Jimquisition: Don't Charge Retail Prices For Digital Games

[Nuke_em_05]

As far as the statement that they cost different to distribute, and should therefore be priced differently, this is just wrong. It's an argument that I see for piracy as well. The premise is false. You are not buying a disk and a box. The cost of the disk, imaging it, and packaging it is maybe maybe $1 ea. You are buying a license, and the aggregate distribution costs are incorporated into that price.

It isn't like digital distribution is 100% free, either. They have to pay for servers, maintenance, bandwidth, merchant accounts, etc.

Did it ever cross your mind, Jim, that maybe publishers keep the prices the same for customer equity? What if I don't have the bandwidth or usage cap for periodic 3-6gb game file downloads? What if I don't have the hard drive space to store/install them? I need to pay more because I prefer a disk? I imagine that a price disparity such as you suggest would bring about a lot of consumer backlash.

I think you have a valid point with the $60 price point overall. It isn't that one distribution method is priced this way, it is that any distribution method is priced this way. Fight for a lower price point altogether, but singling out just one is going to get you serious backlash from the other.

 

[QUINTIX]

It used to be that PC games where $50 at launch while the console counterparts where $60. Whatever happened to that model?

The whole entertainment pricing scheme, outside of music, sucks. During the great depression the film industry thrived. Not even 30 years ago $10 (adjusted for inflation) would provide hours of entertainment at either the cinema or the arcade... with snacks and beverages! Now the commercial visual arts waxes and wanes with the disposable income of a nation's population. The only reason why gaming grows is that there is room to grow. If it had the same market saturation as cinema, it would be shrinking just like cinema.

 

[Doom972]

I've been wondering about this subject ever since I began buying digital almost exclusively, with special editions for certain games and rare retail deals being the exception.
I understood that the reason for the situation being what it is probably the fear of retail stores banning publishers and the publishers not having the balls to challenge the retailers' threat.
The current solution seems to be the discount sales.
I don't buy a game until I can get it at a price I find justifiable and sometimes if a game's price doesn't drop and it doesn't get a sale for some time I lose interest in it, which is a money save for me and a lost sale for a greedy publisher.
I hope others are doing the same, so publishers will understand that we value our money and won't throw away 50$ for just any game. Don't get me started on 60$ games.

 

[Ishigami]

Steam is not the holy grail of digital distribution. Stop praising it.
Steam deals / daily offer etc. are cony-catcher. These offers are there to convince you to cash in now because otherwise you lose out on a supposedly cheap deal. In the end many people will therefore buy more games, more often and even games they usually wouldn?t pick up. In the end many will spend more money on Steam for games they don't even play. At the same time it increases acceptance of the service leading even to more full price sales.
It is like the F2P model of many MMOs. Many people will in the end pay more to play F2P than they would have paid subscription fees on an P2P MMO.
If a game is not on such a special offer it still cost as much or even more than retail.
No Steam is not cheaper.

 

[Corven]

This could be applied to how just 1 or 2 years ago pc games were for the most part always 10 dollars cheaper since devs and publishers didn't have to deal with licensing fees on consoles, but nowadays they're just as expensive as console counter parts for no justifiable reason other than publishers wanted the extra 10 bucks.

 

[Jimothy Sterling]

God, I wish there was a way to remove Jimquisition from my latest videos page.

Perfectly understandable. I realize that for some, it is difficult having my face appear in their feeds because any passing girlfriends and boyfriends will fall in love with it and leave you in order to seek my hand (my own wife, upon seeing one of my videos, actually divorced me in order to marry me again. It was very troublesome).

I assume this is the problem anyway, since it's the only logical one I have as to how simply seeing the existence of a video in a feed is a problem to anybody. In any case, you can let your significant others know that I am off the market and so they should probably stick with whoever they settled for.

 

[ex275w]

The problem is that the systems are so static, since their isn't any competition between digital distributors yet, the prices remain static. I find digital distribution great because games in Mexico can cost 75$ and in origin they are available at 35$. I haven't seen any computer games in stores here in Mexico, so my only options are to buy them through Steam or become a pedophile burglar.

So digital prices are great for me, though they could surely be lower.

 

[4173]

Wow. It's almost as companies may be beholden to people who don't care about video games or the "video game community." I don't think any of the giants are private corporations are they?


As always, I'm impressed with how generous everyone is with other people's money.


Likewise, I'm sure there's no risk in being an innovator or early adopter. Seen any zeppelins lately? "Hey EA guy, why are you such a pussy? Worried you might lose your job? What a *****."


Of course it's not a moral issue, because they are fucking video games. They are not fucking vaccines.

 

[Ilikemilkshake]

And that my friends, is why I do all my game shopping from Amazon/Gamestop.

I got Mass Effect 3 on PC for 36 euro off Gamestop on release day. For PS3 it would've cost me 45-55 euro as a physical copy.

Last time I checked it was still SEVENTY FUCKING EURO on the Playstation Store.

I often see digital copies of games like ME3 or FIFA 12 on the psn store with hundreds or thousands of ratings. This would imply that thousands of people were buying these games digitally seeing as you can't rate something unless you've bought it.

On the UK psn these games cost £50-£55 which is £10-15 more than physical copies, what i want to know is who is stupid enough to pay this amount? It's ridiculous.

Pretty much if it weren't for steam sales there would be practically no reason to buy digital games, which is a shame =[

 

[ex275w]

Snippity Snappity Snoop

I often see digital copies of games like ME3 or FIFA 12 on the psn store with hundreds or thousands of ratings. This would imply that thousands of people were buying these games digitally seeing as you can't rate something unless you've bought it.

