Why games are $60...

METC NAPALM

METC NAPALM

CAG Veteran
http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/19/ps3-xbox360-costs-tech-cx_rr_game06_1219expensivegames.html


Found this while doing a search, might be interesting to someone!

Read rest of article at link above...

The next generation of videogames features eye-popping graphics, piercingly loud sound effects and inventive game play. Another feature: They're wallet-thinning. Once you've plunked down as much as $600 for Sony's new PlayStation 3 console, you've only just begun. Each new game will set you back $60.
That beefed-up price tag--which also applies to games for Microsoft's

Xbox 360--is a 20% increase over games for earlier consoles. That's because the game business increasingly parallels Hollywood: Each new game is a costly bet--many now cost north of $20 million to produce--that can pay off big or cost a company its quarterly earnings goal.
Those risks are magnified at the beginning of a game cycle, when gamers are swapping out old machines for the new models. It's hard to sell a blockbuster game to gamers who can't play it. Microsoft claims it will have sold 10 million 360s by the end of this month, while Sonywill have sold 2 million of its newly introduced PS3s, at best.
 
I am sincerely confused here.

The article is almost a year old.

Besides, I think most of us here know why the games cost more. And most of us have just sort of resolved over to the increase.
 
I really dont mind. They can make games cost as much as they want. I can count the number of games Ive bought at full price this year on one hand.

I'd pay $100 for GTA4. Of course, thats the only game I'd buy all year at full price. The more expensive they make game the less I buy.

Yet developers have the nerve to complain about the used market. :roll:
 
Why a $10 increase does not bother me:

1. I try to shop as a "CheapAss" anyway ($60 retail just means I can save more money, if you like retarded logic)

2. I'm not a kid anymore, saving up week after week of allowance to get a new game. I have a job, so I buy what I want when I want.

3. Now that I have bills, tuition, and rent to pay (about $1000 a month for rent, and $40,000 in college loans a year)...I'm not really busting my balls over $10.

So all in all, an extra $10 is nothing to me. If an extra $10 to the developers means they'll be making more awesome games, then God Bless them. I'd happily toss more money to a corporation who's sole business model is making gamers (kids and adults alike) happy.

~HotShotX
 
Did you stop to think that maybe if more people actually paid the retail price costs wouldn't go up as much because the publisher would actually be getting paid instead of Gamestop. And that is who sets the price, the publisher.

[quote name='Puffa469']
Yet developers have the nerve to complain about the used market. :roll:[/quote]
 
If game prices actually rised with inflation we would actually be paying more then 60 for these games. So techinically we are getting a deal everytime we buy a next gen game for 60 bucks.
 
[quote name='Kayden']Did you stop to think that maybe if more people actually paid the retail price costs wouldn't go up as much because the publisher would actually be getting paid instead of Gamestop. And that is who sets the price, the publisher.[/quote]

Riiight. If no one ever got sick again you think the price of health insurance would ever go down?

How bout if we took over a middle eastern country with arguably the worlds largest oilfield. Surely then the price of gas would go down?
 
i remembered back when MS said they were loosing a shit load of money on the original xbox during it's life time..then I started thinking when I saw the price of a new release game at 60. I told myself, hmm they must be trying to recover the cost of the last generation sales.
 
[quote name='Corvin']the real answer is... a shit-ton of people paid $60 for Halo 2 which was a giant green light for MS.[/QUOTE]



Wasn't Halo 2 $49.99 and $54.99 for the LE?
 
[quote name='Strider Turbulence']Wasn't Halo 2 $49.99 and $54.99 for the LE?[/quote]

Yes.
 
[quote name='whoknows']I committed suicide over the price increase.[/quote]

Glad you're feeling better.

Games cost $60 for a lot of reasons. Those that have been listed here as well as inflation.
 
[quote name='Puffa469']Riiight. If no one ever got sick again you think the price of health insurance would ever go down?

How bout if we took over a middle eastern country with arguably the worlds largest oilfield. Surely then the price of gas would go down?[/quote]

Now if our cars ran on oil instead of gasoline that would be true. But, sadly there hasn't been a new oil refinery built in the US in the last 30 years so with supply and demand, gas costs as much as it did in the 70's (commensurate with inflation) during a failed energy policy.

Same with games. It costs more to make them, the risk is higher than ever and therefore games are costing as much as they did in the 90's during the SNES and subsequently N64 days.

Once the installed base is higher on PS3 and 360 (and if 360 game sales don’t have to keep paying for PS3 development since the PS3 software market is so soft) than we might end up seeing game price normalize.
 
One reason why I haven't purchased a videogame brand-new from retail in years.

Maybe if they charged less I would buy from them, and they wouldn't have to charge so much because they'd actually get my sale.
 
My beef is two things: the original excuse was because "it's harder" to make the games and they have to pay developers more. Which is total crap. Developers know when they choose that career that it requires constant education. Not being throwin in the deep end, but a natural evolution where they learn as they work and nothing is harder. Like advancing in high school where the material is more advanced but it doesn't feel that way because you're progressing at a specific pace. Add to that the software improvements. Where it's more affordable and does more in regards to speeding up the development process and handling a lot of things more efficiently. CliffyB had a whole chunk of the 360 press conference talking about it at E3 a couple years ago. That one about prefabrication and an almost artificially intelligent level design system that looks like quality work instead of a randomly generated Rise of the Triad level.

