Higher prices for next gen games.

XsjadoBlayde

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Of all the publishers to come out swinging their brass-guilded cunts, there's hardly any as lacking in the much-required "benefit of the doubt" to pull this off, as 2K. This is the 'Shamed Celeb comeback tour' as hosted by the piss-ridden corpse of Jimmy Saville.
 
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sXeth

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Could it work, certainly.


Stepping away from the prominent example being TakeTwo's latest reskinned vending machine. People are certainly willing to throw down cash on game in the big bundle editions with all the DLC and so on. I'm not sure what the total on the much-beloved (though I'm not a fan, hence my ignorance) Witcher 3 is once you throw in all the DLC.



Granted, there's a variation there. One is actually providing the value to earn that. The other side is DLC comes in installments. You don't start at 80/100/120 dollars, you put out the first bit, prove your calibre of game, then that convinces people to buy the rest.


Pushing a higher price upfront, in a market that is both flooded with options (And with digital only consoles swinging in now, they won't even have store-shelf dominance, they have to sit there on the storefront alongside dozens or hundreds of indie/AA games), and with smarter consumers having a lot of speculation about the games quality, seems like a good way to falter.


If they were smart, we'd see a rise in demos/free weekends/what have you, which actually has been a thing over the last year so. Unfortunately mostly skewed towards the latter, which provides a very limited option for the try-before-you-buy approach that doesn't really work as well (the fact that many of those free preview periods are also bug ridden hellholes aside)
 

Kae

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Personally I'm not even willing to pay $60.00 for a game, given that I haven't bought any games at full price in over 6 years, not to mention the amount of microtransactions that games have nowadays, so yeah it's safe to say I ain't paying that, I think all it's going to accomplish is increase the amount of pirated games downloads by a small margin.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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Could it work, certainly.


Stepping away from the prominent example being TakeTwo's latest reskinned vending machine. People are certainly willing to throw down cash on game in the big bundle editions with all the DLC and so on. I'm not sure what the total on the much-beloved (though I'm not a fan, hence my ignorance) Witcher 3 is once you throw in all the DLC.



Granted, there's a variation there. One is actually providing the value to earn that. The other side is DLC comes in installments. You don't start at 80/100/120 dollars, you put out the first bit, prove your calibre of game, then that convinces people to buy the rest.


Pushing a higher price upfront, in a market that is both flooded with options (And with digital only consoles swinging in now, they won't even have store-shelf dominance, they have to sit there on the storefront alongside dozens or hundreds of indie/AA games), and with smarter consumers having a lot of speculation about the games quality, seems like a good way to falter.


If they were smart, we'd see a rise in demos/free weekends/what have you, which actually has been a thing over the last year so. Unfortunately mostly skewed towards the latter, which provides a very limited option for the try-before-you-buy approach that doesn't really work as well (the fact that many of those free preview periods are also bug ridden hellholes aside)
I'm going to be totally honest, a demo has never convinced me to buy a game. I've played demos of games that I was pretty sure I was going to buy, sometimes just to make sure the game would run decently.

Tons of demos have made me not buy games because I ran into optimization issues and bugs. As a consumer, demos are great. From a publisher standpoint I'm not sure demos actually help sell games.
 
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sXeth

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I'm going to be totally honest, a demo has never convinced me to buy a game. I've played demos of games that I was pretty sure I was going to buy, sometimes just to make sure the game would run decently.

Tons of demos have made me not buy games because I ran into optimization issues and bugs. As a consumer, demos are great. From a publisher standpoint I'm not sure demos actually help sell games.

I think we need to clarify a "demo" here, as well.

A traditional demo in gaming is often simply a mission, or the first act of the game. That is to say, its the final product just restricted. The most classic example is the 90s shareware boom. Where you'd get Act 1/3 of games, then would have to pay for the rest if you wanted to finish (This was a staple of Apogee-later-3d Realms, and ID software in particular. For instance, DOOM (the original 1993) was released with Act 1 (nine levels) as a demo or shareware, with Acts 2 and 3 being in the purchased game.



While the various preview/stress test/early access/beta weekend stuff in current days would technically act as a preview, they're often not indicative of the actual game. And in some cases, fraught with technical issues. Monster Hunter Worlds early preview weekends for instance, didn't incldue the town hub, any aspect of gear customization, or progression. It was just "heres you dude, here's 3 hunts you can do".. Which certainly is a poor impression when compared to the overall game. To swing the opposite direction, Anthem fired you on (to the best of my knowledge) the first few missions of the game during its previews, but was a completely unplayable mess due to various bugs, but notably a frequent infinite loading screen, which probably killed off interest and dissuaded potential buyers more then any positive gains.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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I think we need to clarify a "demo" here, as well.