On the UK psn these games cost £50-£55 which is £10-15 more than physical copies, what i want to know is who is stupid enough to pay this amount? It's ridiculous.

Pretty much if it weren't for steam sales there would be practically no reason to buy digital games, which is a shame =[

I guess some people feel safe with their digital copies tied to an account, since DRM has ruined infinite installations.

I guess the people who buy them don't have access to the physical copies? The last PC game I bought was the Starcraft Battlchest back in 2007, I seriously haven't seen another pc game here in Mexico since. Plus Digital prices are lower here than retail prices, I was surprised Origin had decent prices.

Captcha: Body surfing...

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

I saw the title of this weeks episode and I was like

FUCK

FUCK

YES

OH GOD YES

MAKE IT SO MR STERLING

...I was impressed with my high-level cognitive thought process during the period between me glancing at and clicking on the link to your video. Very impressed. I've been endlessly baffled by this and Jim has perfectly illustrated all the reasons it makes no fucking sense and needs to stop right now before it rips the industry apart like a crayfish in boiling water. Unfortunately Jim provides no solutions. I'd suggest "boycott" but it would mean the shepharding of thousands of millions of people into completely dismissing an entire storefront that's instantly accessible from every corner of the globe at all times. And that would be downright nutty.

 

[The Human Torch]

This also goes for Guild Wars 2, it's for sale on Arena Net's own website for 59,99 Euro, but I can pre-order it for 45,- Euro at my local gameshop. It's insanity. It almost put me off buying Guild Wars 2 entirely, because I just couldn't behind Arena Net's horrible business practice.

 

[Petromir]

So, people are saying that if publishers price their digital games lower than retail, retail won't stock them. Since this seems to be primarily for PC games, I say... so? Isn't PC at retail all but dead? The amount of people who got to a store to buy PC games is very, very few. Most use Steam now.

If Sony can charge less for their digital Vita games and have stores still stock the physical copies, I don't see why publishers can't do the same with PC games.

Besides, PC gaming at retail died completely, would it really make much of an impact? Is the retail PC games market really such a huge market that they won't risk losing it? Considering PC sections in retailers are really small and out of the way and getting smaller, I highly doubt it.

It's not the stores pulling their PC stocks that publishers are worried at, its pulling ALL a publishers games across ALL platforms due to pc dd pricing. Consoles are still massive in bricks and mortar.

 

[Irridium]

So, people are saying that if publishers price their digital games lower than retail, retail won't stock them. Since this seems to be primarily for PC games, I say... so? Isn't PC at retail all but dead? The amount of people who got to a store to buy PC games is very, very few. Most use Steam now.

If Sony can charge less for their digital Vita games and have stores still stock the physical copies, I don't see why publishers can't do the same with PC games.

Besides, PC gaming at retail died completely, would it really make much of an impact? Is the retail PC games market really such a huge market that they won't risk losing it? Considering PC sections in retailers are really small and out of the way and getting smaller, I highly doubt it.

It's not the stores pulling their PC stocks that publishers are worried at, its pulling ALL a publishers games across ALL platforms due to pc dd pricing. Consoles are still massive in bricks and mortar.

I seriously doubt retailers would stop stocking titles from the large and profitable console market to try and keep the really small and barely profitable PC market.

captcha: market forces

haha

 

[Quiotu]

I'm fairly certain that the console makers would like nothing better than to make their DD network friendlier and more popular among their subscribers. It really is the publishers, particularly the huge ones, that are pushing the price points up... and until recently probably had complete say for how much their titles were. Also, somehow it's the Japanese publishers that are the worst. Taking Jim's example, Atlus is one of the few Japanese publishers I completely respect anymore, but their games on PSN were all full price until just a month ago, only going down in price during an occasional week-long special.

Still seems like a miracle that Sony managed to lower the price of DD games for the Vita, and it's still not perfect, but you have to figure Sony had to bend over backwards to get publishers to cooperate.

It honestly is odd to see Sony be one of the first to push prices down for digital content next to Valve. To a lesser extent CDProjectRed and GOG help as well, but that's more helping through content availability than pricing.

 

[chiefohara]

Enjoyable video.

Gotta be honest though, i like my collector's editions. Not that keen on retail being dead and gone, digital, yes its the future and yes you make complete sense with the price being totally incorrect, but from a selfish point of view, im glad publishers are being douches about this because it keeps my archaic precious Retail hardcopy source of games alive

 

[Tharwen]

Hooray for Hitler!

 

[daxterx2005]

I feel like I've been living under a rock since I buy all my games off Amazon/gamestop/eBay.
Never in hundred years did I think games would be default 60-70 dollars on launch, thats madness.

 

[Eric the Orange]

Next thing we know publishers will make digital versions cheaper... by making physical copies more expensive.
From their point of view it makes sense.

Oh god I can see them doing that too. There "reasoning" (or how they spin it to the press) would be that "the price of game development has gone up, so to make back the cost, the price of games has to rise too".

 

[Spankable]

Just payed £32 for Diblo III from Amazon in the UK, the digital copy would be £45. Surely even if they price matched the publisher would make more money, surely activison getting £25 at most from a physical sale with the rest going to creating the product, amazon costs & free shipping.

Jim made good point about the power of GameStop, we don't have them in the UK, we still need a physical distributer, but surely Amazon can do that, they actively encourage competition.

Modern AAA publishers are slick Corporation & can't be that blind, charege £30, add 20% to your profits, sell a phisical copy through amazon for £32.


They can't be all that dumb. Sorry Jim you, an all of us, are clearly missing the reason for this.