the US to a middle class citizen it might seem pretty decent priced but in most parts of the world its a costly deal. And quite frankly there aren`t many games that are worth 60$

 

[Vkmies]

Well, In Finland, games from normal stores and markets cost almost a hundred dollars a piece, so I don't think games should cost more.

 

[MercurySteam]

This isn't a troll post to insult anyone, it's a genuine interest into why as a group, gamers tend to be very cheap when it comes to the cost of games and gaming equipment.

Come live in Australia and I guarantee that you'll ask the Mods to delete this thread.

 

[Cid Silverwing]

Games really are overpriced. Something has happened that's caused an inflation in game prices over the years, and it needs to stop.

 

[Pirate1019]

Let's do some critical thinking.

paying $60 for a game is fine if you'll get the time out of it. FPS games are a great deal if you play the multiplayer, but if you're like me and don't, then $60 is complete bullshit for 5, maybe 6 hours of singe-player content. Less if you don't count cutscenes.

MMOs get ripped on because you're essentially paying to work. a lot of MMOs simply aren't fun when you boil them down to their base mechanics, so paying every 30 days for the right to grind more skeletons is kind of stupid.

DLC is fine, assuming it's priced right. Day 1 DLC on the other hand is about a pleasant as the publishers ejaculating all over my face.

console manufacturers make boatloads of money from a million other places besides the consoles. A console is an investment because if it's good, it promises more profit than you could get with the box alone. Microsoft gets a cut from every 360 game sold, not to mention a much much larger cut if it was developed in-house. They make money from devs buying the developer kits, and as time wears on, the tech used in the console gets cheaper, so the loss per console shrinks or goes away completely.

People that play videogames are cheap bastards, but you chose all of the wrong arguments. Somebody post a link to the statistics for how much people paid on average for the Humble Indie Bundles.

 

[Scabadus]

I've been playing ARMA 2 since its release in 2009; I've clocked up at least one hundred hours in the game and its expansion pack.

As an honest question, how? I've barely hit 12 hours on Arma 2 and I've exhausted all of its content several times over, do you just really like the game or is there a secret site with mods and additions that I've never found?

Guess I'd better answer the OP to justify asking that, here goes:

The best argument I've heard is talking about the money:time ratio when compared to movies or even books. A film (normal film, not 3D) in my local cinema costs me £7 and lasts for about 2 hours. Now to take a very short game as an example, Modern Warfare 2, it cost me £40. If the ratio was the same, I'd expect it to provide somewhere just under 12 hours of entertainment, and it barely took 4 hours to complete (though infairness I did have to play through it 3 fucking times to understand all of the plot points). And no, I didn't touch the multiplayer, I don't care about your arguments, I had no interest in the multiplayer yet I could get the game cheaper with the multiplayer disabled.

Add this to the fact that it's a significantly larger investement to buy a game than a movie, and there's a problem. Also consider that some games can have a much larger money:time ratio than others; checking my Steam stats I've clocked over 180 hours on Mass Effect 2, a game that probably cost me about £40 (I can't seem to find the initial cost of the game when it was first released). Going by the "£7 for 2 hours" model, this means that ME2 shoudl have cost me a whopping £630 (no really, that's correct).

With a combination of many mainstream FPS titles giving such terrible price to entertainment ratios compared to other entertainment, along with it being possible to find games that give such fantastic ratios, it's hardly surprising that people complain about the price of the poor ones.

 

[Soviet Steve]

Sure, let games go to $800 per unit, I'm set on just about never buying a game that costs me more than $30 anyway, and I'm sure I'd grow to appreciate retro gaming a lot more that way.

 

[Arehexes]

Let's do some critical thinking.

paying $60 for a game is fine if you'll get the time out of it. FPS games are a great deal if you play the multiplayer, but if you're like me and don't, then $60 is complete bullshit for 5, maybe 6 hours of singe-player content. Less if you don't count cutscenes.

MMOs get ripped on because you're essentially paying to work. a lot of MMOs simply aren't fun when you boil them down to their base mechanics, so paying every 30 days for the right to grind more skeletons is kind of stupid.

