Why the 'games are cheaper than ever argument' is complete bullshit.

[Something Amyss]

Then that is what needs to be compared, not singles. How much would a consumer pay for a big act back then compared to now?

I'm not sure I follow. We as the consumer don't pay the production cost any more directly than any other consumer group. I'm not even sure there's a direct correlation one can follow, as music companies rarely announce that CD X has to sell Y million copies or the artist is fired.

Led Zeppelin were touring in their own private Boeing 720 passenger jet. I doubt costs have gone up significantly from that sort of extravagance. Games, on the other hand, have seen production costs rise by 3-4 orders of magnitude.

And it was treated as an extravagance even by the standards of the industry. You're cherry picking one example vs a whole industry. The CoD teams could have gold plated keyboards and a revolving lineup of strippers, but it wouldn't change the industry overall.

 

[Wulfram77]

Computer game prices seem just kinda weird, really. What with so many games releasing at the same price, despite often massively divergent quality. And with the price so rapidly dropping, and most consumers apparently still being eager to buy their games at full launch price

 

[loc978]

Ever here on games sites how games are cheaper than ever? how they havent gone up in price? and some website say games should now cost about $100.

I have one word for that bullshit!

Consumer entertainment products anywhere other than the games industry ACTUALLY reduce in price over the years to come.

Remember how much VHS videos used to cost? about £30+ Ex-rental tapes used to cost £100 or more, I shit you not.


Remember CD's? Whole albums used to cost over £20 singles used to cost £4. Now full albums are less than £10 and singles cost under a £1. The price of consumer electronics decrease in every single other sector except games, its total shit.

So the next time you hear this argument you can say that, historically, movies, music and any other entertainment medium decrease in price rather than increase. So in other words Gaming in the only industry that still has yet to evolve.

In the case of both music and movies, the price to produce the content has either stayed level or gone down. The price to produce games has gone nothing but up, at least outside of indie development. Distribution costs have of course gone down in all cases... so I'm pretty sure on the scales of cost vs income, game development is mirroring movies in their early years of legitimacy by simply not adjusting for inflation.

That's why, yes, games are cheaper than ever. To use the example of the most popular big-budget RPG of a given era... $80 for Chrono Trigger at its release in 1995 (yes, that was the price) would be equivalent to $118 for Skyrim at its release in 2011, if adjusted for inflation. Even assuming a standard release price of $55 (which is what crappy licensed-product games cost in the 90s), you'd still be looking at $81 in 2011 or a bit over $85 in 2014.

In short: profits are going up, consumers are being exploited... but no harder than fans of Hollywood blockbusters back in the 70s... I'd say it's a bit less bad than the price of movie theater experiences nowadays. Inflation is nearly as big a ***** as greed.

Mind you, this may or may not apply in pounds sterling. I don't know a damn thing about British macroeconomics... but a vast majority of games aren't made there, so regardless of local inflation you're always going to be the victim of a worldwide market that prices itself in equal parts off Japanese yen or US dollars.

 

[MHR]

I'm also going to parrot an abundantly obvious idea. You don't need to be paying 60$ for your games. Wait a while and it gets cheaper. I have so many games now from Steam sales and have so much to play, that I don't really consider buying these new crap games at 60$ now.

Some amazing once-in-a-year games like Skyrim are an exception. Skyrim rules, so I paid 60 for that.

But buying everything on release night and complaining that it's too expensive is silly.

I'm almost thankful that games start out at 60 dollars, that way the people with tons of disposable income and few impulse inhibitions will buy up everything at release and then I can get it at 66-75% off down the line. They support the developers with the big incentive bucks and I get a ton of games stupidly cheap. Freakin' love Steam. I think the system works great.

That's not even counting smaller/indie games. I can get an indie game for cheaper than the price of my lunch I had that day and I can get hundreds of hours of playtime out of some of them.

