Gaming Please stop moaning about the price of games.

I refuse to pay more than £35 for a game even if it means missing out or waiting for a sale, I will not contribute towards price creep.

 

Some of the comments here belong in the demote thread. People who expect a regular spew of high quality releases that will entertain them for hours on end, but also somehow think the developers and studio can continue to function if everyone buys the game at discount prices? Naive, self-entitled fools.

 

I wanted ROTTR for my birthday. I had specifically asked my lady wife to buy it for me months in advance. Imagine my shock when it did not release on disc so I had to buy it digitally. It kinda sucked... "Darling, that game, well you need to send me the cash...".

Any way due to this I managed to snag an Nvidia code for £20 IIRC. I was very pleased, given this also retails for £40.

Imagine my surprise then when it overflowed the memory buffer on my Fury X cards running 4k with max detail so I had to wind it all back down to around high levels. Why? the same reason BLOPS III does it; they now have 6gb of VRAM to stuff full.

Now in this instance it wasn't too bad. The game still looked very nice at high and I couldn't really spot the difference unless I looked at some screenshots I had taken really closely.

I still had to wait for Crossfire support though and the game ended up boring me with too much story and not enough action, and action that was pretty much identical to the first of the two games.

I have no problem paying whatever it takes to make a good game with good content in it. I bought the FO4 Pip Boy edition and I have, at last count, bought Fallout 3 - The original, all of the DLC, the GOTY on Steam (just so I could have it on there) the lunch box collector's edition for PS3 (gave the game to a mate kept the goodies) the BOS collector's edition on PS3 (again giving away the spare copy) as well as FONV box set *and* the GOTY.

That racks up to an awful lot of money. FO4 was good and not great. It could have been great if the graphics were better but they weren't.

So please don't put me into that category. I like to buy games when they release but I just think charging console prices is off, especially when there are no licensing fees and the PC release is basically a second payday for the same game.

 

Yes i was/am and i understand it takes time for developers to squeeze the most out of new consoles but the optimisation that happens over the lifetime of a console doesn't seem to translate into better console ports, again this is just my unsubstantiated opinion but i don't think the optimisations done on consoles carry over when porting a game to the PC as i would think those optimisations are specific to the console.

I guess what I'm getting at is it seems while you get more out of consoles as they age that extra performance doesn't seem to effect the PC versions noticeably.

 

They were supposed to be significantly better this round, thanks to the consoles being X86. The only "benefit" I have seen so far is devs using all of the 6gb VRAM available to the consoles, and not even in a good way.

IIRC it should also be a lot easier then if that's the case.

 

Huh... the reason I stopped gaming on the PC wasn't the cost of the games, but the cost of the kit to run them. One day whilst planning my annual refresh I considered that I had really only played a few particularly good games that year, meaning the cost per game was well into the hundreds all things considered - sold up there and then in favour of consoles and never looked back.

Granted I had a fairly severe case of upgraditis, but considering the shelf life of a £300 console there's no comparison to maintaining even the most modest of gaming PCs.

I used to get too caught up in the graphics argument (hence the upgraditis) but it's a little bit daft. It's nice when games are pretty of course, but a crappy game with otherworldly graphics is still a crappy game, and a great game can still be just that with graphics that are a few years behind the curve.

There seems to be some looking back with rose tinted glasses here as well... "Back in my day, every game was GOTY with nary a bug to be seen". Plenty of games in the 90s had expansion packs, most of these were in the £10-20 range and frequently the content was a bit meh, that one could argue should have been part of the original game. Games in the 90s had bugs, some of which were game-breaking, some of which were just annoying. Publishers in the 90s released patches for said bugs that sometimes fixed them, sometimes didn't and sometimes broke other things. The only thing I can see now that's different is the delivery mechanism.

 

Kinda agree with the cost per game thing there ted as it's insane what a PC can cost over the years. People looking at getting into VR will easily spend £1500 including the devices and its a lot of cash for most casual fans to drop on computer hardware.

I have wanted VR since day1 but the costs for me to build a PC the way I wanted it would of meant spending the best part of £2000 which for 1 game is crazy ( 1 game at the minute more would follow)

I have always personally thought PC games should be ran at the highest settings and resolution your monitor could cope with if I wanted to run at medium I'd buy a console.

The amount of rubbish ports and day 1 launch issues of the biggest games for the last few years have put a big dampener on my enthusiasm for PC gaming.

 

I can't believe after probably 10 years or so of enjoying articles here THIS is the one which finally motivated me to even make an account.

The author of this really tries to stand out as arrogant and forceful about shoving his opinion down our throats. I've been gaming since... probably around the late 1980s so I've been around with all the game trends, prices. And whenever someone brings in the topic of "lets take inflation into consideration" i start seeing red.

