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The Almighty Buck Entertainment Games

Higher Game Prices Explored 66

Posted by Zonk from the paying-for-the-shiny dept.
An Anonymous Reader writes: "Next Generation has a feature interviewing a dozen or so developers, publishers and analysts on the new $60 price for games. Generally, publishers are positive, developers are skeptical and analysts are mixed." From the article: "The next gen world is considerably more complex - and prices for titles that deliver on pushing this complexity will definitely reflect that. We couldn't deliver the type of consumer experiences we're delivering in Full Auto as an example, on an existing machine. Hardcore gamers probably remember that $59 retail price points are not that unusual. Going back to N64 and as far back as the 16-bit generation - there were cartridge based games, some with battery back up that routinely cost $59. Those price points were to cover the larger cost of goods - in the next gen world it's to afford better artificial intelligence and technology, which I believe delivers better value to the consumer."
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Higher Game Prices Explored More

Higher Game Prices Explored

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  • Better news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Thunderstruck ( 210399 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2005 @02:48PM (#13502092)
    Although the price is high now, it warms my heart to think that one day all of these great, highly advanced games will be in the public domain. There will be joy and fun for people of all incomes.

    Oh, wait...

  • Interviewing the wrong people (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Winterblink ( 575267 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2005 @02:48PM (#13502097) Homepage
    ..interviewing a dozen or so developers, publishers and analysts on the new $60 price...

    Maybe they should interview some consumers and see what THEY think of the new pricing of these games...

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2005 @02:50PM (#13502126)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:nothing new (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yep. People seem to forget that many console and PC games easily cost $60, $70, or even $80 on their release, little more than a decade ago. Hell, I still have a sticker on my copy of Street Fighter II for the SNES with a SALE sticker on it marking the price DOWN to $74.99.

      Pick up an aging PC or console gaming mag and just look at the prices, which don't even have inflation factored into them.

      On the flip side, it's a hell of a lot cheaper for the publishers to actually produce the physical copies of these

    • Re:nothing new (Score:3, Insightful)

      by wickedj ( 652189 )
      I remember the first time I paid $79.99 for a game. It was Seventh Saga from Enix for the SNES. I was such an avid fan of Enix from the Dragon Warrior series that I didn't give a second thought to using my entire years worth of savings for this one game (I was 14 at the time). I was sorely disappointed. It took me almost a year of on and off playing to beat it. The music, graphics, story, etc. were all subpar to horrible. I still have the game today to remind me that price does not determine a good ga
    • My brothers and I pooled our money to buy Street Fighter II for $75 the _day_ it came out from the only retailer who wasn't sold out: Toys 'r us.

      That was some of the best use of gaming money that we ever did. We played that thing just about every single day for months.

      No figher since has ever really captured that same feeling. Not Tekken, Dead or Alive, Guilty Gear, Soul Calibur, certainly not Street Fighter One BillionX2 Hyperturbo+++ Extreme-a-rama, etc. Too bad really.
      • Yes! You knew Street Fighter 2 retained values on the shelf for ages because it was that good. So good, you didn't think a sequel would ever top it.

        Nowadays, sequels are expected because the originals never seem to be good enough. If they released 1 very good Tekken game for the entire life cycle of the console because it was that good, the price would be locked at $49.99 permanently. But no... they'd rather do a cheesy Tekken 4, decent Tekken 5. Why not just skip them. There is going to be a Tekken 6

  • Of course publishers are positive.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by autojive ( 560399 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2005 @02:53PM (#13502157)
    They are the ones making most of the money.

    There's a reason why I only buy a game or two a year... I can't afford to keep up. :-\

    I'm off to the used game store.

  • Wing Commander 2 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by glowimperial ( 705397 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2005 @03:03PM (#13502281)
    Back when they were still shoving games onto disks, and you had to uncompress everything to play (which could someitmes take 2 hours), I paid $70 for a copy of Wing Commander 2. Until the CD came out, and it looked like games were going to occupy even more disk space, many of us had resigned ourselves to paying $70 or more for games.