 

[Bad Jim]

Led Zeppelin were touring in their own private Boeing 720 passenger jet. I doubt costs have gone up significantly from that sort of extravagance. Games, on the other hand, have seen production costs rise by 3-4 orders of magnitude.

And it was treated as an extravagance even by the standards of the industry. You're cherry picking one example vs a whole industry. The CoD teams could have gold plated keyboards and a revolving lineup of strippers, but it wouldn't change the industry overall.

The Beatles also had a private jet, as did the Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Elton John, Micheal Jackson, U2, Iron Maiden, Bon Jovi, The Eagles etc. It's actually not that crazy, because they shorten the travel time between gigs, allowing more gigs to be played, making enough money to justify their cost. Led Zepplin were the first, but many others thought it was a good idea and got their own.

 

[kilenem]

Games are cheaper because their is a larger audience they can sell to to recoup the cost. Different Formats get cheaper over time because the cost of production goes down or it becomes outdated. Price of Video game development kind of SKy Rocketed with the HD aged and killed a bunch of developers.

 

[kilenem]

That may be technically correct but games ARE cheaper than ever...as long as you're willing to wait about nine months.

Except for Madden 25 (which I got $20 off for buying right away), I don't think I've paid more than $20 on a game in quite a long while.

"Why tippy2k2, of course that's the case when you're living in 1999 and buying Xbox and PS2 games!" I hear the voices in my head saying.

Well that is wrong voices in my head; here are a few of the games I just bought recently (and this is all on console, I can't imagine what this list would look like if I played with STEAM)

Assassins Creed 4 for $15 on Amazon (10 months old)
Metro Last Light for $10 on Xbox Live (1 year 1 month old)
Saints Row 4 for $25 on Black Friday at Walmart (less than 3 months after release)
Batman Arkham Origins for $25 on Black Friday at Walkmart (less than 3 months after release)

And those are just my own personal examples of games I found for cheap. Games start at $60-70 but they plummet in price so quickly that unless you absolutely HAVE to have the game right away, gaming is incredibly cheap.

Good points it just annoys me that people think that $60 is ok to pay for a video game in 2014. A single piece of entertainment costing $60 just doesn't make sense, Yes GTA and Skyrim might be worth it but lets face it 90% of games are crap.

Usually with any product you sell it as the highest you can and when it comes out you drop the price until people buy it. Also Video gaming is a different form of entertainment since it can contain movies, music and art. Would be nice if you have access to those files with out having to rip the game apart on your computer.

 

[Something Amyss]

The Beatles also had a private jet, as did the Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Elton John, Micheal Jackson, U2, Iron Maiden, Bon Jovi, The Eagles etc. It's actually not that crazy, because they shorten the travel time between gigs, allowing more gigs to be played, making enough money to justify their cost. Led Zepplin were the first, but many others thought it was a good idea and got their own.

What percentage of the pop community from the sum total of the four decades represented there are these people?

And how does pointing out the practicality not undermine your own argument?

 

[OneCatch]

Ever here on games sites how games are cheaper than ever? how they havent gone up in price? and some website say games should now cost about $100.

I have one word for that bullshit!

Consumer entertainment products anywhere other than the games industry ACTUALLY reduce in price over the years to come.

Remember how much VHS videos used to cost? about £30+ Ex-rental tapes used to cost £100 or more, I shit you not.


Remember CD's? Whole albums used to cost over £20 singles used to cost £4. Now full albums are less than £10 and singles cost under a £1. The price of consumer electronics decrease in every single other sector except games, its total shit.

So the next time you hear this argument you can say that, historically, movies, music and any other entertainment medium decrease in price rather than increase. So in other words Gaming in the only industry that still has yet to evolve.

Fair point, but it's also worth mentioning that the primary reason that music (and more recently, film and TV) has become so cheap is significantly because of pirating, not some kind of 'natural and inevitable' process unique to entertainment media. Some decline would inevitably have occurred with the price of producing the actual storage media itself going down, but the extent of the price change in the past decade is rather atypical, and not necessarily something to aspire to in the long term.

