Game prices VS growth of the medium

[JSR]

I think most games today give tremendous value at their price. For 50£ you have 15-50 hours of solid entertainment. And most of us buys games at much lower prices. You have Platinums, Classics, pre-owned not to mention the bargains that are out there. I would estimate that most of us could get enough gaming entertainment to fit a month for under 80£, and thats not considering replay value or online multiplayer. No matter your economic situation, that's good value. Compare to any other popular forms of payed entertainment. Movies, books, CDs, cinema, eating out, a night on the town. Either way, gaming gives more value. So to say that the prices are to high is wrong in my opinion.

If games were to cost 20£ each, the industry would die or turn into something quite disgusting. You already have hordes of people only buying 1 to 3 games a year (usually CoD, Fifa and Need For Speed), and these people are the backbone of high budget games. These are the people - unlike us - who buy games when they are brand new, for the 50£ asking price. If they were to pay less than half of that, the games would change drastically. Then game production budgets would be slashed. Games would come with much less content than they do today. The DLC model would be the primary way of income for the publishers. Imagine having to pay 3£ for each and every team you wanted to play as in FIFA. Imagine paying the same amount for the guns in CoD, or the cars in every racer out there. It's just not feasible with todays gaming environment.

[Charlie]

I wouldn't say gaming provides more value for money than books, music or movies which frequently have the capacity to touch people deeply and even change their lives but that's another agument.

But then the whole value for money thing is subjective anyway. If I buy a game for £40 and play it for 5 or 6 hours before having my fill I wouldn't call that particuarly good value for money, but another person might buy the same game at the same price and enjoy playing it for twenty hours or more and that is good value for money.

[Chief H]

Measuring value, as with many things really, is super-difficult due to all the different aspects that make it up. So even though from a consumer perspective it feels like prices are set by publishers and enforced upon us when we want to buy something, the relationship is actually the other way around; publishers rarely are able to put a solid £-value on a product based on what goes it so it's more a case of experimentation and measurement of reaction. People will only pay what they think a product is worth, so especially witha young medium like videogames, there'll be a lot of experimentation to see what they can get away with (such as the crazy CoD special editions).

Which is why you'll see Just Dance 2 go out there at the same price as a big-budget title. Why not? If people will pay top dollar for it you'd be missing out on profits by charging less. Which then shifts the question back on to why people value games at each value.

Now whilst a lot of consumers may appear to be mugs, actually they're finding value in innovation whereas we, having been involved with videogames for much longer, don't see such value and therefore feel overcharged.

[Corranga]

Interesting stuff.

I think, as many have eluded to, if the consumer is willing to pay for it, then it's deemed good enough value.
You also have to consider used value / trade value of a product like games. DVDs are worth little, books basically nothing when used.

Nintendo are the interesting party here imo, someone said they are the greedy ones, and that may well be right. Current gen wise, Wii games are cheapest to buy, which presumably stems from them being cheapest to make. By staying out of the crazy HD multi core cpu mega hardware era, yet by selling more consoles, Nintendo have managed to maximise profits.
Imagine if they had added DLC to the Wii!

The main titles like Mario X, Y, Z and Donkey Kong hold strong prices for longer (like COD etc) but never cost the 45-50 that COD did.

Also, the lower price of Wii games hasn't driven down the cost of Ps3 / 360 games (so will ~ ?1 iPhone titles reaily drive them down...?)

By lowering the price of games, I think you will simply generate more shovel ware, poorer quality

Maybe we need some sort of 'cinema appeal' for games, so there is some sort of separation between big budget AAA titles that will cost more and lower budget titles that cost less. Maybe this is done via silly LE/CEs or...

I think Sony are going to try this with the NGP:-
Big titles = physical releases and higher prices.
Smaller titles = download only.
The major flaws I see with this is that you're effectively shooting the retailers profits down, and giving the consumer different messages.
For example, with only 12 triple A titles on NGP in the first couple of months, will GAME etc want to allocate shelve space and stock the games, and have demo pods etc?
Will they want to sell the hardware, especially if the profit margins are low as they often are with H/W?
Will we see the specialist retailers move towards a supermarket style "top 20" model, with less and less older games stocked?
Will digital releases sell less than their physical counterparts (as in where 1 media is exclusively selected)

If you think games cost too much now, just wait until it's all digital distribution and everything can therefore be price fixed, little reductions, no competition to drive sales etc...

Chris

[Matt]

if game cost 20 pounds publisher might get 7 pounds and if game cost 40 pounds they might get 18 pounds. So where the motivation for them to cut it.

LOL. It's not that simple. Maybe they'll sell 3 times as many and end up with more profit.

[Flabio]

The key word there is 'maybe'. Maybe we'll make more, but maybe we'll make less.

And right now, noone is taking a gamble that might lead to less.

There's a nice piece on Eurogamer about Iwata's keynote today (that I'd link if it weren't for the fact that something on there is crashing my web browser at the moment).

It raises an interesting point though. It says that it's Nintendo that has the most to fear from iDevice games and the driving down of prices, as the section of the market most likely to take the hit of it is the 'cheap and cheerful party game shovelware', which accounts for a lot of Wii and DS games sales.

Now, those are third party, but Nintendo still take a licence cut from those, so they're quite right to be worried about them taking a hit (why spend 20 quid on a Wii game if the iPad equivalent is 99p?).

The market for the big blockbusters isn't going to vanish cause the iPad has cheap games. You won't see Skyrim on the iPad, or Call of Duty, etc...

[Matt]

Yep, it's a "maybe". But then you have to look at a few simple questions:

Is the gaming audience as high as it can get? - no imo. I'm sure there's huge room for growth, I'm sure the cost is off putting for many.

Are Games priced low enough to be impulse purchases? - no imo. For some, yes £40 because it's got a pretty display in Game is nothing. For the majority, I imagine £40 on a "whim" is too much. I picked up Bulletstorm on a "whim", but that's the first time in ages. Now, if I see a game under £20 and I fancy it, it's another story altogether.


It would require a publisher like EA to take the lead. Big advertising campaign to let the gamer know it's their new policy, and not dumping of crap product. Accept a short to medium term loss for a possible long term gain? Nope, they probably won't do that.

Maybe Sony or MS could do it. Insist on an RRP £20 below their competitor. Would make console sales interesting, and the other would very quickly have to follow. The publishers wouldn't like it though, and may start ignoring that platform in response.

End of the day, it's unlikely to happen, but I'm convinced it would work.

[Flabio]

Perceived value is also quite a difficult thing to overcome. All sorts of psychological studies on that that show that people are rarely rational when it comes to the price of things...

[Guts]

Now, those are third party, but Nintendo still take a licence cut from those, so they're quite right to be worried about them taking a hit (why spend 20 quid on a Wii game if the iPad equivalent is 99p?).

But you can't play with the whole family/group of friends in front of an iPad, can you? I can't see iPad competing against the Wii much, the other is mobile, the other is a home console. DS/3DS is another story of course.

[Flabio]

Eurogamer seems to be behaving now, so this is the article I was referring to.

[iloveannie]

Honestly cannot remember the last time I paid the rrp.

[Neon Ignition]

Simples:

Console titles are a restaurant meal

Apps are McDonalds Value Menu