Sabiancym said:
This isn't a troll post to insult anyone, it's a genuine interest into why as a group, gamers tend to be very cheap when it comes to the cost of games and gaming equipment.
When console games went from $50 to $60, you had petitions, swearing off gaming, and people who actually sold their consoles simply because they had to pay an extra $10.
So why is this? The average gamer age is high twenties to low thirties depending on which study you look at, so they should have enough money to drop on gaming, yet all I ever see are posts about people waiting to buy something until it's in the bargain bin. Or people demanding a game company reimburse them for some minor thing that really doesn't even effect their experience.
I'm not saying being economically aware is a bad thing, but I just wonder what this industry would be like if gamers were a bit more willing to spend. If big games were $80, the quality and depth would skyrocket. These developers would have more money to invest into technology and developers and that equals a better product.
Well, to most of us, the method by which a game is created is a bit of a mystery. We know there's a lot of hullabaloo in making the story and gameplay, but I'm talking after the game itself is made, how does it make it to those wonderful round discs we generously feed into our consoles? In most people's minds, it works the same way as burning a cd; the developers have the data for the game stored neatly away, so all they have to do is burn that data onto the dvd, maybe add in whatever security that restricts it from being played on anything but the specific system it was designed for, and then sell it. I could be wrong here, but this seems to be the most logical method by which the game data makes it onto the discs we play.
In this way, the cost to make a game doesn't necessarily rise once the actual game was made. Back when consoles ran on cartridges, the cartridges were relatively expensive to create, usually demanding a surprising portion of the cost of the game. Nowadays, DVDs are cheap, and can be bought in bulk for pennies on the dollar. To add into this, most game developers are rather poor at selling their games, as, despite the all-too-easy method of production I theorized above, most games only have a production period of a couple months before they immediately cease all production and not one extra copy of the game is released. Then the only way to get said game is via Used, which, as has been said in the Used vs. New debate since the dawn of time, means that the money paid for that, however low it may be, never makes it to the developers.
In short, the reason why the price in games went up wasn't really because of some dramatic increase in depth (technology maybe, but NOT depth), but because developers needed to get profit from their games, and given how few New copies most games are expected to sell, they had to increase the price to at least make ends meet. This may be a very simple summary of an all-too-complex debate, but in my eyes it seems to be one of the most likely culprits.
As to whether or not games would "rise in quality" if we were more willing to spend, please take a look at Facebook, and more importantly, companies like Popcap and Zynga. These two developers create simple flash games and rake in millions of dollars a year, as much as most AAA developers. And yet, all they do is continue to make simple flash games. If a developer gets more money, it doesn't mean they're going to create higher-quality games. If anything, they're going to rest on their laurels, constantly dish out sequel after sequel of the same game, believing it will have the same impact and sales that the original did (For proof of this, see Square Enix and the lovely position they're currently in)
Also, let's not forget that we've been in a bit of a recession for the past few years. This sort of falls in line on both ends. It explains why the developers wanted more money for games (to make ends meet on their side) and why gamers so vehemently opposed the price hike (because so many of us just didn't/don't have that kind of extra money to throw around).
Sabiancym said:
MMOs constantly get hated on by a group of gamers, yet they are a considerably better deal if you look at the cost to gameplay hour ratio. Very few people play one non-mmo game for years. If you buy one game every 3-4 months, it's exactly the same cost as an mmo.
C/Gh ratio aside, a lot of the people who hate on MMOs do so because Subscription-based gaming didn't exist until they came along. Games were buy-once-play-forever, and when these games showed up saying "Pay us $XX, then pay us $X every month until you get sick of the game" just sort of aggravated people.
Another good reason why a lot of people may hate MMOs is because outside of having a good Cost to Gameplay hour ratio, they have a poor
Quality to Gameplay hour ratio. What I mean by this is, whereas most games have Hard Modes, Time Attacks, Boss Rushes, and all sorts of things in the story mode and out that make the game
more fun to play as you proceed to play it, most MMOs get
less fun the longer you play it.
I mean, picture it. You just started a brand new character on an MMO you've never played, and it's great! You're leveling up every few minutes, you're getting gear like crazy, everything's super cheap so you always have money to spare, you're just having a blast. Skip ahead to about halfway through, leveling takes an hour or two now, the gear you want is just out of your price range so you need to start saving up, but you're still having fun. Now skip once more to when you hit the level cap. Most of the levels before the cap take 5-6 hours of questing, gear requires twice that much grinding to earn enough to buy it, and now you've gotten all your abilities and the only paths left are Raiding, PvP, or starting an alt, but now you know enough about the game to at least plot your route from 1-cap, and if you want to avoid the quests you did, you need to do even more plotting.
I'm not saying you're not having fun, I'm saying that MMOs, by their very nature, are games designed to suck as much money from you as possible before you get burnt out from it. And you always do get burnt out. I have never seen a person who could play an MMO in the same way they (re)play a (console) game that they own.
Sabiancym said:
DLC is constantly bashed by people not wanting to pay for extra content. Yet there are a ton of hobbies where extra things cost more. Booster packs for card games, parts for the car enthusiasts, etc.
The problem with DLC is that there are a lot of cases, or at least a lot of paranoia, that the content held within was simply held back from the release to earn a few extra bucks. There are tons of games that are released with a handful of DLC on Day One. This just doesn't seem right nor fair.
No one would deny that seeing a DLC pack a year or two after a game's release would be like a godsend, and tons of people would buy it up in a freaking heartbeat. But too many developers are using it as an underhanded means of getting money from the Used crowd, or as an incentive to buy New.