The other thing to consider is the relative sophistication and improvement in media. Games are far more sophisticated now than they were in, say, the late 90s, in the same way that Bluray is more sophisticated that DVD is more sophisticated than VHS. It stands to reason than Blurays be priced higher than VHS because they are a better product. In the same way, it makes sense that a modern AAA be sold for a higher price than a game from 20 years ago (especially with digital distribution removing rarity from the equation).
And the gradual obsolescence of older forms of media (and more generally inflation) counterbalances a trend towards price increases. Essentially, to say that new games should reduce in price because other forms of media do over time is something like saying that Blurays should be cheaper because of VHS.


I don't think it's unreasonable that the cutting edge now costs approximately what the cutting edge cost at any other point in time, though of course I do welcome the fact that games don't cost £100! Certainly I'd argue that the gaming community can hardly claim to be 'hard done by' with prices down in real terms, and the overwhelming diversity currently available.

 

[Moktor]

The truth is the same today as it was 30 years ago, or go back to the dawn of trade for that matter. An object is worth what people will pay. If people continue to pay $XX for something, you better believe a manufacturer will see what it can get away with. Should be, would be, could be is a meaningless argument. As a poster stated above, wait a short time and prices drop.

 

[jklinders]

*sigh* this again.

In terms of AAA pricing games are not too expensive. I'd hate to see them climb higher but since they have not increased in price substantially in my lifetime and inflation marches on I would understand. I think what this debate is missing is how much larger the markets for these media types has increased over the last 30 years. Personal video players and gaming are almost the same age, but I am willing to bet there are more people who watch movies than who are hardcore gamers. Hell, even an entry level blue ray machine still costs about 100-120 bucks right now. So they are not really universal.

Movies have pretty near capped out in how much it takes to make them these past few years. Last I checked AAA games were still increasing in cost. The credits list in the past few games I beat were as large as any movie I'd seen. those are a lot of paychecks even if they are smaller than Tom Cruise's.

Some digging seems to suggest that revenue from gaming is fairly close to that of cinema, we're talking about 82 billion in cinema to around 72 billion in gaming. given how AAA game development is rivaling the cost of making a movie these days if games are overpriced then as Jim Sterling keeps saying they need to be made more efficiently. that's logic I won't argue. I will argue that under current market conditions the stats seem to support a reasonable balance until devs can stop tagging along behind the latest hardware like an eager puppy trying to impress it.

 

[havoc33]

LOL.... How can this even be a topic of discussion? At least in my region the difference is substantial. When I was a kid most SNES games cost 899NOK, which is a whopping 85GBP.

 

[Nixou]

And those are just my own personal examples of games I found for cheap. Games start at $60-70 but they plummet in price so quickly that unless you absolutely HAVE to have the game right away, gaming is incredibly cheap.

Which is why the AAA business model is utterly unsustainable: you have to spend over 100 millions to craft the game, unless your franchise is part of the handful which can sells tens of million of copies, your potential customer base is around 5 million people, and given the way a game's price split, if half of your potential customers wait until after the very small full-price window to buy the damn game, you're fucked.
And with the cost (and time -therefore cost-) of crafting pretty games going up (because it doesn't matter how pretty Epic's last tech demo looks: you're going to need competent and experimented graphic designers to handcraft your game otherwise you're just going to produce just another bland, lifeless, indistinguishable game and lose customers, and given that talented graphic designers have been driven out of the game industry this past few years thanks to an epidemic of shitty-hour-&-working-conditions-induced burnouts, these tend to be a rarity nowadays) it's only going to become worst as time pass, maybe to the point where only Nintendo, EA, Activision and Squeenix (plus whichever studio subsidized by Microsoft & Sony) can afford to produce these games (a whole segment of the industry reduced to a de facto monopolistic cartel of big players, joy of joys...).

