Just to put a different angle on things, do we, the gamers demand games that cost $2-3 million to develop?
Would we buy a game for $60, or buy the same game for £30 with lesser graphics and a soundtrack by unknown bands and non celebrity voiceovers?
I'll admit I've pirated things before, but a lot of it does simply come down to price, and the only things I've bought new at release date for full price are the WOW expansions as you get left behind if you don't and they don't tend to go on 'sale' anyway.
It's not an ideal analogy, but I picked up Saint's Row 2 for £5 in the Direct2Drive sale, now I'd considered it before, but £30 isn't a throwaway amount of money, and I wasn't sure how it would run on my PC, and of course you can't take back PC games for a refund.
However, even if it had been £10 I would have gone for it and taken a punt on the game. Surprisingly I'm well below the min specs and it runs really nicely, however many people have had a lot of trouble. (I don't even have a dual core, just a 1.8ghz Sempron.)
Of course, value for money is relative, and I'm sure if I was earning £40,000 a year, I'd be buying a lot of full price games and playing em for a couple of days before they sat on my shelf forever. But as it is, there's a lot of people out there, especially now, who really have to think before they can choose to spend their remaining spare cash on a new game.
To me, the answer is to massively cut dev costs, and make the games more financially appealing to the mass market, I don't think I'd pirate anything at £10/$20 per game, but £50 for something I might only enjoy for a couple of hours, I could get drugs n hookers for that (not that I would)
Would we buy a game for $60, or buy the same game for £30 with lesser graphics and a soundtrack by unknown bands and non celebrity voiceovers?
I'll admit I've pirated things before, but a lot of it does simply come down to price, and the only things I've bought new at release date for full price are the WOW expansions as you get left behind if you don't and they don't tend to go on 'sale' anyway.
It's not an ideal analogy, but I picked up Saint's Row 2 for £5 in the Direct2Drive sale, now I'd considered it before, but £30 isn't a throwaway amount of money, and I wasn't sure how it would run on my PC, and of course you can't take back PC games for a refund.
However, even if it had been £10 I would have gone for it and taken a punt on the game. Surprisingly I'm well below the min specs and it runs really nicely, however many people have had a lot of trouble. (I don't even have a dual core, just a 1.8ghz Sempron.)
Of course, value for money is relative, and I'm sure if I was earning £40,000 a year, I'd be buying a lot of full price games and playing em for a couple of days before they sat on my shelf forever. But as it is, there's a lot of people out there, especially now, who really have to think before they can choose to spend their remaining spare cash on a new game.
To me, the answer is to massively cut dev costs, and make the games more financially appealing to the mass market, I don't think I'd pirate anything at £10/$20 per game, but £50 for something I might only enjoy for a couple of hours, I could get drugs n hookers for that (not that I would)