I won't go on the same rant as the author went, I'll just list some main points:

- Price of games isn't absolute. You good ol' US folks pay 39$ for it, I pay 39Eur for it... or pounds. Still the same price/performance?
- Rehash of the same game year after year with the same old 59$ (59Eur) price tag?
- 69$ beta version games which rely on "pay first and maybe get a stable game in 6 months time" profit model (COD, BF, ...)
- The latest trend of "episodic" games... which bring about the amazing new method of paying for the whole game, and then hoping the developers make new content for it (e.g. Hitman)
- Hyped up sequels which end up being a lame 3hour game play experience
- pure console ports with no real added value to the PC gamer
- making sequels just to make money and add no real value to the franchise

Honestly, i haven't been gaming a lot in the last couple of years... but i do like to try some sequels to games i've known and loved back in the day... and to see what franchises as Starcraft, COD and BF came down to makes me sad. Makes me sadder to see people paying premium for crap like that... and i unfortunately have to do that since i have kids who like to play that... and me being the "computer friendly dad" have to get a copy for myself too...

I don't mind playing 69$ for a game with real added value, as in hours and hours of gameplay, or a real multiplayer experience. But that is simply not the case with modern games.

 

Welcome to the internet!

I'm not touching the other ones - frankly the best way to show your disagreement with each one of those is to wait until it's €10, or €20 or whatever, or just not buy it at all, but this one...

Why on earth should the PC version be any different or better than the console versions? Especially considering the TAM of PC vs console games, it makes sense that the PC edition should be a straight port at best, if not an afterthought.

 

Because the PC is different or uses better hardware than the console.

The numbers I've looked at are fairly similar in terms of the number of users, unless we're combining Xbox Live & PSN into a single market.

 

Who cares? That explains why you get a slider to increase detail or resolution, but I don't see why developers should put any effort into a port beyond simply making it work across as many platforms as possible.

Interesting - please do share. I was making a sweeping assumption that the console market was significantly larger than that of PC gaming, though a quick google didn't show me much of use, not recently anyway. Certainly a few years ago this stood true based on multiple sources, and that was before what I assume was a re-invigoration of the console market off the back of the latest round of hardware.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/micr...or-42-of-the-total-video-games-market/0115826

 

I find this very interesting, because I don't understand this state of mind. Why do people feel attached to digital assets in a fancy physical package (like console games) that were specifically made to enforce artificial scarcity? The only way I can rationalize it is as some kind of coping mechanism for investing in a completely locked down system that can bought for much less money in the second hand market.

The reason why people don't value Steam games, in my opinion, is because they are completely digital and Valve doesn't try to fool you into thinking they are scarce and thus valuable. On the other hand, Nintendo in particular does artificial scarcity very well, otherwise the Amiibos wouldn't be successful.

Isn't that because it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify a PC upgrade? PCs are increasingly becoming good enough for most tasks and games, and so it's also becoming very difficult to make games that will blow your mind in a certain franchise and that make you buy a new PC.

Nowadays, the best games will be those that try to innovate, and they don't necessarily need top tier hardware to run.

 

Excellent article. Spot on.

 

I didn't say anyone should care, you asked why a PC version should be any different or better than the console version and i tried to answer it. While some games do come with sliders a great deal of ports have very basic options when it comes to graphics, some even lock the FPS on the PC to 30FPS.

I done the same as you, a quick Google seemed to say Steam had around 125million users but that was last year, then going on this it seems the PSN has around 65 million, and lastly Xbox Live seems to have around 48 million, obviously those are probably ballpark figures seeing as most are from last year.

 

I'm not sure numbers of user accounts per platform would accurately reflect the market size though. I have a steam account - I had to create one to play HL2 12 years ago. A PC gamer I am not.

There could be a fair chunk of users that fall into the casual gamer category as well (especially on xbox, as isn't that part of windows phone now?). Just making out what I can from the Steam stats Intel onboard GPUs make up a fair share of the user base (though some of the figures look weird, so not sure how reliable that is).

I'm surprised that there's not a nice simple little pie chart somewhere that just compares 2015 sales per platform

 

I would disagree with this on a couple of counts. Firstly, you can't really compare a personal computer to an actual gaming computer, which is technically what consoles are. The distinction of "gaming" applied to PC hardware is arbitrary; it's a colloquial reference to the intended use of the hardware, much like socks that have the days of the week embroidered into them. A so-called "gaming" PC does what every personal computer does, which means it does a million things consoles cannot do, and so on.

Secondly, on the point of money spent to maintain a computer, the trend of upgrading is just that - a trend, not a necessity. Pretty much everything in my PC could have been purchased nearly 8 years ago (come November, when X58 was first available for purchase back in 2008). The only exception is the graphics card, which I recently bought second hand for £200, and there's no good reason for me to upgrade again any time soon. The only reason I have a hexcore processor and 24GB of RAM is beacuse of the non-gaming use of my PC. If not for that, I'd still probably have a quad core and the 6GB of RAM that's currently in my desk drawer.

