How Much SHOULD a Game Cost?
- Thread starter Siris
- Start date
I'm fine with $60. I'm not happy about it, but I understand it's necessary with the high production costs nowadays.
You never had to pay $70 for a new copy of Street Fighter 2 shortly after it was released. I believe Final Fantasy 3 retailed for $60, and The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past was $60 at release as well. Most of the cost during the SNES/N64 days was due to the memory space required for the games having to be stored in the cartridge. The system itself didn't really have a large amount of RAM, the ROM was stored in the cartridge, as well as SDRAM for save states, and if you remember back in 1992-1995 RAM was extremely expensive. Imagine paying two hundred dollars for a 4MB ram stick, which was the norm. Now you can get a gigabyte for $30. But again, at that point the cost varied greatly, mostly due to the nature of how media was stored. I believe Super Mario 64 was $70 when I got it a few months after launch, GoldenEye was $60. Honestly, most of the games for SNES and N64 at release were at least $60, with some being at $50. You didn't really see $50 console games become mainstream until the Playstation, which I'm assuming is mainly because it's quite a bit cheaper to just stamp a disc than make a cartridge with it's own internal memory chip. The only system that I've seen relatively consistent prices on is the PC, they stayed around $40 for most of the 90's, going up to the $50 mark in the last decade.rileyrulesu said:
Well, I live in Australia, and paying $110 dollars for a console game does seem rather dodgy, even to me. I'd say around $50, seems reasonable to me, although I wouldn't really know...
A game should be priced at whatever it can be sold for. Its up to the buyer to determine how much they are willing to pay. If you hold out on a game thats priced at $60, the retailer will narrow there margins to make a sale, or they won't have any margins at all.Siris said:
Then there's the formula theory. Where price is a function of cost, scale of the market, share of the market, marketability, etc.
I'm no economics buff, so I like the first way.
Remember, be patient.
Capitalism rocks. Whatever the devs/publisher want to sell it at is good. If consumers dont like it, they wont buy it.
Although I think some games should be more expensive, since it feels cheap to get 800+ hours of entertainment for like $60. (I have over 800 hours in Oblivion, FO3, and Mass Effect 2, which i payed $30, $30, and $60 for, respectively)
Although I think some games should be more expensive, since it feels cheap to get 800+ hours of entertainment for like $60. (I have over 800 hours in Oblivion, FO3, and Mass Effect 2, which i payed $30, $30, and $60 for, respectively)
Capitalism doesn't work when there's no competition over prices, though. I don't know how it happened, but the industry just up and decided that $60 would be the price for games. If a consumer wants to pay less, they generally have to either pirate the games, or buy them used or on sale -- and the companies see these things as problems to be squashed, not signs that $60 is too high for a significant portion of their customers. What we have here is an oligopoly that, for the purposes of price fixing, is just as anti-capitalistic as a monopoly.samjc3 said:
TL;DR: When the only option a customer has to show that a product costs too much is not to buy it, rather than to buy it cheaper from a competitor, capitalism isn't really working.
the problem is that not very game is of equal quality or cost, so obviously it would make sense for a high budget game to have a higher price, but EVERY game is $60, no matter how good, bad, cheap, or expensive it is.SonicKoala said:
also, game companies did fine with $50 games and they've had 6 years to get used to the current generations. they have no excuse for charging $60 anymore
yeah, that frame of mind is stupid in and of itself.Radeonx said:
When video games came onto the market in America, they HAD to be that price to earn a profit for all involved, because it was a huge risk to bring it into a market where the entertainment industry (shops and all) were giving up on video games altogether. Hell, the reason the NES was the Nintendo Entertainment System, was because they were trying to sell it as something other than a video games console to the stockists, hence why the cartridges were so large for such a small ROM.
Meanwhile in the UK, video games and the industry had no problems, so when Nintendo brought in their new console, with games at £50, Sega were selling Master System games for 20 quid and Spectrum games were going for 2 or 3 pounds, which is why (among other things) Nintendo didn't get a market until the SNES.
The fact of the matter is that video games are a huge industry today, and almost every household has a console of some sort. a DVD comes out and it's between 12-20 quid, and it sells a ton, it sells a ton when it's a tenner, and it still earns them a fuck-ton of profit. The reason places like GameStop have a dominance on the market is because they sell the pre-owned games for such a noticeable mark down. No matter what game it is, leave it a couple of months, it'll be cheap as hell second hand, where as it might not of gone down in price at all, brand new.
Lower prices means more people are going to decide they can spend that on a game, which means more sales, which makes up the difference in the price drop.
In Norway we pay in NK what would be around 100 US dollars per new game. Everyone who complains about 60 dollars should think about that.
I know how you feel, mate. Go to your local EB Games (we all have one) and try to price match to JB HiFi, Big W or even KMart. If you have a Gametraders handy then you should be okay.SirDeadly said:
Yes, and we'll have great fun when developers have to run on fumes, publishers will have to jack-up already ridiculous prices just to survive and piracy goes up 1000% in the first few years until the entire industry collapses.Serris said:
I seriously hope you are joking.
Remember when games used to be 50 bucks new? Namely every generation previous to this one. However with new graphics skyrocketing the development costs for the new generation, there was a need to increase prices to manage new costs.Owyn_Merrilin said:
If 60 dollars was too much for the consumers to bear, not many people would buy at that price point, meaning the producers would be forced to lower prices in order to sell an appreciable number of units to make up for costs. Since this is obviously not the case, 60 dollars is affordable enough to the consumer base, or at least enough for the companies to turn a profit at that price, meaning that they are likely to keep prices there until consumers make it clear games just aren't worth that much to them. But for now, they absolutely are.Owyn_Merrilin said:
Free market in action!
/bowArehexes said:
A pity not many people have commented on it, but I imagine some people have smirked.
Hell, I'm happy paying the $70 it costs in Canada to play most of the games I have. If it's a good game, the devs deserve money for it. As long as it's affordable I'm happy.
The prices you yanks put on games... You would cringe at the price of some releases over here when the pound was strong!