Dryk said:
If budgets keep rising the way the gaming industry is just to look like a pack of wolves fighting over a carcass. People aren't magically generating more and more money out of nowhere over time and they're going to have to face up to that eventually.
mfeff said:
Publishers don't care about selling more copies later though, they want to make all their sales in the first week, make a shit-ton of money and then have it forgotten about. A high price stops that plan dead in it's tracks.
Not to mention that each person who can't afford a $60 game is another person who isn't telling his friends about this awesome game he found.
There is certainly a push for the first 48-72 hour sell through. As it was my experience when I worked in distribution in the "games industry" years ago. To anecdote when I was offered a store that was "floundering" I modified some of the price structures as well as the policy of the store. The store was earning around 330,000-350,000 U.S. a year when I took it over.
In a year I had it up to 1.6 million. The issue became one of replication in the retail chain. What your saying rings true as to the resistance to change and short shortsightedness that I encountered throughout the U.S. game industry. This store was in a very "urban" environment. My success here earned me the nickname "prince of the ghetto". Let that sink in for a minute as to how much these "people" opinion the lower class.
The push is more on the retail side rather than the publisher side anyways. Retailers purchase in bulk and often do not want to be "storing for fun", hundreds of thousands, or even millions of copies of a product. It cost "something" just to have them on pallets.
Mass Effect 3 sold three million copies! Break out the champaign!
Well not exactly, 3 million units are being stored at the retailer. That number is coupled with the direct download sales, again without the numbers it's difficult to tell what has actually sold until the earnings reports come out. That said, ME3 was expected to hit the 5 million mark... good luck with that.
I mention this to further illustrate and clarify "marketing people couldn't find their ass with both hands and a map".
So let's look at what you just said.
Budgets. Not really sure if you mean game development budgets or personal budgets that show a reduction to the amount of fluid spendable money towards the purchase of entertainment.
Games, in an arms race to achieve a certain look and animation quality have certainly increased the cost to make. Most of that cost is from attempting to compress the creation time to bring the product to market faster. Not really so much that "it cost more to make games". That is a pretty meaningless statement without a reason as to why it went up. I have shown time...
and time...
and time again... that content creation cost have gone DOWN, not up per unit of creation widget.
Game "budgets" are semantically tied into marketing budgets. That being said, since 2004 to 2008 the game industry doubled it's advertising budget. From 2008 to 2012 it tripled it AGAIN on the previous double. This is exponential spending on advertising and accounts for most of what a game "cost" to make. A huge portion of the price of a AAA game is the purchaser subsidizing the advertising cost of the thing he just bought. Reflect on this in a moment of contemplation.
Diablo III adds on every web site? SWToR adds on T.V.?
Now if cost of creation becomes more or less a fixed, and it is headed that way, the target pool is approximately known, then it is simply a derivative of the unit per unit sale per unit profit margin. That is to say, earn 20 percent above cost, 30 percent? It helps to know where one wants to be. Clearly one wants to be on the highest possible point of the curve.
Audience budget. Maybe it has gone down, maybe it has gone up. That there has been a downturn in sales is not an indication that there is less disposable income towards the units purchase. It is a possible factor, but not necessarily THE factor.
Owners, statistically per console, typically buy 6-8 NEW titles during the entire cycle life of a system, and there are new games being released all the time, then it is plausible that it is competition, it is also plausible that cheaper games through digital download are offsetting the end user's time in such a case that he or she simply has no desire to purchase the new widget. To answer the question outside of "speculation land" one needs the data. That data is guarded, so anyone's guess is as good as any other.
This is one of the primary reasons of the "used games" debate.
Other factors: DLC - extending product life (offering a by-pass to used), sticking to a product - CoD, Battlefield are great examples of this (hence the pay to play garbage being tossed around), handhelds and micro transaction games - market saturation. Could go on... and on... and on....... it's pedantic.
So is it less money to blow? Are games to expensive? Maybe. Are there areas where cost could be streamlined in product creation? Most certainly... again, as it was and has been my experience the "games industry" is LOADED with slop and money waste. Those cost are reflected in the title.
So... let's see... don't care about selling copies later... ummm, yes they do. I have already detailed that above. It's retail chains that don't want to float boxes of shite with no home to go to. Clearly the publisher would love nothing more than to move another 1.5 million units to that retail chain.
That it is not built into the price structuring on the front it is probably right on. Though this simply reiterates my point... which I will mention again.
"marketing people couldn't find their ass with both hands and a map".
To reflect this again, is to say that as the price of content creation per widget in a compressed period of time becomes fixed, it is advantageous to continue to market the product one already has for whatever one may get for it unit such time that one has something else to sell.
When we see this not being done... you guessed it...
"marketing people couldn't find their ass with both hands and a map".
mention that each person... yadda yadda... right.
The key here is that (especially younger people) who "DO" have a copy of "the next best thing", DO have a copy and are telling everyone about it... thus this creates (ideally) a sense of urgency and "keeping up with the crowed" mentality. Leveraged greed is a beautiful thing. Slashing a price can negatively impact the impression of a titles "worth", thus pricing something high... cars are a great example, instill in the idiots mind that it is "actually" worth what the price tag says it's worth.
Constantly slashing prices to hit a market penetration rate to maximize the initial impact of sales "could" lead to a market crash.
Prices... as an honest opinion... they are going to go up, not down. Especially if these "so called" cost keep trending up. The cost increases will be bundled with plastic crap and the DLC kicked in... how generous. Then a middling product, (same thing just without the plastic crap toy and DLC), and then perhaps a stripped down version a little cheaper.
We can say this because it is already here. This is lunch break stuff... as I said... haven't even tickled the surface of "how and why" these things are done.
A wise man once told me... if you want to be rich, stop thinking like a poor person.