Now I'm happy to be corrected on this, but I sincerely believe that there is not a single current game that requires more than a 4GHz quad core and 6GB of RAM (available 2008/09) to run adequately at 1080p. That leaves graphics hardware, and if we're talking 8 years and including both buying and selling, there's probably not as much money in it as you might think, even for flagship graphics cards.

Your question re. why should PC versions be different from console versions... that's a good question, and not an easy one to answer. Perhaps it's because PCs have more cutting-edge hardware available to them, and innovation is important to the industry - that's why developers put effort into the detail slider. Don't you think that the industry would eventually stagnate if all developers cared about was compatibility?

Back OT, I generally sympathise with the author of the article. A heck of a lot goes into games these days, and yet many people seem reluctant to attach value to what is being produced. I knew there were going to be some disagreements here based on the piracy thread, and I'm still waiting for the token "I don't care how much games cost, because I just pirate them!"

 

Plenty of the comparisons are laughable, comparing it to live events which are largely priced based on demand for a 1-off event when they can only possible allow 20-40k people to attend isnt the same as a game that sells millions of duplicate copies just like books, films or music. When someone makes only 30k copies of a book/film/album that millions want, then draw comparisons.

I think part of the problem i have with the high prices is that often games arent the solo experience they used to be. They're now something that most people play with friends and if all of you arent 100% interested, then it gets messy. If you wait for a sale, for it to drop to a price you think is justifiable, you've been left behind, everyone else has had their 100hrs of fun with it, and playing it far more infrequently, which again makes it less worthwhile.
So we're getting games going up in price, often down in quality and care for the audience, which are focused on the online gameplay, and unless you're willing to pay the day1 price you're likely not going to be playing it with your friends.
If it was a solo game, it makes no difference, but when it comes to playing with friends, you're being excluded because you cant justify the price (for whatever reason), or you need friends who are excited about playing it, to wait because you're not near-RRP levels of fussed about it - good luck.

Thats not to say how dare they charge £xx for something, but the way games are being focused on MP, a 12mo cycle till the next identical version is released, and the social aspects they're encouraging, plus the fact that many games often end up being great for about 30h and then have zero replayability... its not helping customers, and its a reason why prices going up is a reason to complain, because in many cases waiting 6mo means you might as well not bother. Look at Hardlines & Battlefront, both PC communities are diving (have been diving) so why on earth would you buy it now?
They insist on creating short cycles and tiny interations on the last, then expect full prices to increase too. No.

 

If in your case the "gaming" element on your PC has really netted out to less than £300 in 8 years (e.g. gaming specific parts and the difference between an acceptable baseline for a non-gaming PC), well done, but I'd suggest you're very much in the minority. (I also admire your discipline!)

Why would it? You're talking as if Graphics=Innovation

I think it already has to some extent, but that's more on account of "innovative" delivery models. It's a sad world when Clash of Clans grosses 4x what the top triple-A console title manages :/

That's good point I hadn't even considered as MP gaming isn't my particular tipple, but now you mention it a friend of mine is a destiny enthusiast, and it seems as if he's basically committed to purchasing each and every DLC as it comes out simply because everyone else will. I'm fairly certain he's spent well over £100 on the game so far. I guess it's probably the same scenario with COD et al?

I buy shooters when they're a tenner simply because I know single player has been all but abandoned in many cases, and they're only good for a short and moderately enjoyable brainless diversion from something more in-depth.

 

Yea who knows how each number is arrived at, i normally take any claims on the numbers of users with a few truck loads of salt.

Steam stats have always looked odd to me, i mean how did they double their apparent active user base to 125 million in just 2-3 years, maybe a better indicator would be Concurrent Steam Users that shows around 10 million, or maybe we should just chuck some darts at a board.

 

When trying to dig some more things up, I stumbled across something that highlighted that it's likely to be nigh on impossible to really get an accurate view what the addressable market for a "normal" game. That's a terrible definition, but what I mean by that is something that isn't an MMO....

http://cdn.gamer-network.net/2015/articles/1/8/0/7/7/7/4/145382136822.jpg

Because basically sub-based MMOs look to be an enormous chunk of the PC market, which I'm considering as not a part of the TAM for "traditional" games - is that fair?

EDIT: Ah wait, those are just "digital" earnings and exclude physical copies, so will naturally will be skewed. Why should they be classified any differently? I give up, I'm not even sure what I was looking for now

In lieu of any solid data, I'm now basing my assumption on solely the fact that developers of multi-platform games seem to treat the PC platform as an ugly sister (even if it is prettier), so there's probably a greater addressable market in the console space.