The High Cost of Gaming

MTV Games is reporting on the financial pinch next-gen gamers will feel now that the 360 is out. $60 games are drawing frustrations from both sides of the gaming industry. From the article: "Many developers and publishers say the reason for the price hike is simple: Next-gen games, because of graphics, coding, voice acting, cinema scenes and everything else gamers expect, cost more to make. 'As a studio we can certainly speak to the amount of man hours and increase in staffing for next-generation content,' said Cord Smith, the producer of February 2006 car-combat title 'Full Auto.' 'As a gamer, it seems like it costs a lot to enter this new generation.'"

It only seems like a lot

[the_humeister]

If you adjust for inflation, it's not really as much as it was in previous generations. I remember when Street Fighter 2 came out for SNES. That game was $70! So the new games for XBox 360 cost $60. Adjusted for inflation, that's less than what SF2 cost when it first came out. Or we can look at price as a percentage of yearly wage. Still, it's less than what it used to be.

just wait

[cowscows]

The solution is to wait a few months after release before you buy a game. It's really not that hard to do.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Or...

[ScaryFroMan]

You can now jump into the last generation, which still has negligibly different graphics, great games (with more to come; think Twilight Princess), and fast declining prices.

The newest things aren't necessarily the best.

Bigger Graphics mean Bigger Price?

[MMaestro]

This is rubbish. If you go by the logic that 'better graphics/voice acting = higher price tag' then console games should have dropped to $30 for a brand new, day its released game during the PS2/Xbox/GC era. Most console games flat-out have awful graphics, poor textures and low resolutions. That alone should justify a $10 cut but it doesnt happen. Vice versa, PC games with their resolutions commonly reaching 1600*1200 the least, often times requiring a hardware upgrade just to reach 60 frames per second, hardware stress-testing graphics should cost $60~$80 by now. Same thing for voice acting, music, and the extra cost of developing for new hardware (if you add $10 for each hardware generation since the Atari 2600 we should be paying over $100 for a game by now.)

Ssssh you are upsetting the console monkey's

[SmallFurryCreature]

You see consoles are cheaper that is why you get games like "Fable", "Morrowind", "Knight of the old republic" wich sell for 10 euros extra for the console version yet come with less content. Fable PC had extra chapters, Morrowind the whole user created content and Kotor an extra space station and some goodies.

More content, lower price. Welcome to the wonderfull world of game economics.

The reason could be that game companies look at their respective userbases and decide wich userbase is most likely to be stupid enough to pay more for less.

Or perhaps the reason is that the console version has to recover the licensing cost. MS doesn't get a penny for a pc game but they certainly get paid for an X-box game.

As for the cost increasing because of either inflation or higher production costs. If the industry was working properly this would be offset by increased market share meaning they would have more copies of the games being sold to spread the cost over.

Games are not normal product. They are a luxury item partly bought by parents for kids and adding yet another 10 (your currency here) is likely to at least make parents think twice. Especially in a down economy. The 5th of december in holland is sinterklaas, the day to give gift to each other like christmas in is in the rest of the world, and the PSP has NOT BEEN SOLD OUT for two weeks now. The original rush was the game fanatics buying it but this was too early for the holiday season buying. Only the most together parents would have started shopping that early.

I am no analyst but this leads me to believe that many a kid is not going to find the PSP in his shoe (Sinterklaas uses shoes, Santa stockings). Part reason? The high price for the games. Come on, most of the games are rehashes, the are smaller without such niceties as voice acting and yet cost more then full pc games?

Oh and a further tell-tale sign that the cost of production has little to do with the cost of games. How can every game cost exactly the same amount to produce? What do I mean? Well if cost of production detemines price and every game is priced the same then the cost of production must be equal.

No games are priced for what the market can bare. Then some daring company raises it by 10 and if it works slowly other companies will follow. Price hikes like the euro introduction work wonders too.

I think that the game industry is just shooting itself in the foot again. With copy protection just a fantasy does the industry really want to raise the barrier against simply buying the game? Anyone want to take bets on how long it will take before the 360 is hacked?

The real Revolution would be...

[nmaster64]

...to bring down developing costs! Making things cheaper on both the developer and the consumer to me is much more important than things like High-def. I mean, maybe I'd care a bit more if I had one of these thousand-dollar HDTV's that everyone supposedly owns nowadays...

I hope Nintendo can really pull through with their promises to make game development simple and cheap with the Revolution. I think ease of development may become a HUGE factor in who wins the next console war...

Sony and Microsoft can show me all the pretty graphics they want, but if I just don't have the money than it really doesn't mean anything to me, does it?

Trivial fix:

[Eivind]

I don't see the problem here. The fix is trivial:

If a certain entertainment-option (such as a game) is not worth the price asked to you, then don't buy it. Selling games at $60 works only when people buy games at $60, and evidently, quite a few do.

Most games fal in price rapidly, so it's not like you can't play the very same game for half the price, if you're willing to wait a few months. If not, and you absolutely *must* have the game at release-day, even at $60, then obviously the price was not too high, but instead correct. It's called a free marketm, get used to it.

more expensive than movies?

[OleMoudi]

Well, I haven't really read in detail anything about videogame development costs but, are they really more expensive to produce than a blockbuster movie with, say, julia roberts and brad pitt plus the best of the FX ? I'm pretty sure than each one of the Lord of the Rings movies was more expensive to make than Halo 2 and I haven't seen yet a 60$ DVD of a single movie.

I don't think it's justified princing a videogame in 60$. Maybe costs per unit in the cartridge era where higher and we could in some way accept that price, but now hay games come in optical media? Apart from the game itself, their cost is less than a dollar to manufacture for crying out loud!

And as people said before, nowadays they have a very populated audience. Videogames are no longer a hobby for a few, and neither its price should be.