DLC is fine, assuming it's priced right. Day 1 DLC on the other hand is about a pleasant as the publishers ejaculating all over my face.

console manufacturers make boatloads of money from a million other places besides the consoles. A console is an investment because if it's good, it promises more profit than you could get with the box alone. Microsoft gets a cut from every 360 game sold, not to mention a much much larger cut if it was developed in-house. They make money from devs buying the developer kits, and as time wears on, the tech used in the console gets cheaper, so the loss per console shrinks or goes away completely.

People that play videogames are cheap bastards, but you chose all of the wrong arguments. Somebody post a link to the statistics for how much people paid on average for the Humble Indie Bundles.

I agree with what you say pretty much but I just wanna say I loved your line about the publisher ejaculating all over your face with day one DLC.

 

[moose_man]

Hell no. I'm 14, I can barely pay for games as it is. That's like asking if books should be $30 instead of $10. Why would they be? If they're making a profit, that's about where they should stop. Maybe a little more or less for good or bad games respectively.

 

[Sabiancym]

I think most of you are just posting your sticker shock reaction instead of actually thinking it out. I figured that would happen.

Modern economics backs up my point. Every company under the sun knows that the only way to make more money, is to put more money in.

Where is the proof that game companies will continue to churn out exactly the same game at $80 that they would for $60? It's simply not true. Maybe a few companies would churn out crap, but that already happens.

At $80, the average quality of gaming would go up, considerably. Stop using games and genres you don't like as an example. You're never going to like those games. Use a game you really enjoy, and now imagine what that game would be like if the company had 140% of their current budget.



It doesn't even matter if you agree with me. The cost of games are already going up. DLC is making companies millions, and because of that you'll see (and are already seeing) better and better games. Better being relative of course.

 

[ultimateownage]

A minute long music track costs 70p.
A 2 hour film costs £10.
A 6 hour game costs £50.
A 10 hour book costs £5.

6 hours of music costs £42, 6 hours of films costs £30, 6 hours of books cost £3 and 6 hours of games costs £50.

Though it really depends on the developer, games are up there with movies on the poor cost for time. It isn't that simple though; music and games have the best replay value.

 

[Assassin Xaero]

Fuck no they shouldn't be higher. They are already overpriced as it is for the generic shit rehashes and ports we constantly get. Since, lets say PS1/N64 era, the quality in graphics and physics has gone up, but the quality in the actual game has gone down. $60 for a 4 hour game? Yeah right.

As for money, right now, I'm lucky if I make more than $150 a week and with the economy, I'm not getting any more hours or have much of a chance to find a new job. And the more money for developers = better games thing. Yeah, right. The big AAA studios mostly just put out the same thing over and over again with a new coat of paint and minor tweaks: Halo series, Call of Duty series, Dragon Age series, etc.

 

[Sabiancym]

Games really are overpriced. Something has happened that's caused an inflation in game prices over the years, and it needs to stop.

What?? That's not even close to true.

Nintendo games were at least $50. N64 games were the same. PS1, PS2 and Xbox games were all $50.


The cost of games has remained stable. If anything, it's due for an increase. Look at the cost of everything else over that same time frame. They've all increased dramatically.

 

[Katana314]

A while ago, it cost $50 for a game, and that was the only way to get them. There were no indie titles, there were no free games, there was no digital distribution, or anything like that.

"Hey, guys! Hey, guys! Look at what I got!"
"Is that...a VIDEO GAME?"
(all) "WHOOOOOAAAAAAAA......"

Today, I can download the Unreal Engine for free and start making a game with 5 people that has graphics 10 times as good as anything released in 2004.

Today, there are about 10 bazillion flash games made by all kinds of people that cost nothing.

Today, most successful MMORPGs are free to play. (With some large exceptions)

Today, more people are trying to get into the industry and make more and more games than ever before.

Today, many indie games with a price point around $10 have gotten much higher reviews than average AAA games.

Individual games do not have the value they had all those years ago, because now gaming is much easier to reach.

 

[Sabiancym]

A minute long music track costs 70p.
A 2 hour film costs £10.
A 6 hour game costs £50.
A 10 hour book costs £5.

6 hours of music costs £42, 6 hours of films costs £30, 6 hours of books cost £3 and 6 hours of games costs £50.

Though it really depends on the developer, games are up there with movies on the poor cost for time. It isn't that simple though; music and games have the best replay value.

There are plenty of games with well over 20 hours. Why do people expect to get those for the same price as a crappy 5 hour game?

That's the whole point. The better developers should get rewarded with more money. Which would allow them to make even better games.