[quote name='Zimmy']I can swallow $399 for a full blown HiDef gaming system (especially if the DVD upconverts).
My main gripe that I don't hear anyone complain about is the $60 game price point.
They tried this before and failed (Mario64 anyone?)
I'll get the Super 360 at launch but I doubt I'll buy more than one game for a long time until they get their heads on straight.
Those waiting for the PS3, there already is a rumor that Sony is watching what MS is doing and may delay for another year.[/QUOTE]
What are you talking about? Mario 64 sold millions of units in the US and Japan at full price, as did every other hit title on the N64 except for a few that had very small sizes and thus less costly carts. Tetrisphere, for example, was much smaller than the average N64 game and was released at $40 IIRC.
$60 and higher games were common throughout the 16-bit era and there were many successful titles. If you factor for inflation you'll see those game were very costly in constant dollars. (Google 'inflation calculator' for numerous sites that let you do this.) $60 in 1994 is equivalent to $76.59 in 2005 dollars.
Changing to optical discs, CD-ROM and DVD-ROM, reduced the cost of the media to a very small fraction of what it had been for mask ROM chips but the costs of making the games has gone sky high since then. A game that has ten full-time artists producing content for it instead of just two has five times the cost just for that one element. On top of that, all of those artists need places to work and equipment. While some may work out of their own homes in most case it means office spaces and utility bills to keep the lights on and the computers running.
The whole process demands more and more cash to be poured in as the games grow to make use of the more powerful hardware. Despite the growth of the industry overall the average successful game doesn't sell much better than a success from ten years ago. (Check out the Platinumcharts for all-time bestsellers at
www.the-magicbox.com for examples.) If publishers could count on doing GTA's kind of sales numbers with regularity they could keep prices down but most hit games, even on the immense installed base of the PS2, aren't moving that many more units that hits from earlier times that had only half the budget requirements.
There are no easy answers. The publishers would love to make up the difference in volume but they have good reason to believe it cannot be done except in very rare cases like GTA. If they don't spend the money to get the most out of the new machines they'll just have a market that yawns and wonders why they should get a new console if its games down't seem to offer anything betting than before.
We would hae been facing this a decade ago if it weren't for CD-ROM. The 32-bit generation's capabilities could only be served by many times greater volumes of game data (and that is before FMV enters the picture) on mask ROM chips. Without a revolution in the game delivery format most of what we've become used to having in games would be impossibly expensive. The next step may be to eliminate producing even discs. Games that are sold online and only leased rather than owned could allow for cost reductions (no longer producing 100 retail packages to only sell 60 of them at full price) and keep prices down. That would mean every consumer would need a hard drive on their console and a fast broadband connection of the sort that is just now appearing, like Verizon's FIOS. That solution is not going to be viable in time to matter for the coming console generation.
you microsoft. Lick my hairy balls! Only a complete idiot would buy the $299 model!
