Look, a guest article! This one comes from Roynaldo.
Gaming. We all love it, even if it is expensive. The UK seems to have it good with ‘the norm’ being around £35-£40 for a new title. It sometimes seems that publishers and developers are squeezing us for every penny they can, although they’re simply charging what they know the market will bear, if we weren’t willing to pay it then they wouldn’t charge it.
However it does seem a little unfair that we should suffer equality with initial release prices when games are so varied in quality. Why does an RPG title or sandbox title that provides the customer with a minimum of 30 hours playtime, a very enjoyable 30 hours as well when looking at Grand Theft Auto or White Knight Chronicles, have the same initial price tag as Mindjack that lasts a fraction of that time and has a serious lack of quality in comparison?
What about Gran Turismo versus F1 2010? One has a gulf in class and support yet they both require you to part with the same amount of cash upon release. Why do we allow ourselves to be sucked into this whirlwind of greed and cost covering when the mediocre games inevitably fall from grace and end up in the bargain bin?
The fact of the matter is it’s all opinion. I may hate that samey feeling of Formula 1 games over the diverse, crisp feeling of Gran Turismo, you may not. You may prefer Cars 2 to Sonic Allstars. I would then tell you to sit on one of Sonics prickly bits and purchase Formula 1. I may scream at you to purchase Dragon Age but you might show me the finger whilst strutting your stuff around Fallout.
[drop]Call of Duty on the other hand is a complete dominator. It will sell millions whether it gets absolutely slated or is the best received game of all time. Activision know this and have upped the RRP. Greed? Yes. Fantastic business practice? Obviously.I believe that quality should be represented in price. For example Uncharted, Gran Turismo, Grand Theft Auto and all those other top notch titles should be top price whereas your yearly upgrades (usually from EA sports) should be lower down the ladder as the effort and development costs are a mere drop in the ocean. How can Activision warrant pumping out a set of new music tracks at £40 a pop? What about new IP? Should these be top price? It also begs the question what is top price if representation were to be put in place? We could then end up spending £50 on the AAA titles and £25-30 on the likes of FIFA.
Now I suppose all these questions need some sort of concluding question. What do we do about it? You could do what I do and only buy your most anticipated games upon release while stockpiling a back catalogue for the off peak. On the other hand you could remain being sucked into the whirlwind of profiteering, sit in your armchair playing a game that doesn’t deserve your £40.
The choice, is yours.
cam the man
I buy mostly racing/driving games which I’m normally still playing months later. Therefore I’m quite happy with the price of games, although I wouldn’t complain if the price dropped.
Roynaldo
I find it interesting that most comments mention FIFA. Football fever anyone :)
spooferbarnabas
it’s because FIFA is a good example of a game which is overpriced :)
hol
Dunno really, there a few games I will pay full whack for, the likes of killzone, GT, that sorta thing. Then there are the ‘wait & see if any bargains I can’t resist’ games, dirt3 was one of these as was motorstorm apocalypse, both cost me £20 & were bargains.
I’d guess it was personal preference, like all things I suppose?
BigCheese
I personally pay £35-£40 for FIFA every year, and to me, it’s a bargain. It’s the only game I play consistently throughout the entire year, whereas great games, like Uncharted, can only hold my attention for a month at best, and one or two replays maximum.
heedbaw
Arguably games do represent better value for money than movies, if you want to rationalise the costs that way. But the cost of games is a bit of a stinker if you look at some numbers, quickly pulled out of a hat I might add.
For something like GT4 it was supposedly around the $100million mark for developement cost. But in the first week alone it made $550million. And for Modern Warfare 2 it was something like $50million, though that would already have had an engine to work on. And that made about the same $550million the first week.
There will also be marketing budgets splashed out as well, with MW2’s coming in at around the $100million mark.
To me it seems that the publishers are making a mint out of games as it is, whilst at the same time citing developement costs as an ever increasing factor in pushing up the price of games.
3shirts
I think it’s fair to charge the same price. As the article says, it’s basic business to charge what you think people will pay. If they don’t pay it, you suffer reduced profits.
Nowadays with such a wealth of reviews, early coverage, videos and opinion around on the internet it is fairly easy to get an idea of whether you will like a game before you buy it and there are many good rental services so you can even try for yourself.
I am happy for a few stinkers to be priced at £40 if it means the good ones are too. I am confident in my ability to avoid the bad ones.
Tanster
I would not pay more than £40 for a game but I think that if I decide to spend money on a game it doesn’t matter if it’s 7 hours or 30 hours long. It’s about the experience
heedbaw
lol, quality managed to chop my actual reply from rantage.
To use Fifa and Fallout you could say that the comparative lack of depth between a sports game and an RPG can show up in the quality of the finished product. Can’t remember last time I played a Fifa game, but they always seem relatively polished. I have played both recent Fallouts though and they were a buggy mess but I thouroughly enjoyed them.
And going to the price question, I’ll generally buy agame on release if I’ve been anticipating it for a while. But this dovetails into 2nd hand as I’ll be trading stuff in to get anything on release. Last game I bought full price without trading was EDF at £19 in Tesco, and feck knows when I last was able to do that kind of thing. Budget game maybe but it’s awesome fun and much better than a lot of recent full price games to me. And that’s including many of the upcoming big releases, not seen anything in a while that’s made me go ‘oooh’ apart from the Bioshock Inifnite E3 playthrough
damoxuk
What I do apart from the odd super AAA titles of which Dead Space 2 is so far only part of (UC3/Batman/Skyrim will be the other 3) this years day 1 purchases I wait until prices have dropped to under £20.
The speed at which games drop in price means that after i’ve finished a big AAA title there’s 2-3 of the other games what are decent but have dropped to under £20.
I still always buy new just discounted.