Games are so "cheap" that the 60 bucks game market is currently suffocating from lack of cash.

***

Hell I remember when the voice packs for Wing Commander II came out (what people would call DLC today or in some circles a ripoff) it was about $30 new

You're talking about a time when PC gaming was a niche for a tiny audience of people who were either very wealthy (not everyone owned computers... not everyone could afford buying computers: when my father bought his first computer -which he used mostly to make the test-sheets he gave his pupils prettier- he spent what amounted at the time for 6 months of minimal wage: PC games were a luxury back then, and priced accordingly)

 

[Jeezy56]

I don't usually buy games new (especially since I recently sold my consoles to focus on PC), but I'm pretty sure I got GTA Vice City and Gran Turismo 3 or 4 on PS2 on release day for £20. New games are now more than double when they first come out in the UK (usually £45-£60). I can't believe anyone pays that much when you can wait a few months and get it so much cheaper. It's possibly something to do with slightly oblivious parents buying their kids games when they come out without the knowledge that they will be devalued so much so quickly.

 

[babinro]

Disagree completely.

Many games go on sale very quickly after release (read within 6-12 months) on sites like Steam. You then have several sites like humblebundle that offer insane deals for games (granted most are indie titles but not all).

The simple fact is...I spent a LOT more money funding my gaming hobby in the gamecube generation then I did the PS3 generation. My spending has only continued to drop in this current gen as well.

I'd also like to point out that AAA games are very cheap when you consider the cost it takes to make them now compared to the inflated cost of production over time during the NES/SNES days. Of course the cost of a new game is really misleading when you consider the additional costs of post game content. You could easily make the argument that the TRUE consumer cost of any big name game around launch is closer to $90+ Something tells me that with Destiny's 10 years of planned support that most consumers won't just stick with the original disc forever.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Adjusting for inflation even 10 years ago, games aren't any more expensive, thanks largely to switching to digital distribution.

That said, large publishers want to raise prices GROTESQUELY; and if they can't get it directly out of your wallet, they will try to take it in other ways: DLC, service-centric concessions, data mining, or even just corners cut (all of which is significant, but most it is difficult to measure in terms of dollars and cents from our perspective).

 

[CardinalPiggles]

In fairness the price of triple A game development is inflating quite a bit. Compared to say music CD production, which floats at roughly the same cost as 10 years ago.

I'm not saying games SHOULD be more expensive for the consumer, of course they shouldn't. What I will say though is that game developers/publishers shouldn't be throwing so much money into game development and marketing in the first place, and then complaining when their game doesn't sell 50 million copies.

Also, that user on the first page that got banned, I assume the link he posted was against the rules for whatever reason, I would suggest a mod removes to the link to remove temptation of clicking it.

 

[AT God]

I don't hear this argument very often, but economics 101 suggests games have to decrease in price because there are a hell of a lot more of them these days. While games may take a long time to make still, there are thousands of games released each year, and when games were more expensive, they were less popular so I feel people who wanted them were willing to pay more. But essentially it is competition, I find it interesting looking at brand new games on Steam and seeing which ones have the guts to ask for 60 dollars at launch. I don't have the money to pay full price for games so it is interesting to see games that I have never heard of asking $60.

That said, I think lots of games charge huge prices at launch because there are always some die hard collectors who want to get games early or collect them. I think a fairly clever game dev could charge almost anything under a hundred bucks for a youtube fodder game because if the game looks amusing, at least a few dozen people will buy it because youtube people need things to make videos for. (Note: some famous Lets players might get games for free but I am sure that at least a few copies would sell regardless). The only real LPer I occasionally watch is Jim Sterling's usually humorous Steam game LPs, and I get the feeling the games he often outs only get bought for novelty, and while that is devious, money is money if that is what the dev wants. Even if Jim gets the games for free for review purposes or through some crazy steam review system, at least a few chumps out there will buy the game because they have money to burn and want to be like Jim. I have no intent of buying them but I get a kick out of watching people play the various pieces of crap that appear on Steam's store.

