I don't think it's unreasonable to pay the RRP for a game you really want. Whether that's £40 for and XBox 360 game or £30 for a PC game. I think it also depends on what games you have bought recently, if I haven't bought one in a while then I'll happily pay the full price on release day as I might be bored and the game is good enough. However, most of the time I'll wait and get a good deal or trade games in. I bought Batman: Arkham Asylum on the 360 for £18 brand new-I think that's a great deal. I bought OF2R a while back, completed it, traded it in and got Dragon Age for £5. Again great deal. I got Street Fighter IV for £15 a while back, hated it, traded it in at a different store where it was still £40 and got £15 on the trade-in so I managed to get my money back. If you think about it at a £ per hour rate, games are generally much better value than other home entertainment. Even games like MW2 which has a short single player is improved by the multiplayer aspect. Anyone that thinks games are too expensive and then pirate the game are just idiots. I'd quite like an Aston Martin but they are too expensive for me. You don't see me stealing one. If you can't afford something, you don't buy it-simple. I'd quite like BF:BC2 right now and I am either going to trade in some old games to get it or just wait till the price drops. I'd also like to get a new PC so I can play PC games but I can't afford that either so I stick with what I have currently.
I think a huge problem now is that there are simply no demos, its what stops me buying as many games as I used to. Reviews can say a game is great, but not whether you will like it. Without demos to try out the game I, and many other people, keep their money in their pockets or download the game to try it (but then comes the argument for many, well why buy it now?) As far as pricing goes I will happily pay £25 for a game im excited about (more difficult now without any demos to whet your appetite) but will typically wait for ~£20 for a game I'm not sure about. With it being harder to now sell on PC games due to activations and/or shops not accepting them it is making that purchase harder aswell, simply because you are essentially paying more for a game (some games you won't sell on but most people will sell a lot of their games once finished/bored of them). With the DRM/lack of second hand oppourtunities its makes an unsure purchase even harder for me, if i dont like the game I'm pretty much buggered, but on a console I can atleast get some money back. It is also harder to get a good deal/sane price in high street shops now, there seems to be the grip of console gaming popularity driving up PC games prices despite the fact PC gaming is no where near experiencing the same surge in popularity (a decline if anything). Overall I find it harder to justify a purchase I'm unsure of simply because the consequences (monetarily) of buying the game are riskier, there no longer, for me, seems to be the motivators that once were there.
PC gaming is still cheaper than consoles but I always think prices are too high (£25 is usually the limit I would spend on a new game). Luckly Ive a huge back cat I want to buy and play so by the time I get round to it those games will be dirt cheap.
If y'all still aren't convinced, and you have both a Gamestop and Game in your local burg then there's a pretty easy way to make your game cash stretch a little further... Basically at the minute Gamestop have an offer on whereby if you trade any 360 game (apart from sports titles) you can buy Bioshock 2, Dark Void, or the special edition of Dantes Inferno for £5. But we play PC games I hear you cry! Here's the gorgeous part: Game are offering £25 in-store credit for Dantes Inferno, and £22 for each of the other two. Example of how this might work: earlier today I went into my local cash converters, picked the two cheapest 360 games I could find (total of £9), brought them to Gamestop, traded them in, bought two copies of Dantes Inferno, brought them to Game and walked out with a £50 gift card. It no longer matters how much games cost The best part is employees of both stores (the ones I delt with anyway) know exactly what's happening, and still don't care. Life is good
I think brand new games can be a little expensive, but it's amazing how quickly they drop after a few months. Saying that though, I bought GTA4 on pre-order for £20 when it first came out, which was a bargain imo. I don't agree that Steam does good deals though, I bought Half Life 2 Orange Box a few weeks ago for £10 on Amazon, it's £15 on Steam and it's their own game!
I'm not voting until there's an option that doesn't imply huge, stupid generalizations about complex things.
The "good deals" part of what you're mentioning refers to the Steam Sales, not their year round prices. I'm pretty sure the Orange box was well below £10 after Christmas. Frankly after the last Holiday Sale you'd be stupid to ever buy something not on sale on Steam...kinda like DFS
Cinema ticket costs £7.50 for (on average) 2 hours of film. Game costs £25 for (if multiplayer) upwards of 48 hours of entertainment. There is nothing to complain about.
Yikes...where do you go to the cinema? £5.80 here, and that would be if I didn't work in both a 12-screen multiplex and 2-screen arthouse and therefore get free access to both
PC game pricing is fine. I feel vaguely sorry for the console users actually. They pay more for games that often play better on PC anyways. I rarely buy when they are released though, as very few in my estimations are worth paying more than £20 for.
More expensive compared to what? A loaf of bread? Buttons? Then yeah, damn right they're more expensive. If you remain unconvinced that your argument is more than a little silly, I'd suggest you take a look a this link.
Honestly, PC games do not have the same "value" that console games do, it's as simple as that. Console games have a resell and trade-in value that PC games just can't compete with! Games like MW2 was getting you $40 from Gamestop! You can also rent the games as well. So no, PC games DO NOT have the same value and thus are not cheaper. If you remain unconvinced that your argument is more than a little silly, I'd suggest you take a look a this http://www.n4g.com/gaming/News-349298.aspx
PC Games have far superior value as they have better multiplayer and if you buy carefully (IE. Valve/Blizzard) you will get support for a long time. Just because you can't trade them in is not the sole definer of value - ask the people still playing Starcraft/Diablo 2.
I have a PS3, and if I buy a new console game it's usually £40. I can usually sell that same game for £15-£20 once selling fees have been deducted from wherever I sell it. If I buy a new PC game, it's usually £15-£25. I can usually sell that same game for around £5 once selling fees have been deducted. Unless I buy a game on Steam, when it is usually around £10-£15 as I often only buy game in the sales. Others may have different experiences, but that's mine, and my maths says PC games are the same price if not cheaper once you consider the long-term value. If the same game if available on the PC and the console at the same overall price (taking into consideration the resale price of each), then I'll buy it on the PC for obvious reasons, but that's another matter entirely and I'm vaguely aware you've been trolling a certain thread on these forums about this issue since the dawn of time, so I'll not go there. There's also this curious phenomenon where I tend to keep my PC games longer than my console games, which I'm much more willing to get rid of quickly. I still own, for example, a copy of Total Annihilation from 1997, a copy of Half-Life 2 from 2004, and a copy of F.E.A.R. from 2006, all of which I re-visit and play often. Out of the 30 or so games I have owned for my PS3, I currently only have 4 of them in my possession, the oldest being GT5 dating from early 2008, and shortly before GT5 comes out that will be going up for sale. Crucially though, I wouldn't even want to go back and play any older console games which are the same age as the PC games I own listed above, even though I have one of the first generation PS3s with backwards compatibility. I've tried to go back and play some old PS2 games, but they look like crap and I could barely even give them away once I realised this. For obvious reasons, PC games also tend to be supported by patches much longer than console games (even if it's just compatibility fixes for newer OSes), while patching is very much a new feature available to developers. Well, new as in available since the beginning of the current console generation, anyway. Oh, and don't think for a second your beloved console game manufacturers/developers aren't thinking of ways to prevent second-hand sales of console games, because they are.