  • Wait for the bargain bin.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ronjeremysjohnson ( 899273 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2005 @03:08PM (#13502338)
    I haven't paid more than 20$ for a game in a long time. Games sales seem to burst and then dwindle forcing retailers to drop the prices rather quickly. Of course there are exceptions like WoW which I didnt get until 2 months ago when Circuit City had a sale. Plus systems have to have their million seller discounted games so people will buy their systems. People who cant afford or dont want to pay full price for games simply need to wait. This raise would only effect those who cant or dont want to wait.
    • If you CAN'T wait for a game, that means you are a game reviewer and chances are you got a pre-release copy gratis from the publisher or at the very least your employer bought the game for you. Or perhaps a game developer who wants to see what the competition is up to, but then $60 is just a drop in the bucket compared to purchasing all the necessary software ($3500 for 3DS Max alone.)

      Otherwise, it just means you don't want to wait for the game and are willing to drop $60, $70 or...?
      • Or perhaps a game developer who wants to see what the competition is up to, but then $60 is just a drop in the bucket compared to purchasing all the necessary software ($3500 for 3DS Max alone.)

        The company buys the software (except for contractors), not the employee.

        Also, in my experience many games never drop in price (usually niche console games, especially on the Gamecube and GBA). Some stay at 60 Euros for years and only drop when the retailer decides that copy will never be bought (and some retailers w

  • yeah 60 dollars, more complex. BS! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kinglink ( 195330 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2005 @03:10PM (#13502369)
    After you factor in the tools like Renderware as well as others, you realize game designers do far less.

    The fact is the line that "The next gen world is considerably more complex - and prices for titles that deliver on pushing this complexity will definitely reflect that."

    Yeah I really think the next Need for Speed game really has the same level of complexity that Xenogears (the original) and Gran Turismo have. the fact is that if you priced games by complexity it'd be easier to tell who did the most work.

    The reason why the game world is going in the crapper is every other game that is released is a sequal of a lousy first game, or a rip off of another game, or worse a port of a game from a different version (console to console, Console to PC, Pc to console.). I liked Half Life 2, Morrowind, UT2004, and Doom 3, but I don't need Big Mother Truckers 2, BloodRayne 2, or Fantastic 4.

    I love most of GTA, but Mafia was aweful, Driver is terrible, and True crime just sucked. Yet all those have sequals coming? And let's not fail to meantion all the RPGs that fell short, all the racing games that just arn't needed, and all action games that is just mindless violence.

    And let's remember all those games started on the PC ported to the Xbox (or bought for the Xbox) and then brought back to the PC? Deus Ex was an excellent game, the sequal? restricted. Morrowind at least was done right, Halo had a lofty goal (3 different playable races) until it became part of the Microsoft family, and Splinter Cell? I remembered that game when it was just called thief.

    There's too many crap games that try to be different but end up being the same old crap. Of course let's not also meantion those ultra short single player games that get all their points from Muliplayer? And half the problem is these reviewing sites that never rate stuff under 6.0 Let's be honest. Out of the last 12 monthes, there's been some good games but there's been a LOT of bombs. Why arn't I seeing Reviews that are at least honest about that.

    The end problem is this. Instead of spending more money to get named actors or named properties, like movies do (which have also fallen) why don't they spend the money making the game better or tighter, no one wants to play a movie based game if it's just movie scene, gameplay, movie scene, harder gameplay, movie scene, if the gameplay is only "hard" because of crap controls.

    • After you factor in the tools like Renderware as well as others, you realize game designers do far less.

      Let me guess: you've never created a game, or held a job in the industry, have you? Otherwise you'd recognize the above as patently absurd.

      Trust me, designers most certainly do *not* have it easier. Even with middleware tools like renderware & havok, and with design tools like Phototoshop, Maya, and 3ds Max, it's still an unbelievablly work-intensive process to create content for a state-of-the-

    • I liked Half Life 2, Morrowind, UT2004, and Doom 3, but I don't need Big Mother Truckers 2, BloodRayne 2, or Fantastic 4.

      Wow! All but one that you like are sequels (unless Morrowind is a sequel to something); and apparently all that you hate are sequels (except I know that Fantastic 4 is not the 4th in a series).

  • So you're saying that the games are going to cost more, but the quality is going to be higher? ie gameplay, plot, graphics, etc?

    If that's true then fine. Better quality games cost more. Contra should cost more than Ragnar.

    But I doubt that this is how things are going to turn out. There are still going to be plenty of crap games, and they're going to be $60. So rather than price the game according to it's value, it's just "we get to charge more for our games!"

