Gaming Please stop moaning about the price of games.

#rant

 

The solution for prices too high is simple: buy the games on sale.

The problem is that most of those that complain behave like drug addicts complaining to the drug dealer about the prices. It's pointless, because they'll end up buying it anyway (or steal it, of course).

 

While i agree with the gist of the article that games are actually cheaper than they've ever been the following sentence just seemed wrong to me.

It just seems to me that software doesn't fall into this production model as once software has been developed or designed the reproduction of it costs very little and it can be copied without losing any of the qualities that makes the original special.

I guess it's like developing a new drug, it may cost a lot to develop it but the production probably costs very little, I'm arguing about semantics aren't i.

 

Please don't mistake a small extremely vocal minority for all of us.

Spoiler

No Man's Sky is too expensive, we pay around 16% more than you Brits.

 

I've thought this for a long time, and it amazes me that people don't seem to understand. It comes down ultimately to one factor in my opinion, which I feel I have to shout from the rooftops:

THE MORE ADVANCED GAMES GET, THE LONGER THEY TAKE TO DEVELOP AND THEREFORE THE MORE THEY COST.

Unless my memory's playing tricks on me, the cost of Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels was £30 back in 1996, which most games are now. Prey tell me, how is it even a touch on games such as GTAV, Tomb Raider, etc. Also, remember that that's twenty (I feel old) years ago, so is worth approximately £1billion by today's standards.

 

Interesting editorial, reasonable on the face of things but an argument based on customer perception must live or die by the sword.

I play games less and less now. I remember starting to feel a bit price gauged every time I bought or pre-ordered a new release, shockingly even the limited edition player skins (that in fact everyone must have by default on release day and no one will ever care about later) or PDF artwork quickly lose their shine, and the free expansion to be released at some point in future is also often never redeemed. I also am not forgetting that I get to play alpha, the beta and release candidate (providing I only want to play bits, do not mind frustrating bugs and do not want to play when it is completely broken or offline without notice, other terms and conditions may apply).

So the early adopter now actually pays a premium rather than a discount for the simulated value in game testing and release day 'exclusives' (last one I remember being decent was the M1911 on BF 2) against the real risk of the end product being no good (broken or just rubbish) and/or seeing the product very heavily discounted very soon after. This model is obviously lucrative so you can argue a game is not expensive but there are reasons the consumer base may justifiably believe it so.

The comparison to attendance of a football match or cinema is apples and oranges. I do not need to attend a football match to watch it and can choose to pay many times less to watch even more matches at home on my TV which may well be a better comparison. Once the resources put into building a game are expended it can be resold many more times over, I think a football match less so.

The discounts are odd because they beg the question how can the same item that costs pennies now be worth so many more times higher at release? How can a package of these products be worth pennies when the the total value of all the individual items at release be another order of magnitude higher at release? Simply the perception that something is new means people will pay more for it and it must be the most efficient way of continuing to maximise revenue as long as possible. In fact I have very little issue with this, we are victims of human nature and to have flat low pricing across a products life span would be commercial suicide. So since the pricing is not flat and while I am am part and party to this situation it is entirely immaterial to being able to moan about the price of games, because there are many reasons to do so!

 

Exactly, and that's why charging for the distribution of digital assets makes no sense. What costs money is the production of those assets and that's what should be funded.

Tools like Kickstarter and especially Patreon (with all their flaws) are much more appropriate to fund digital production, in my opinion. The problem is that they end with too many middle-men and can even call into question the value of copyright, so the big players will never use those.

I hope, though, that in the future we go from "Buy our game, because we have to recover the money spent" to "Want us to make this game? Give us money and we will release a torrent of the final version completely free, no strings attached".

 

I think this article is hasty and overlooks or over simplifies the gripes of many customers.

Games might be 1 pound cheaper than were in 1996 on average but in 1996 games weren't having content cut out of them on mass for day 1 (or shortly after) paid DLC.

While I agree quality is more important that raw length (I really dislike the rinse/repeat padding that stuffs Ass Creed, Farcy etc.), most games are not even half the quality of the Wither 3. So holding it up as a beacon, while nice sadly does not represent the average game.

I think price has become such a flash point for discussion because the value of games in the mind of the buyer has been in decline for some time, due not only to some of the gross DLC raping that goes on but also because of the mistrust that now exist for many of the botched mainstream releases (looking at you batman) combined with a big hike in release day prices. Lots of games now having a £50 price tag for their digital launches and the erosion of physical releases, you can't even get a physical copy of Rise of the Tomb Raider for PC from Amazon.

Also, the segregation of game content into tiered pre-order bonuses, robbing people of already created content tends to piss people off and feeds into the correct perception that they are getting less value for money.

And before anyone leaps to the defense of ANY of those practices, look at the consumer backlash form the Deus EX Mankind Divided 'Augment your pre-order' bollocks. Jim Sterling & Total Biscuit nailed this argument on the head in a number of recent and past vidoes on the subject of game value, well worth a watch.

 

Star Wars Battlefront....£95

Case closed.

 

Is it actually possible to be quite that stupid?

This.

 

PC games are cheap if your willing to look around and buy from other sites than steam.

The division gold edition for example is £53 on such sites on steam it's over £80.

I have personally stopped buying day 1 off most titles. I won't buy the division till I have at least read a few reviews. Been bitten to much by awful PC bugs.

League of legends takes up a lot of my spare time which is not a lot to begin with and it's free to play.

Witcher 3 is the only big budget game I could recommend to anyone in the past year.

I paid less than £8 for latest batman and below £20 for latest anno can not say either game is worth full price. Batman is still broken and anno is not that good.