 

[TwiZtah]

That may be technically correct but games ARE cheaper than ever...as long as you're willing to wait about nine months.

Except for Madden 25 (which I got $20 off for buying right away), I don't think I've paid more than $20 on a game in quite a long while.

"Why tippy2k2, of course that's the case when you're living in 1999 and buying Xbox and PS2 games!" I hear the voices in my head saying.

Well that is wrong voices in my head; here are a few of the games I just bought recently (and this is all on console, I can't imagine what this list would look like if I played with STEAM)

Assassins Creed 4 for $15 on Amazon (10 months old)
Metro Last Light for $10 on Xbox Live (1 year 1 month old)
Saints Row 4 for $25 on Black Friday at Walmart (less than 3 months after release)
Batman Arkham Origins for $25 on Black Friday at Walkmart (less than 3 months after release)

And those are just my own personal examples of games I found for cheap. Games start at $60-70 but they plummet in price so quickly that unless you absolutely HAVE to have the game right away, gaming is incredibly cheap.

Good points it just annoys me that people think that $60 is ok to pay for a video game in 2014. A single piece of entertainment costing $60 just doesn't make sense, Yes GTA and Skyrim might be worth it but lets face it 90% of games are crap.

Why are games not worth 60$?

Let us break it down. Let us say that the average game is 8 hours long, that is 7.5 dollars per hour. That is about what you pay for a movie, or less. I have heard the same thing about Shadows of Mordor, that apparently is 15-20 hours long. That would be 3 dollars per hour of entertainment, a very low price. Add to that how many games are based around multiplayer, CoD, Battlefield etc. spending hundreds of hours on the game, and you have a few cents per hour of entertainment.

 

[jklinders]

That may be technically correct but games ARE cheaper than ever...as long as you're willing to wait about nine months.

Except for Madden 25 (which I got $20 off for buying right away), I don't think I've paid more than $20 on a game in quite a long while.

"Why tippy2k2, of course that's the case when you're living in 1999 and buying Xbox and PS2 games!" I hear the voices in my head saying.

Well that is wrong voices in my head; here are a few of the games I just bought recently (and this is all on console, I can't imagine what this list would look like if I played with STEAM)

Assassins Creed 4 for $15 on Amazon (10 months old)
Metro Last Light for $10 on Xbox Live (1 year 1 month old)
Saints Row 4 for $25 on Black Friday at Walmart (less than 3 months after release)
Batman Arkham Origins for $25 on Black Friday at Walkmart (less than 3 months after release)

And those are just my own personal examples of games I found for cheap. Games start at $60-70 but they plummet in price so quickly that unless you absolutely HAVE to have the game right away, gaming is incredibly cheap.

Good points it just annoys me that people think that $60 is ok to pay for a video game in 2014. A single piece of entertainment costing $60 just doesn't make sense, Yes GTA and Skyrim might be worth it but lets face it 90% of games are crap.

Why are games not worth 60$?

Let us break it down. Let us say that the average game is 8 hours long, that is 7.5 dollars per hour. That is about what you pay for a movie, or less. I have heard the same thing about Shadows of Mordor, that apparently is 15-20 hours long. That would be 3 dollars per hour of entertainment, a very low price. Add to that how many games are based around multiplayer, CoD, Battlefield etc. spending hundreds of hours on the game, and you have a few cents per hour of entertainment.

I would tend to agree that games are actually a steal at full price in dollars per hour compared to a lot of other media. But that takes us back to something I have been knuckle rapped in the past over pointing out. Games are in fact a luxury. Most luxuries will be priced as the market will bear. If people do not want to pay those prices the companies either lower them, change their business model or crumble. The key here of course is the concept of luxury. We don't need games to live so we can wait until the price drops low enough to to pay or get it right away. No purveyor of luxury goods will price themselves out of business if they want to stay in business.