A traditional demo in gaming is often simply a mission, or the first act of the game. That is to say, its the final product just restricted. The most classic example is the 90s shareware boom. Where you'd get Act 1/3 of games, then would have to pay for the rest if you wanted to finish (This was a staple of Apogee-later-3d Realms, and ID software in particular. For instance, DOOM (the original 1993) was released with Act 1 (nine levels) as a demo or shareware, with Acts 2 and 3 being in the purchased game.

While the various preview/stress test/early access/beta weekend stuff in current days would technically act as a preview, they're often not indicative of the actual game. And in some cases, fraught with technical issues. Monster Hunter Worlds early preview weekends for instance, didn't incldue the town hub, any aspect of gear customization, or progression. It was just "heres you dude, here's 3 hunts you can do".. Which certainly is a poor impression when compared to the overall game. To swing the opposite direction, Anthem fired you on (to the best of my knowledge) the first few missions of the game during its previews, but was a completely unplayable mess due to various bugs, but notably a frequent infinite loading screen, which probably killed off interest and dissuaded potential buyers more then any positive gains.
And in Anthem's case that was entirely indicative of the quality of the final game.

If a company is previewing a game and doesn't specifically say "this is a stress test meant to break the game" then when I load it up I expect a fully working game. If it has bugs and issues and it's a month from launch then I full expect all of those issues to still be present on launch. If they can't bother to put out a decent preview then why should I trust the final product to be any better, or for the final product to have decent support and fix those issues?

But yes, I was talking both in terms of traditional demos as well as "preview builds."
 

Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
I'm going to be totally honest, a demo has never convinced me to buy a game. I've played demos of games that I was pretty sure I was going to buy, sometimes just to make sure the game would run decently.

Tons of demos have made me not buy games because I ran into optimization issues and bugs. As a consumer, demos are great. From a publisher standpoint I'm not sure demos actually help sell games.
That's one of the reasons that publishers don't like to put out demos, there is more that can go wrong with them then right.

The last demo I played that sold me on a game and made me buy it immediately was 'The Golden Treasure: The Great Green'
And yes I will use every opportunity to pimp that game out since its awesome and like nothing else I have played.

Actually in the steam demo thing that was a few weeks ago a few demos did totally sell me on their games. Mainly.

But a few games did end up turning me off after I played the demos.
 

CastletonSnob

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"Development costs have gone up, so game prices need to go up" doesn't work as an excuse. AAA companies have MORE than enough money to cover the costs of developing a game. Most AAA companies don't even pay any taxes, so it's not like they're bleeding money.
 

Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
"Development costs have gone up, so game prices need to go up" doesn't work as an excuse. AAA companies have MORE than enough money to cover the costs of developing a game. Most AAA companies don't even pay any taxes, so it's not like they're bleeding money.
Sure they are, but it tends to be into the CEO's pocket.
 

Gordon_4

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Well, I remember paying $104.00AUD for Tekken 4 on the PS2 so this is not going to be new territory for me. I mean I’d prefer that this increase in cost meant we could wave goodbye to all the mobile gaming cancers that have infected mainstream gaming. I’d also prefer to wake up one day and realise it’s still 2015 and the last five years have been a horrific coma induced fever dream.

Or as Yahtzee once put it: “Hope into one hand, shit into the other and see which one fills up first, ************”
 

Eclipse Dragon

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No, I can't afford that and to be honest, I don't usually buy them at launch these days anyway.
If I'm still interested by the time the price goes down, I'll get it then. If not, I've saved money.
 

CriticalGaming

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Frankly I'm okay with $70 bucks so long as they go back to being full complete experiences again.


Publishers wanted to raise the price a decade ago, but public backlash wouldn't allow for it. So instead they showered us with DLC, which evolved into Microtransactions and lootboxes. Now legislation and the general public have gotten wise to the extra monetization they've been subjecting themselves too. Which means the publishers can't do it anymore.

they caved and kept games at $60 because they knew they'd make it up with the lootboxes and shit. Now that they can't do that anymore, they are once again moving to raise the price of the box game. Which if that is the cost of getting full complete games again without the bullshit, then fine.

However it remains to be seen what extra scummy shit they keep in the games with the higher base price. I don't imagine 2k giving up on ultimate teams and shit like that.

Games tend to loose value quickly, so I wonder how many more people will wait for sales or just general price drops.

If they don't sell copies at $70, you can bet they'll drop that price real quick.
 

144

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I'd be happy to pay the cost. It's been a long time coming.
Extra Credits did episodes on this exact subject, and I think they made a great argument.

Games Should Not Cost $60 Anymore - Inflation, Microtransactions, and Publishing

Why Do Games Cost So Much To Make? - AAA Game Budgets
 

The Rogue Wolf

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They can charge seventy bucks, a thousand bucks, or eleventy bajillion bucks for their games; that doesn't mean I'm going to pay that much for them. I only bought Crysis 3 when it hit Steam with a deep discount; what did I miss out on? The chance to play it when everyone else did?