    Maybe Sony/MS/Nintendo is raising the price
    • Sony and MS, yes, but I'm torn on whether I want to believe Nintendo will follow suit. A lot of analysts are expecting Nintendo to stick to the current price points ($199 console, $50 games), at least for first and second party software.
      • I hope you're right, but again I wish games were priced according to value rather than $xx for a game on a given console. If you bought a Revolution and picked up three $50 games, how tempting would it be to pick up a few cheap games. Nintendogs(which I admittedly haven't played), for example. Relatively simple, not neccessarily graphically intense, just a $15 distraction...
      • Nintendo's price points are generally cheaper than anyone else's. They're the only console at the $99 price point, and games drop to $39 fast generally.

  • I could just bitch about pricing... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Traegorn ( 856071 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2005 @03:12PM (#13502381) Homepage Journal
    ...but I'll instead just turn to the used videogame store. Why? Because the mom and pop used videogame store is the same price as Funcoland, and I'm instead patronizing a local establishment. But here's the thing - Videogame companies don't make any money on my purchase. They've already made their profit from that particular sale. So, what happens to their sales if high prices drive a larger percentage of consumers to the used bins? With less first release sales, they won't make as much money... ...and then they'll either be smart, and drop the price back down (which will also make them look better, if everyone else is more expensive), or they'll do the sadly more likely, and raise the price again to "recoup lost profits"...
    • So, what happens to their sales if high prices drive a larger percentage of consumers to the used bins? With less first release sales, they won't make as much money...

      Well, except this can only go so far... if EVERYONE resigned to buying just used games, then there wouldn't BE any used games at all.

      I think we all know where this whole situation is going to end up: Companies will still be pressured for deadlines and all the other stuff that's limited them in the past, they'll still spend the same amount of m
      • Well, except this can only go so far... if EVERYONE resigned to buying just used games, then there wouldn't BE any used games at all.

        I wasn't reffering to EVERYONE switching, merely a large enough percentage to reduce their overall sales and profits significantly.

    • but I'll instead just turn to the used videogame store.

      But watch as you can't go online with the game because either 1. that serial number has already been activated, or 2. almost all the players have moved on to the sequel.

  • ... if they were any good. 95% of all the publishers put out these days is absolute crap and completely unoriginal showing no innovation or advancement for the industry. All an increase in price of games is going to do is this:

    1) Cause me to wait longer to buy games (eg: even if I *think* I'll like it, ill wait a few weeks to see what my non-biased friends think instead of listening to supposed 'non-biased' magazines who get kickbacks.)

    2) Cause me to wait until a mediocre game hits the bargain bin.

    Shrug, t
    • if it's crap people arent gonna like buying it

      Sadly, whether people like it or not, they're just going to end up buying it anyway. I doubt they could alienate their customers even if they tried.
  • "If you go back to the Nintendo 64 days, many of those frontline titles retailed for $60 and consumers were more than willing to buy them, when they were good games."
    Yeah I paid 60+ for truely awesome games back in the 1990's, but then again I only bought 6-10 games a year. Now I buy over 50 games a year, most of which are off the $60.oo games are discounted $20.oo to $40.oo when they don't "fly" off the shelf?
    • Fixing this post.. stupid markup language left more than half of the post out... "If you go back to the Nintendo 64 days, many of those frontline titles retailed for $60 and consumers were more than willing to buy them, when they were good games." Yeah I paid $60.oo+ for truely awesome games back in the 1990's, but then again I only bought 6-10 games a year. ($70.00 for R-type and I thing $80 each fpr Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana) Now I buy over 50 games a year, most of which start off at $49.9

  • Procedural art (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Hythlodaeus ( 411441 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2005 @03:26PM (#13502563)
    I already wait for games to hit the clearance bin before buying them. I think high prices for AAA titles will be a good thing for indie developers, who aren't throwing the kind of money at a game that it requires a $60 price to recover the investment.

    We've already reached the point where the cost of art assets is a greater limiting factor than hardware capabilities when it comes to graphics. I believe procedural generation will step up to the challenge and rescue the industry. Procedural terrain, buildings, and plant life are basically solved problems. Wil Wright's Spore is making a credible attempt at procedural animals. Our eyes have such high standards when it comes to the human form that I doubt we'll ever have completely procedural humans, but a number of games now have just a handful of human character graphics and parameterize features such as jaw width, cheekbone height, obesity, etc. to create combinatorial variety with a minimum of artist man-hours.

