OutrageousEmu said:
Therumancer said:
Given that the high asking price is justified by the abillity to recoup part of that expense through trade ins,
It fucking is not! The so caled high asking price is the one that hasn't been affected by inflation since videogames were first sold in the mid fucking eighties. If it were a fair price, it would be adjust for inflation to $121, without any ability to resell.
Incorrect to a massive degree. I really did have a computer in the 1980s so I can actually say that with authority even if I was a kid at the time. Most people who claim this are of course lying because really there weren't that many units out there.
At any rate, to begin with the high software prices were justified by limited sales, a video game that moved a few hundred or a few thousand copies was doing really well, and devs were literally working out of their basements and such.
The issue is now that your dealing with computers and consoles being present in almost every home, and games are moving hundreds of thousands or even millions of copies, with the industry raking in billions in profit from the units moved. The volume of sales and mass production is high enough where prices by definition should have been going down dramatically in a very real sense. Rather the prices have been increasing due to coordinated price hikes.
The problem with the gaming industry right now actually starts with the developers. See, the way games are developed is usually that a producer says he wants to invest in a game to make money. He might either have an idea (or one put together by a focus group) or leave it to the developers to come up with something they want to sell. The Developers then give the publisher a price and a time frame in which to create that game. The actual costs in producing a game are minimal compared to these budgets, the bulk of the money going into the cost of human resources... what the developers decide they want to pay themselves for the time worked.
Developers generally do not make any money off of the sales, rather the publishers do, needing to recoup what they paid the devs with the costs above that being profit. When a game comes out, the developer has generally gotten it's money already.
The high price of games is the rising price of game development in many cases, due to developers becoming increaisngly greedy despite their claims of living hand to mouth. They look at the profits producers are making and decide "we want more of that for the same work" leading to the current problem. When a code monkey might want $100k a year to bang out lines of code for a two year development cycle that kind of thing really raises the price of games. Those demands are also why developing games like they used to is hard because all the guys who do graphics and such want so much money for their work hiring enough people can be difficult.
Incidently this system is also at the root of the finaicial problems with games like "Duke Nukem Forever". See if a producer gives a developer money for a game they use it to pay themselves, and that means if they don't produce anything the money is gone with no real way to recoup it. The worst that can usually be done is not hiring the developer again. This is why there were issues with the missing 30 million dollars (or whatver it was) paid into the development of DNF because the dev team basically lived off of that money while not actually producing much in the way of an actual product other than some screenshots and coming soon blurbs.
Now granted, this can work other ways as well, sometimes a developer will take a loan from a producer to make a game, and then itself reap the profits in hopes of making enough to pay back the loan. This is less common because after all if a developer borrows money, pays itself, and then doesn't produce anything and goes out of business or delcares bankrupcy the producer is pretty much screwed.
This is the basics, but it's been covered in things like "Game Informer" and other sources over the years.
Another point to consider is that the gaming industry basically operates as an illegal cartel, albiet one that has not gotten attention from the goverment yet. One thing you'll notice is that all games cost the same basic prices. A game that takes a million dollars to develop and one that takes a hundred million both sell for the same $60 price tag. This is because the industry coordinates prices so nobody will try and undercut each other. You'll also notice that despite all the hype about competition, you usually see releases staggered through the year so big titles don't go head to head with each other more than nessicary so nobody winds up in the intended position of having to try and produce the highest quality product for the lowest price, and everyone can make money without having to divide what the market can bear at any given time.
Overall with the number of computers and consoles out there, games should be going for like $20 a pop tops. Of course that would require massive industry reforms including things like developers receiving reasonable salaries, and also being made to actually work on producing for the entire time they are being paid (like a real job). Not to mention goverment monitoring of the industry to end price setting and force competion. What the industry is doing is very similar to what you've seen with gas/oil cartels setting gas prices in the US so they don't have to compete with each other (which has gradually been changing due to goverment attention, even if it's a constant battle). This means prices would lower while quality would go up as games actually have to try and undercut and outperform each other
for the same market.
It's not really crazy, it's simply an understanding of how things work. I've read a lot about it over the years.
One valid point to consider though is that a lot of those dev budgets also go towards the salaries of a few individuals. Guys like Itigaki and Peter Molyneux pay themselves very well out of their dev budgets. I think Itigaki (the guy who did Dead Or Alive and Ninja Gaiden) was fighting over like 20 million dollars he was owed at one point (which is crazy for someone who makes video games). That's an aspect of things that need to be dealt with as
well I feel.
See, the issue is that while gaming has the potential to be as big as Hollywood and Pro Sports combined (another whole discussion) it's not there yet, and it's being strangled by short term greed. Right now you wind up with game developers and publisher CEOS that want to act like the industry is there already and live like Rock Stars with their private jets, multi-million dollar paydays, and celebrity guests/voice actors. I mean crap, Miyamoto signed some dude's arm on request. Too much too soon is the problem, and these game price tags are the result of the bill for all of this being passed on to us consumers.
Also to explain what I mean by making these guys produce (mentioned above), one of the big reasons why a lot of games are released as such huge messes is because a lot of times the devs take their money and then just goof off while living off of it. Then as the release date comes along they haven't done a lot of the work, and need to say crunch 2 years of development into a period of like six months. A lot of people don't want to believe this, but look at a lot of games that have gotten pushed up, and stories about how a game that has been in development for a year or more doesn't actually have much going for it except for a trailer. DNF simply being the most infamous example of this. It's also the story behind some of these crunch-time stories by the wives of developers you hear when devs are forced to work non-stop for the last few months before release to try and get a product in releasable shape.
I'm NOT a nice guy about this, but I criticize the gaming industry, it's price, and it's practices for some good reasons, and I've been following this for quite a while. I think the problem is that most people who defend the industry tend to forget all the little incidents they hear about, the little exposes, and that kind of stuff instead of putting them together to form a clear picture.
Granted, not all developers are quite the wanna-be Rockstars of Ion-Storm in it's prime (perhaps the worst when it's come to a lot of this stuff) but I think a lot of them become a lot closer than we fans might want to admit to ourselves.