Each to there own for prices, there's certain titles id pay a lot for mostly RPGs. The next COD or Battlefield not so much. Same with the yearly updates of FIFA or Assasins creed.

 

I hate analogies

No your not arguing over semantics. Rick's point here is fundamentally incorrect. He's comparing the making of an indie game to a sort of manually crafted piece of art and the game of larger publisher to an equivalent, mass produced on a machine.

His reasoning fails on three fronts. Firstly he's romanticising the idea of indie devs as a sort of team of artists and conversely portraying developers at large publishers as sort of talentless mass producers. Which in essence is a plea to emotion fallacy.

Secondly, regardless of whether indie dev or big AAA publishers, it is still the same kind of people, with the same kind of skills, doing the same kind of work. Big publishers just have more of them and larger budgets. There is no difference between developers that work for big publishers and developers that work for independent publishers. The production process is the same, the difference is scale.

Take this as opposed to crafting versus mass production, where almost every element is different, the skills of those that produce each are different, the type of production is different and the production method is different.

Thirdly big publishers costs don't go down with more people. More developers doesn't mean a faster time to completion, it means more production content. Content such as higher fidelity art assets and animations or more complex physics. Big publishers costs are going to be absolutely massive when compared to an indie dev team. The economies of scale simply don't apply to software in the same way they do to manufacturing tangible products. Costs go down in mass production of tangible products because people are replaced by machines that cost less, can work more consistently for longer and at a higher rate than people. You currently can't do that with software, you still need people to do the work.

Analogies are tools for teaching not for rhetoric. If you need to make a point on something, you have to use precise language not analogies. Analogies are by their nature imprecise and vague.

 

First of all I'm not a big gamer, so I would never spend £40 on any game. It's just not worth that much to me.

Having said that, I'll take your Firewatch and raise you TransOcean and Euro Truck Simulator 2

Both of those cost me well under £10 from Steam, and both are developed by small independent companies. I've got over 25 hours in TransOcean (probably about the same again to complete it) and more than that in ETS 2. If you take the free mods into account, the playing life of ETS 2 is more-or-less unlimited.

Compared to those two, £15 for a game you finish in 5 hours does seem a lot, but maybe there is something in Firewatch that makes it worth it.

 

Wait, people are *still* pre-ordering games? Have they not learnt yet?

 

I have no problem with the average cost of games, what irks me is that (mainly large) game devs and publishers release games that are 50-75% complete then sell the rest of the game as dlc at an extra cost or include micro-transactions/pay-to-win.

I'm a pc and console gamer and pc gamers have it better (community mods etc) with Steam/Origin sales bringing prices down even further.....

 

A game produced by a large team is not mass-produced in the same way as a model T ford. It's still handcrafted just by more people. Even that analogy misses the point though - you'll sell something for what it's worth to the customer - so don't complain about high prices, just don't pay them.

 

I think one of the main factors in people's perceptions of prices is that steam / origin / whoever regularly have sales and so you can regularly pick up '£40' games for more like £20 or less. Combine this with code sites like g2a or greenmangaming regularly offering big discounts and games being bundled together in humble bundles and the like, it makes indie games offered at £15-£20 seem expensive even if they really aren't.

 

In 1996, you didn't release a broken/unfinished game in to the wild, then patch/nerf/DLC the sh!t out of it until you either completely segregate your user base or p!ss them off entirely.

Also, you didn't charge for DLC, remember when that sort of thing would be free?

Early Access? pay for something that might never see the light of day? How long has DayZ SA been out for now? It's a Zombie survival game without chuffin Zombies!!!

^^this^^ and any EA or recent Battlefield!

One game I'm not going to complain about the price of was Witcher 3, £1.72 via HotUkDeals/Amazon thankyouverymuch

 

Wow, you really got the can opener out there

I started PC gaming again in 2008 after a seven year hiatus. In 2009-2010 PC games cost around £27 at launch from Amazon. The equivalent console game cost around £45 (for the PS3).

I don't know why the PC version was cheaper (though I would lean toward the massive hardware costs and less people buying so they made them more enticing) but I know what games cost.

Now all of a sudden we are being charged full on console retail prices for games. Why? has anything changed? have they improved enough to warrant being nearly twice as expensive?

The answer to that for me is no, they're not. They're no better than the tosh we were playing in 2007/2008. Graphics for me have simply not progressed anywhere near enough to warrant the extra cost. Recently I decided to load up the original Crysis and play it at 4k. It took some hacking but I managed to get it there without too much fuss. It looked incredible, easily as good as 90% of the modern games I have bought.

The more the games industry "progresses" the more companies seem to want more for less.

Any way that's how I feel and I strongly doubt it would be possible to change my mind. "Jaded" I think would describe it.

So what have I decided to do about it? do I want to go backwards in terms of graphics and complexity? yes, actually I do. However, why on earth would I then pay £20 for a three hour basic Indie game when I can simply load up an emulator and have access to an absolutely enormous back catalogue of very similar games via a simple to run emulator on a tablet?

Over the past week or two I decided to revisit emulation and boy, what have I been missing ! I can't believe how lovely and simple (and satisfying) the old Neo Geo games were !

I've enjoyed it so much I wanted something more permanent, so just bought myself a Mad Catz M.O.J.O console complete with wireless controller for £59. It will then take me a few hours to root it and get it all set up with my emulators of choice (that I actually paid for, about £3 a go) and then I can load on thousands of fantastic games without spending a bean.

I can't even begin to describe how disappointed I am with the whole games industry right now.