    The beautiful thing about procedural and parameterized art is that they can be open-sourced in a meaningful fashion. There's currently a lot of free/public-domain game art out there, but not much of it helps. The art requirements for games are too idiosyncratic. With parameterized/procedural art you can fit random art from the internet to your needs a lot more easily. Parameterized art is re-usable art, which means less duplication of effort within the community. The collective art output of the indie gaming community will then be able to create games of similar graphical quality and content depth as commercial AAA titles.

    So yes, high game prices are a good thing.

  • Fixed costs versus recurring (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xenocide2 ( 231786 ) on Wednesday September 07, 2005 @03:29PM (#13502604) Homepage
    If you develop an AI, it costs less per unit, the more units you make. If you use a bigger RAM chip on a cartridge, it raises the cost of every unit!

    Reasoning that better games are more expensive and should therefore be more expensive to purchase is a faulty argument. Games should be priced to maximise profts; PROFIT = SALES x (PRICE - COST OF MANUFACTURE) - FIXED COSTS. The fastest way to grow profit is to grow that first term, either through increased sales, higher prices or lower cost of manufacture. Fixed costs generally pay for themselves in increased sales.

    The hard part here is that Price is generally inverse related to Sales. That's basic economics. Cost of manufacture is generally out of the hands of game developers, because there's certain minimums you must provide consumers and standard interfaces you need to comply with. So developers and publishers are basically left with a tradeoff between fixed cost and sales x price. Advertising, awesome new graphics, particle effects, those are all fixed costs.
    • Or in layman terms:

      More expensive hardware = more expensive product.
      More expensive software = more products need to be sold to make a profit.

      More expensive cartridges were JUSTIFIED through this simple fact. If it cost an extra $7 for the extra RAM (most) gamers were willing to accept a $5 or $10 price increase. But if its a price increase because of software changes, people just cannot justify the price increase.

  • Now that so many require a subscription to play. Also, the intrusive rental/DRM systems like Steam are no doubt enhancing revenue by preventing all that piracy they were crying about, so that money should be available to decrease the unit price.
    • Also, the intrusive rental/DRM systems like Steam are no doubt enhancing revenue by preventing all that piracy they were crying about,

      DRM copy protection systems on games do not prevent piracy. It just annoys the people that buy legit copies... Unless they buy the copy and then download the crack.
  • If all they do is produce the same crap over and over stop buying thier games. Support independent game developers and their creativity. Cut out the evil middle men and marketing morons who ruin everything with their single minded devotion to money.

    Death to The Games Industry Part 1 [escapistmagazine.com]
    Death to The Games Industry Part 2 [escapistmagazine.com]
  • Lets say the cost of making milk rose by 5$. If producers of milk want to keep the same margins (They would most likley lower them, but for simplicity lets say they keep them the same) then the burden of the new cost would be placed on the consumer. Thus, you would now have to pay 10$ for Milk. Well, if you really like cereal and love the taste, you might very well keep buying milk at 10$.

    But lets say that 50% of every bottle of milk was spoiled. When it cost 5$, you accepted this fact that it might be spo

  • Last year the 2k5 series of games (NBA, NFL, College Hoops, NHL, and I think their MLB) were $20. NFL, at least, got better reviews than Madden, and the move made EA so scared that they snapped up every exclusive license they could get their hands on.

    Was that a loss leader in expectation of eventual market domination, or did those titles actually make a profit? I haven't seen anything definitive either way.

    I get that the development cycles are getting nastier, but if you could make a better football game
  • Burnout Revenge for Xbox: $50
    Burnout Revenge for Xbox2: $60

    These are what stores are telling us theyll cost, so it is subject to change, but even so... wtf?
  • ...does the phrase 'price point' mean?

    As far as I can tell, it is exactly synonymous with 'price'. This means that the second word conveys no meaning whatsoever, and so is a waste of everybody's time.

    Remember, kiddies. Friends don't let friends speak like marketroids.

    • "Price" is an exact number. For example: an Xbox 360 will cost $399 in the configuration everyone will want.

      "Price point" can refer to a rough figure. For example, Apple waited until 2005 to release an MP3 player at the $100 price point. The iPod shuffle compares with MP3 players of $80-$120 or so.

      Price = how much money you have in your wallet right now
      Price point = how much you're willing to spend on a product

    • Price point [wikipedia.org]

      It's just a local maxima for profit in a given price range. A price of $3.00 rather than $2.95 can cause a greater drop in demand than going from $2.90 to $2.95 for instance.

