Poll: It is Time to Fix Game Prices

[Savagezion]

Games are expensive to make because we, the consumers demand better graphics, we demand HD resolution. We want games to get better, but we complain about the price.

Are games really tha<t expensive? You complain about game prices closing to 60 bucks. Here most Xbox 350 and OS3 games cost around 100 when they are released.I can pay 20 bucks for a movie and have entertainment for 2 hours. I can pay 100 bucks for a game and often have 10 times the entertainment just for a single playthrough.A game that lasts 10 hours will give you a value of 6 bucks an hour. Xenoblade has given me a value of far less than 1 dollar for each hour.

You also need to understand the market. Should game companies sacrifice their income without cutting expenses? Should game companies make us pat less when they know we're willing to pay the full price? The market doesn't work that way. A mega corporation like Activision doesn't care about pleasing us. They care about getting their money and as long as they do there's no need to change.

That is under the assumption that more people won't buy if the price were to drop by $20 bucks. That is the same logic as saying every pirated copy is a lost sale. There isn't a rule that a game that sells 1m copies at $60 would have sold to the same amount if it were $40. Personally, if I lived in Australia, I would be a past generation gamer. There is no way I would pay $100 for a game knowing how big that markup is.

I don't care how many hours of play it has, that is no justification. Skyrim is virtually endless due to randomly generated quests, but that doesn't mean it is justifiable to charge $20/month for the rest of your life. Skyrim is estimated to have cost ~100m (unconfirmed speculation currently because game pubs/devs usually hide this info.) Considering a list of movies too long to name have recouped that with modern movie ticket prices alone I think $40 is a safe number. When you figure in DvD sales to boot...

I will agree things won't change until consumers show the industry they can put the controller down long enough to say "enough is enough". Sadly, I think too many consumers are too comfortable eating out of the industry's hand to force any change in the market. This is why CoD has subscriptions now. This is how the industry is standing up telling consumers what they can and can't buy.

This is why we have crap like SOPA and ACTA. The industry simply has been handed too much power by consumers. Very little consumers realize they can take it back away from them and make them have to work to please US whenever they want.

 

[Zeren]

I never buy a game full price. I wait for STEAM to knock 20% or more off before I will buy it. That's how I solve it.

 

[dagens24]

The way I see it, $5 for an hour of entertainment is standard value. Most movies are about 2 hours and cost $10 to attend. I feel like that's a good baseline; $5 an hour. That means that I need to get 12 hours of entertainment out of a a full $60 priced game for it to have standard value. So when I hear people whine about $60 games I have to roll my eyes; I don't think there's a $60 that I've bought that I haven't gotten my 12 hours out of.

Now, this doesn't take into account the quality or amount of fun I'm having, but no pay system could. Your Halo could be my ET, my CoD could be your (insert another game as terrible as ET here).

 

[The_Blue_Rider]

I just want some goddamn standard pricing. Games in New Zealand shouldnt cost 20-40 more US dollars than in the states. Thats daylight robbery that publishers know they can get away with, as soon I turn 16 i plan on remedying this issue by ordering online.

Seriously i dont mind paying a little extra for shipping + handling costs but come on up to 40 USD extra per game? That smells of complete bull

 

[Zack Alklazaris]

They already price games accordingly to whether they are big budget or indie video games.

As for the price, while I was way too young to remember I have been told video games have always cost 50-60 dollars. Inflation wise they have actually gotten cheaper. In the 80s original nintendo games cost 50-60 dollars a pop. The prices are fine, in fact I'm surprise they don't cost more.

 

[Baconator96]

If the rumors of the new xbox being designed to disallow the use of used games is true, then games as a whole need to take a drastic price reduction.

 

[Von Strimmer]

You think $59.99 is hard to pay for? I live in Australia, and do you really think I could afford to fork out $100 for EVERY new release that comes out?

You're just as capable of doing that as we are. Your minimum wage is double our minimum wage. I'm not sure about your actual cost of living, but a quick Google search showed there wasn't a lot of disparity between what I see here in the US. Also, that dude's post was rational and level-headed. There was no need to jump down his throat like that.

Fella above is right. Hell I'm full time retail (studying) and I get around 19 an hour :/ Which I am sure is more than what your Average American retail employee is on. As I tell everyone our shit is more expensive down under because we demand more pay. If we went on the US pay scale for jobs of course everything would drop in price, but no one wants to do that.

I think the prices are fine as they are. I just have to wait a bit longer for games or give some a miss, its hardly the end of the world.

(Awful lot of entitlement beliefs on this website)

 

[endtherapture]

Sometimes I think that games are too expensive, but then I realise that games 10 years ago still cost £30, so there isn't really an increase in inflation when you think about it.

I get most of my games cheap on Steam sales and stuff though, and PC gaming is cheaper anyway so I'm not bothered by the price.

 

[zefiris]

I never by used - because if you are buying used, you are basically saying I'm legally pirating the game.

That is complete and utter nonsense, and it is sad that some people actually believe such nonsense.

Your property, you can sell it. That is not "piracy".Deal with it.


In fact, what is piracy is technically companies saying that you cannot sell your games, in other words, them saying you cannot do what you want with the property you bought.

 

[DeltaEdge]

Prices are fine the way that they are. They haven't really gotten more expensive than they ever were because like many have already said, they used to be just as expensive on average, if not more expensive back in the days of old (NES Era). With the economy the way it is, I'm rather surprised that the industry is still doing as well as it is. (Some people are out on the streets homeless, and we are arguing about how these luxuries that we are apparently "entitled to" should be cheaper. I'm just sayin') A tier system would be horrible. For one, it's too subjective, and to elaborate on that, there are many differing opinions about games. The only way to create a solid tier system would be to create an official game review rating committee and base the prices off of their opinions, and I think we can all agree that leaving the price of a game up to how well it is reviewed by a single group of people would be stupid. Also, games are priced on how much they intend to make, not how much that we think it's worth. As U.S citizens, we live in a capitalist society, and trying to control the prices of games and put them where we see fit kind of defeats the purpose of a perfectly good (or maybe not, we aren't doing so hot at the moment)free enterprise system doesn't it? And like another poster mentioned, we have it easy compared to gamers in Australia who have to pay 100 for their games when their currency is worth more than ours. THAT kind of pricing is whats unacceptable. What we have is simply what the price has always been. Unless you want to give developers an excuse to make crappier games on the account of "you want lower priced games? Then here's your cheaper game. A really good game will be more expensive", you really shouldn't complain about the prices of new games. If people really can't afford them, no one will buy them, this will force the companies to accommodate for us by lowering the prices. The games no one likes will always go down in price, while the ones people like will maintain a higher price and drop slowly, and all of them will gradually drop slowly in price as time goes on. I don't really have any problem with that kind of system, and I don't understand why you feel entitled to cheaper prices for luxury goods which are already cheaper than they could be. I could easily see games as very expensive things that only rich people could afford, and I consider it rather fortunate that regular people can even afford to buy so many of them.

 

[00slash00]

i assume people who complain about prices are either young or dont have a very good memory. near the end of the lifespan of the snes, i can remember going into eb games and seeing new games selling for almost $80 and back then i dont think they even sold used games. even so, no one was complaining about the price. i dont know what happened to gamers over the years but i guess maybe used games just spoiled us. $60 is fine with me. sure, it means that i dont buy video games every month, but it also means the games i do buy, i buy because i really want them

 

[L-J-F]

You haven't felt ripped off until suddenly you realize you're paying an extra 80% because you're an Aussie, trust me.

 

[Drejer43]

that is such an awesome image, seriously that cracked me up. thanks.