How Much SHOULD a Game Cost?

[Clyde64]

$60 for a new one in Australia. Why do I have to pay $100 when Americans get it for $60?

 

[LittleChone]

$30 dollars. The developers of the game get about $27, and besides, cheaper games means more people are willing to buy more.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

In AUS? The highest possible should be $60, for standard editions. Collector's editions and pre-orders are another matter entirely, though.

 

[PxDn Ninja]

(Cost of development + cost of licensing + distribution deals and advertising fees + manufacturing costs) * (1 + profit margin of publisher) * (1 + profit margin of retailer)

 

[Psycho Cat Industries]

Whatever the marketers choose.If their sales fall from over priced stuff then it is their own fault.That is why the market works well.It prevents monopolized price nazis.

 

[DudeistBelieve]

Based upon the honest quality of the title.

I would of bought Naughty Bear if it was 20.

 

[The_Blue_Rider]

Id be fine with $80 to be honest (stupid New Zealand having absurdly high videogame prices grumblegrumble)

 

[Romblen]

I would prefer it stay a $50 (US), that being said, I could understand developers raising the price as the price to make games also rises.

 

[mrdude2010]

They should stay $60.
Because they've been $50-60 since they started coming out, and changing it just because the part of the fanbase that doesn't recognize this complains is stupid.

they were $50 for the previous gen of consoles. i felt that was fair, especially considering the hard materials required to package the game, i figured it wasn't too bad. then the price went up to $60 for the new generation of consoles. initially that's okay, because it's new technology, but now that this generation has been around for 6 years with not exactly incredible graphics updates (yes they look prettier now than they did, but really? to that great of an extent?). it's time for a price drop back to $50 at this point

especially since PC games, which consistently run at a higher level of visual quality, customizability, and control, only rarely break $50 new.

 

[Nexoram]

Enough.

Enough to pay the people to make the game and enough not to make us broke.

Something like this, enough to pay for the game with a little bit of profit but not so expensive like it is today. Also, Australians have to pay much more for games ($40-$50) even though the US and Australian currencies are reaching parity very regularly now.

 

[babinro]

I find current gaming pricing to be more than fair for how much entertainment they provide compared to things like movies or a night out. Gaming is one of the best values for your dollar.

The only exception to this are MMO's that have pay for month fees. They simply do not offer enough benefits to warrant the ongoing costs of a game. These games should either be free, or cost the same as normal games but instead come with 4 months free to at least somewhat justify the purchase.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

around $50 for a video game.

About $40 for a PC game.

$30 for a hand held game.

Video game's are probably the most expensive to market, distribute, and produce, so I think right around $50 is a fair price.

PC games should be a bit less as they most likely cost slightly less to produce (I would assume something created on a PC for a PC wouldn't be as expensive as the 'console process').

Hand Held games aren't as thorough as full-fledged PC or Video Games, so they should consequently cost less.

I agree fully on this. $50 for a game is by no means unreasonable (unless you happen to be in debt like I am and haven't bought a game in the past 8 months). Game cost a lot to be made and the more money that the companies get the more that will go into the game. I could shell out a couple extra bucks if that means the games will improve because of it.

 

[SirDeadly]

It should definitely be less than $100 AUD... It'd ridiculously expensive down here, I can only afford 2-3 games a year if I'm lucky.

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

I'm fine with $60. I'm not happy about it, but I understand it's necessary with the high production costs nowadays.

 

[Vern]

$50.
SNES games were $50, N64 games were $50, Game cube games were $50, Xbox games were $50, PS2 games were $50.
Screw inflation, this is about tradition.

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.

 

[TheSquashedOrange]

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...

 

[Choppaduel]

Your thoughts?

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.

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.

 

[samjc3]

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)

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

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)

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.

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.

 

[mrdude2010]

Unless you have an intricate knowledge of the various costs associated with both a)Making the actual video game, and b)distributing/marketing the video game, I don't see how anybody here can actually claim that "THIS is how much a game should cost".

Obviously, the company is going to have to charge an appropriate amount so that, for one, the costs of actually making and marketing/distributing the thing are covered, AND enough of a profit is generated so that the company and its employees can stay afloat and live comfortably. I just think that there are a myriad of motivations behind charging people "X" amount of dollars for a certain game, and I think that very few people actually take that into consideration; instead, people do what people always do - complain about how expensive everything is.

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.

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