  • Things haven't changed that much... check out this scan of a 1995 flyer from Toys 'R Us. (I swiped the link from Digg, you might have seen it already)

    http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=949302 [hardforum.com]

    They're Canadian prices, but the prices typically adjust to about the same.
    • And that, my friends, is why I have never owned a console. A sojourn down the console games isle has always stiffarmed me from splurging on a console. Damned expensive titles.
  • Heh heh, silly rabbit, tricks are for kids! The consumer is not going to bite on $60 games. Look at what happened to DVD movies which were quite expensive initially but now run $20 and less for many titles, even some new releases. The only DVDs that get a premium market are specialty items like Anime, and even those are mercilessly marked down after a few months. We're talking about entertainment here! So unless these next generation games are going to come to my house and blow me, forget about $60. I'll wa

  • I remember when PC games were $20-$30. Test Drive (and Test Drive II: The Duel), Starflight (and Starflight II), flight simulators from various vendors were fantastic finds. Many of the older classics, like King's Quest, were in that price range too. There were small teams, 1-5 people mostly with very little marketing costs. Those games were worth the money. Today's games eventually make it down to those prices, and it turns out that I'm pretty happy waiting for them. By that time, my computer can han

    • A quick look through the manual tells me there's 25 people working at id who were involved with making Doom 3, that's not counting any publishing, marketing, voice acting or whatever else was done by other companies. The dev house gets very little of the price you pay at retail, usually 7% but in this case probably closer to 20-25%. That'd be 25*6*75000 = 11.25 million $ (if we assume all of them were employed over the entire 6 years (it was 6 years, right?) and the average pay ends at 75k/a. The cost for t

  • Going back to N64 and as far back as the 16-bit generation - there were cartridge based games, some with battery back up that routinely cost $59.

    Long before this, the Colecovision had a marginally decent port of Zaxxon, and it cost $50. This was a time when I was earning about $14/week from my paper route, and "regular" games were $19-$29.

    As far as loading crap into the cartridge, I believe some of the later Atari 2600 cartridges had their own processors in them, and used the base console as little more t

  • "The $59.99 game (the standard edition will cost $49.99) will come in a special black metallic case."

    http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/09/06/news_61326 48.html [gamespot.com]

    I know it's no confirmation but that's still good news for me considering I haven't seen any official words saying next-gen titles would cost any more.
  • I remember those days, and I'm not looking forward to reliving them.

    What I find interesting is that I'm hearing this generally out of the console gaming crowd, not for the PC. Sounds to me like they're just hyping this up to maximize their profits. If SquareSoft could release their later Final Fantasy games at $49, games which spanned over several discs and are among the more expensive games developed thanks to the huge development staffs and times, yet still apparently turn a healthy profit, I don't see
    • If SquareSoft could release their later Final Fantasy games at $49, games which spanned over several discs and are among the more expensive games developed thanks to the huge development staffs and times, yet still apparently turn a healthy profit, I don't see anything to validate these claims.

      For one thing, Final Fantasy games are already well into the black before they even leave Japan. The reason they can afford the high development costs is that they sell ridiculous numbers of units. So, Square Enix

  • N64 (Score:1)

    by Thrymm ( 662097 )
    I worked at an EB in New Jersey back around 96 and 97 when the N64 was coming on the scene... they werent selling games for $59, oh no, they were $79 in most cases. People complained but still bought them since some were scarce at the time, such as Wave Race, and Star Fox. I thought it was crazy to spend that much, and was happy I only had the PS1 which were at the most $54.99 at the EB.
  • Despite being only 24, I'm old enough to remember the days of NES carts priced at $60 each. Today, some games on DVD still cost $60 (when very popular and just-released).

    What's changed in those 15 years or so? Our wages/salaries: in nominal terms (not adjusted for inflation), these have risen on average.

    But game prices have not.

    So, the *real* (inflation-adjusted) price of buying a game has actually decreased since the old days. That is, what might've been a $30,000 salary 15 years ago is, after adjusting
  • This way you make money off the people who have countdown timers set on their cellphones for the next GTA or Blizzard game, who will happily pay $60. After that, however, all it does is discourage buying and encourage copyright infringment.

    Publisher's get too greedy imagining dollar signs and don't look for the sweet spot on price as much as they should. I go through about a 50 pack of DVD-R's every month, and don't buy that many games or movies. But the last time I was next to the $5.50 bargin bin at Wa

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