My old man was once just a single signature away from buying a computer game shop. Not a video game shop – back then they were computers, not consoles – but a proper, fully fledged shop – it sold monitors, keyboards, mice and – yes – games. He didn’t, and I can’t for the life of me remember exactly why he didn’t, but that’s history long in the past.
I often wonder how my life might have turned out if he had, it was a decent location and then, at the advent of the Amiga / ST era, things were really starting to kick off. The industry was maturing, the general public was staring to accept this whole new medium of entertainment and – crucially – the price of games was starting to rise to all new levels.
Gamers long in the tooth will remember, as fondly as I do, a game called Armour Geddon. Ignoring the rather ridiculous play on words, this was a game that featured 3D vector graphics and an almost entirely open-ended structure that invited the player to plan out their own research strategy and defense systems as two players battled against the computer AI.
[drop]It was also about twenty quid, and thus – at that stage – completely out of my price range. I remember, vividly, splitting the cost with a mate and picking the game up from John Menzies in town before rushing home to play it. Here’s the thing, though – as far as I remember the game supported two Amigas linked together – which leads me to remember we had to buy another copy.However, part of me thinks this might not have been the case. As kids could we have afforded another disk?
To get the most of out it you needed to team up and have an Amiga each – so the irony, looking back, of having a full computer / monitor combo spread over two rooms of a modest semi-detached, yet not being able to splash out another twenty quid, seems ridiculous, but then pocket money was hard to come by and whilst parents might have bought the machines in the first place, they certainly didn’t buy the games we played on them.
Are we as a public justified in ripping off a publisher because we can’t afford the games? Legally, no – of course not, but are games really worth the asking price in the first place? Nowadays if we see a brand new AAA title at that sort of price we don’t think twice – it’s a bargain – but then, that was a serious investment and one that we couldn’t make twice.
I don’t buy a lot of games these days – I’m generally done with a title after it’s been reviewed (and rarely return to it) and think seriously about handing over £40 for a game that I can’t help feeling is, in most cases, overpriced. It baffles me that people are happy to pay upwards of £50 for a game, but then it’s all just down to perception of value.
Take, for example, Call of Duty. Activision can charge what the hell they like next year for what would arguably be yet another iterative update on a franchise that’s surely well past its prime. And people will buy it – because, to them, it’s worth the money. They’ll play online for hours a day and – in some cases – won’t play anything else for months.
To me, an ageing old fool in his thirties who remembers panicking about handing over seven quid for Jet Set Willy to the man behind the counter in the shop my dad nearly bought, it simply doesn’t make any sense. I guess it all just depends on what disposable income you’ve got to splash on these things, but for me – with flashbacks of Armour Geddon – these things are damned expensive.
gazzagb
I always judge prices by how much gaming I’ll get out of it. That’s why, for me COD is a bargain as I literally get weeks out of that game. I find that if I pay £35-40 for a game, and get a good number of hours and enjoyment out of it, then it’s worth it.
I’m finding that with some of the PSN games, it’s a lot harder for me to justify the price of the game once I’ve bought it and played it. There’s only a handful of games that I think I’ve got my money out of – Battlefield 1943 (still the best game on PSN imo), Limbo, Trine (I waited for it to be about £12, not the £18 they originally asked for) and From Dust.
Steam I think prices everything perfectly, games get cheaper as they get older, and there are regular sales where you actually save a lot of money. The ‘sales’ you find on PSN knock of a couple of quid max, and often the games are either terrible or so old you already have them so it’s not worth it.
Death_In_Flamez
With me I never pay full value for a game. The only exception every year was the Call of Duty franchise although after this year, never again. From now on its either trade in or presents.
dude90
The prices are just getting higher I remember when PS2 games were between 20 and 30 pounds and quickly the prices of PS3/360 games increased to 40 pounds with some at the ridiculous price of 50 pounds. Eventually they will become too expensive and I’ll be giving up buying more games.
moshi
Yes they are but at the same time some games are totally worth it, I am looking at you Skyrim.
tonycawley
If I go to the pub for a night of drinking, I’ll spend £50 and I’ll feel shit next day. I can buy a game, have an enjoyable night playing it, feel fine the next day and will have spent a tenner less.
Mike
£50 in the pub? Bloody hell Tony, you an alcoholic? :P Great thing about living in the North East, fairly cheap drink prices. And in Newcastle – £2 trebles. You hit the floor before breaking into the next £20 note lol
yogdog
I’m probably not far off being one!
That £40 game could last multiple times you might go out drinking as well, so you’re saving even more.
tonycawley
Not alcoholic, but £5 taxi there, fiver back, 6 quid on a kebab, 6 quid on 20 fags, and 4 quid a pint. That’s 50 quid easily spent before I even think about spending another ton on bolivian marching powder!
tonycawley
That last part was a joke. But I’ve spent £200+ on a night out multiple times up London, but then it is 40 quid in a can home.
Mike
£4 a pint? I wouldn’t even consider it! Good thing I don’t live ‘darn sarf’, not yet, anyway!
blackredyellow
Absolutely not in my opinion. As a few people have said, I can recall paying over £50 for N64 games, months of saving between me and my brothers! There’s no way you’d pay that for a new game now, unless it was some sort of limited/special edition.
Also, in comparison with other forms of entertainment, I would argue that games have a greater value for money than many others. A brand new dvd would be at least a tenner, you’ll get 10 hours out of it if you really like what’s on it. If it’s a blu-ray then you can expect to pay at least £15. An average game costing £35 may get you 20, 30, maybe even 50 hours of play. And then there’s games like Skyrim or Dark Souls, easily warranting over 100 hours of play.
It’s not a cheap hobby to have, gaming, but in comparison to other forms of entertainment I think it’s good value for money.
Bladesteel
Are they worth it? Most of the time yes, other times they’re not worth anything.
Are they too expensive? Maybe. It’s down to the choice between a little profit many times or a lot of profit a few times.
hol
Are game
tonycawley
Are game???
hol
Damn! Are games to expensive? No, not really, let me explain, as a 40+ year old gamer, I remember my dad getting an Atari 2600 VCS, those cartridges were £30 plus & this was in the late 70’s, early 80’s! Even some spectrum era titles were £20 & then there was the BBC B games which carried a higher premium again!
Then we moved on to the Amiga era, again, £25 to £30 a game! Ok there was the budget brands but the big publishers at the time, Ocean & the like, pumping out licensed shovelware!
I clearly remember paying £95 for Streetfighter II on a jap SNES cartridge back then too & not batting an eyelid!
If anything the £40-50 rrp we have these days & I hate to say this, seems a bargain with how the price of living has risen over the last 25 years!
Deathbrin
There weren’t as many around as there are now though, were there?
heedbaw
I feel that games are now too expensive and not in comparison to what’s gone before, it’s not exactly representative when you consider that a large part of the cost on cartridge based games would be attributed to the fact that you were buying a ROM.
For me I would have to say that it’s a factor of the lack of originality most new titles display, and the silly amounts that the publishers are making even though games are suppposedly much more expensive to make.
I hate to draw it up again as it’s not to great a barometer, but it’s one that sticks, CoD MW2 cost $50 million to make but it brought in $500 million for Activision. And that’s the franchise they first pushed the RRP up on because of the cost of modern game developement.
Or if you look at EA’s figures from last year, well 2010 now, they made an average profit of 140% on each game they’ve published. If someone can point out how that’s not taking the piss I would be grateful because I can’t see the rational behind their prices when they’re making that much per game.