Game Prices

[Adrien C]

Has the world gone nuts? Don't video games companies see that the world is going threw an economic crisis?
I went to check out the price for cal of duty: 70 Fuken Euros
Fuken insane, who the hell pays 70 Euros for a freaking game now days?

I miss living in Mexico where I would get games for 8 euros ( pirated of course) I feel like they are taking revenge on me.

 

[hool10]

That's why I'm strating to pirate things more. Crappy movies that you really don't watch you just wait for on TV or watch them on the 'net. Or games that have 4 levels, I mean that's insane. I remember games coming in big carboard boxes and costing $50.

 

[smwScott]

Games in general are obscenely overpriced. The initial investment (whether it be a console or adequate PC) is huge and then they charge you $60 a pop. Absolutely ridiculous.

I think it's to their detriment too. Before the Orange Box (which I pre-ordered for $45, one of the few examples of reasonable videogame pricing) the last game I bought was Resistance near the PS3's launch. There are plenty of decent games that I would've loved to buy, but I'm not going to spend that much. Instead I rent the decent ones, beat them, then return them. If games were priced more reasonably, say in the $20-$30 range for ~10 hour games, I would've bought many more and the industry would've gained a lot more of my dollars. I don't think I'm alone in this either.

Even if it meant less content, such as only purchasing a single player game with no online element, then having to pay extra to activate it later would be acceptable. I don't play many online games and I feel that when I pay $60 to play a ~10 hour singleplayer game I'm really spending about $30 on a component that I'll never use.

The only games I really feel comfortable paying full price for are things like GTA4 or Mass Effect that are of such an incredibly high quality and pack in so much content that it actually is worth the obscenely high price, although I still think the $50 price mark of the previous generation was more reasonable.

 

[knut]

Meh, I buy games I know will get a lot of playtime. If I play a game online give or take every night for 2 hours, for the next 3/4 months, then how can I complain about a price like ?40?

 

[Tyguy]

stop buying them and they will reduce the prices....like they did with EA Sports

 

[Tommy]

I don't mind the price if there is worthwhile hours in the game to start with. Although multiplayer is a different beast I bought Battlefield 2 for ?29.99 and, according to Xfire, I've played about 80 odd hours which equates to around ?0.38 per hour. I reckon that's pretty reasonable.

 

[Asuka]

Game prices on the PC are what they should be for everything else. Console games being 10$ more for what? Only thing i dont really get.

 

[Hellrider]

Here console games cost 25$ more than PC games.

 

[Asus]

I think SNES prices sometimes were up in the $70s.

Anyway, game prices have not gone up for a long time. But recently development costs have a lot. We want bigger and better, they try to deliver and price goes up. Sure less people buy then but it's just the nature of the market. Yay for Valve.

 

[StardogChampion]

Game prices are a joke nowadays. New games are costing ?40 ($84) over here.

Luckily PC games are ?25-30 ($52-63)

 

[JFry]

I don't see why they wouldn't go up.. like Asus said the development costs are insane these days. I'm surprised they've stayed as low as they have for as long as they have tbh. The thing that gets me is super mario brothers 3. Relatively speaking, that game cost next to nothing to develop yet it was $50 when it came out.

 

[CrazyHarij]

Yeah especially console games are stupidly overpriced. You can get alot of decent shit for that money that's much more well spent than on 10 rough hours of entertainment like most games. Of course better games are better purchases. Halo, Orange box etc, money well spent

 

[Paulaner]

Back in the early 90s, when PC games came on floppy disks, the prices were much higher. I remember paying Ultima 7 something like 70$ and prices over 60$ were quite common. Now I go for budget games, special offers and Steam. Full price is only for quality games like The Orange Box.

 

[CyberPitz]

Back in the early 90s, when PC games came on floppy disks, the prices were much higher. I remember paying Ultima 7 something like 70$ and prices over 60$ were quite common. Now I go for budget games, special offers and Steam. Full price is only for quality games like The Orange Box.

Is it wrong I remember that?

 

[kupocake]

Game prices on the PC are what they should be for everything else. Console games being 10$ more for what? Only thing i dont really get.

$10 for Console licensing, or some other chaff. Regardless, what you save on buying the PC version of a game is inevitably more than lost on the greater price you spent on buying the hardware to run it.

I very rarely even pay full retail price on PC games. I'll pay ?25 for the current 'best thing evar', but for anything else my budget is somewhere between ?5 and ?15. I suspect I may be killing the games industry in my own way, but at least I don't illegally download games. If I want something, i'll buy it when it becomes affordable.

Plus my current PC is incapable of running some of the newest games and I don't really have the time to play as much as I used to.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

We were actually just talking about that yesterday in one of my lecture classes.

There's a minimum base line that they will sell at. People in China can't buy LEGAL games because they are just so freakin' expensive in relation to their economy. If they did sell legal games for like $5 or something, then everyone would just import their games from there throwing the games economy out of whack, f*cking with the publishers income and causing a huge price spike in the games economy. There is also price increases based on relative cost of living. You can't directly compare Euro's to American dollars for example because there are way different cost of living among other things.

Unfortunately, it's only going to go up from here. With these multi-million projects publishers, at the current price point, need to sell a shit and a half to break even. If they raised it, less people may buy it, but everyone will adapt. Such is life.

 

[Letters]

I think I paid like $70-80 for Super Metroid...

I don't really mind the price of games... I mean it's definitely high enough to make me think about and research whatever I'm gonna buy and deters me from getting a lot of 'maybes', but the games that I do buy are always worth the purchase. I haven't bought a shitty game since Lionheart!

Digital downloads I think have increased the amount of games I buy for some reason, and it pisses me off now whenever I have to go to Best Buy to get one, like I will on Tuesday for Mario Galaxy. Okay, not really piss me off, but you get my meaning.

 

[Krynn72]

I wish they would start selling more downloadable games like valve does, and reduce the cost since publishers can start to be taken out of the mix. I still think games on Steam are overpriced for just being downloads (except orange box, since that was such phenomenal quality that the price is allowed to be higher)

 

[Adrien C]

Is it cheaper to buy games on steam than boxed games? I woudln't understand why would prices be the same on steam if you arn't getting a dvd and manual.

Talking about big budget games, just check out how much Halo 3 made in a freaking week end :

Halo 3 also holds the record for the highest grossing opening day in entertainment history, making US$170 million in its first 24

I'm sure Halo 3 didn't cost more than a 100 million USD to make, wich is still insane for a video game.
The profit game companies are making is evident. I would really like to see a game economy crash so they would learn.

 

[Asus]

But there is a big difference between the HITs vs others. You picked...halo 3 for an example.

 

[Max_Fall]

Has the world gone nuts? Don't video games companies see that the world is going threw an economic crisis?
I went to check out the price for cal of duty: 70 Fuken Euros
Fuken insane, who the hell pays 70 Euros for a freaking game now days?

I miss living in Mexico where I would get games for 8 euros ( pirated of course) I feel like they are taking revenge on me.

Buy Pirates mate,cmon

 

[jimbo118]

yeah i was gona get cod4 in my local Gamestop on friday but it was 70euros so i thought fook that, i'll have a look in town tomorrow on my break to see if its cheaper but generally 360 games are 60ish euro new, HMV seem to have that as there maximum price atm, it then goes lower, pes 2008 f.e is 54.99 atm.