My other problem is that in-game advertisement breeds like a virus while the price stays the same. An EA game chock full of EA product placement is not such a big deal, tacky, but not anything where I expect a discount. But playing a military shooter where 90% of the game surfaces are ads for deodorant and men's cologne should for damn sure result in $10-20 off the established base MSRP. Broadcast television is free because of ads. The purpose of ads is to reduce cost for creation and/or delivery, and in turn reduce cost for consumers. But it ain't happenin' in the games industry. The only industry in the entertainment field where almost nothing applies as it does to music, literature, and movies.

I know a lot of my opinions can be argued. I'm the type that understands other points of view. But the aforementioned two points I strongly believe prove that games are pricegouged. They are not priced in regards to length or quality. Heck, Over G Fighters is still $60 most places while Call Of Duty 4 is going to be put on the shelf a few rows up with the same MSRP.
 
i just refuse to pay 60 bucks for a game. i can wait till there's a sale, price drop, or promotion. this allows me to catch up on older games that are cheaper now. i have yet paid a full $60 out of my own wallet, but i own all the big name titles and bought them brand new. i don't believe i even spent $50 on a game and at this rate my 360 collection is going to be my largest.
 
Playing a game is playing a game. Doesn't matter when you do it. Sure I agree that you will still enjoy it. But you can't deny that there is a spiritual feeling that goes along with playing a game on the release day, much like the anticipation and rush of watching the Super Bowl live televised as opposed to radio host or TIVO'd.

Watching trailers over and over, re-reading previews, saving up for the game, and finally getting it on the release day...it's a part of the gaming culture that you just have to experience and it makes it THAT much better. It's not required, but you don't know the feeling until you've actually done it.
 
New AAA games are spendy, but there are more opportunities for free and low-cost gaming now than ever before. Remember MKTrilogy for N64's release price? $89.99...which is probably about $120 now.

I am just saying, we get more value out of our gaming buck now than ever before, and if you want to, you can play great $5-10 games that will keep you busy for a month apiece.

You young stars just don't know how good you got it :) We used to pay $50 in 1980 money ($133 now) for this:

adventure.png


And we loved it!
 
[quote name='n8n8baby']
You young stars just don't know how good you got it :) We used to pay $50 in 1980 money ($133 now) for this:

[Image]http://www.videogamecritic.net/images/2600/adventure_plus.png[/Image]

And we loved it![/quote]

Damn, was that a sequel to Adventure??
I wonder if the keys get stuck in the walls in that one as well.
 
Yeah, I meant to dig up the original one, but hit the wrong one at first. Took me about 10 tries to figure out the stupid
 
[quote name='radjago']Short answer: because people will pay it.[/quote]
Long answer: because people will pay it.


Not much more to it than that. ;)
 
I'm mega-pissed that the "discs are cheaper" argument just about died after the Dreamcast. I don't know what was up with the PSX because I didn't own one, but I loved Dreamcast games because they were usually $40. If they were multidisc or online, they were $50. It made perfect sense, and it was still cheaper than N64 games. And the whole CD argument might begin to fall apart in the case of the Dreamcast because they used GD-ROMs. It was a new format that SEGA had to develop. And it was still as cheap as CDs.

Enter the PS2/XBOX/GCN era, and $50 became the standard. Okay, so many of the games were DVD, but there were still come CD PS2 games that were as expensive as DVD PS2 games. The GCN's miniDVDs must've cost a hell of a lot less than regular DVDs, so I don't see what their justification for the $50 price tag is. I guess most, if not all, XBOX games were DVD. But they were still discs. Discs = cheaper, right? Wrong.

Instead of passing the savings off to the consumer, the savings are kept for the company. If these savings are then passed to the people who make the games, well, that's not too terrible. Passed into the company's savings? Well, I guess that's acceptable. Most likely, the savings are passed into the already bloated CEO's salary. That's ass.

Nowadays, the Wii's shown that $50 is here to stay. DVDs must cost as much as CD/GD did back in the 90s since they're not as new anymore, but they still charge the last gen price. And it's not like they have the 360's development costs argument to fall back on. The only system I see having any justification for the $60 price tag is the PS3. All the games for that system are Blu-Ray, and that's supposed to be really expensive, even compared to HD-DVD. If anything, I expected PS3 games to parallel the more expensive cartridges of the N64. But all I see are $60 PS3 Blu-Rays and $60 360 DVDs, and I wonder why I'm paying $60 for 360 games or I'm only paying $60 for PS3 games. I don't know which one's too cheap or which one's too expensive, but I'd put my money on the 360's games being too expensive. I seriously doubt that Sony would take a loss on game sales. They might have a much narrower profit margin, but they're not losing money. And that only leaves 360 games with a bloated profit margin! And the Wii probably has a similar profit margin because what they don't charge in game price, they don't spend on game development.

I mean, everybody seems to forget the CDs are cheaper thing from the 90s. Everybody. Am I the only sane one in the universe or what?
 
You do understand that the physical cost of the disc is pennies, right? CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD whatever. The cost of pressing is all negligible. It's the cost of the reading hardware that's expensive.

$50 is 2000 dollars is $58.54 in 2006 dollars.
 
[quote name='MSUHitman']There was also an article in this month's OXM on this same topic starring CAG's favorite analyst, Michael Pachter.[/quote]

Was just about to mention that article. Interesting but I already knew much of what they said, typicial OXM writing.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
bread's done
Back
Top