456 réponses à ce sujet

[Lyssistr]

Morroian wrote...

Lyssistr wrote...

coolide wrote...

Video game producers are not charities. You need to look at this from the shareholders' view.

 bs, shareholders these days are almost the last consideration, companies in many sectors (especially in tech, software etc) invest in so-called "growth" and pay **** dividends, if at all.

Investors don't necessarily want dividends they may want capital growth which profitability obviously helps as well. The price rise has to be about increasing profit thereby increasing capital growth and/or dividends it doesn't make sense otherwise.

 Well not only and it doesn't always make sense, nor is it simple to price a non-derivative security, there is no rigorous technique to do that, some academics say prices are best modeled with a geom. brownian motion+drift (essentially claiming prices are random) but people use several techniques to come up with an intrinsic price, e.g. though value investing principles, growth investing techniques and what they use depends on the timescale they're looking at and lots of other factors. None of these is rigorous or exact tho, so it's not as simple as that.

 In theory todays value of stock X should be the discounted (to the present) sum of cashflows of all its future dividents but ofc looking at this is not practical because nobody knows what IRs will be like each time a company pays a dividend for the next X years (tough to get present values), what the dividends will be, who knows when a company will go bankrupt etc.

 Investing in growth and skipping a dividend, *sometimes* is a reasonable practice, e.g. tech stocks but at some point they do expect a dividend. growth is valuable to the extent it promises future cashflows through dividends, even if that means investors may have to hold to their stocks. E.g. Apple didn't pay a dividend lately and the stock price so far is rising, because people expect this growth to be reflected in their future cashflows (**not expressing an opinion on aapl stock or how it will fare in the future, just mentioning its behavior so far. Since it skipped a dividend for growth, it serves as a recent example of how growth worked -so far- for aapl, not expressing an opinion on where aapl will be tomorrow**).

 If no dividend is *ever* payed tho, then growth on its own does not guarantee an investor will get something out of his investment.

 **I'm not commenting on EA stock, nor giving any advice on what to do with that stock** just giving a short summary of how people price non-derivative securities.

 With regard to DA2 price rise & shareholders *in specific, not EA stock in general*, again since shareholders don't seem to get any dividends for the last 5 yrs, DA2 price rise has nothing to do with them. **again not expressing an opinion on the stock, just saying that DA2 price rise won't directly deliver to stockholders, EA stock is affected by a multitude of products and another bunch of parameters, not just DA2. DA2's price is a drop in the ocean**

Modifié par Lyssistr, 14 janvier 2011 - 06:06 .

[StingingVelvet]

Stanley Woo wrote...

Unfortunately, there is no way to give a company like BioWare your gaming dollars directly when purchasing one of our games. Sorry.

Which is why the PC indie model is so lovely.  Make a game, sell it on your website, reap all the profit.

[BTCentral]

Lyssistr wrote...

Oddly, the UK release price is reasonable, 27.56£ @ amazon and 29.99£ @ steam.

The UK Signature Edition price was even more reasonable. I pre-ordered my copy for £24.93.
The regular version is actually more expensive.

It was well worth my pre-order, as not only do I get extra stuff... it's cheaper?
(And I would have bought it on release anyway if I had not.)

Modifié par BTCentral, 14 janvier 2011 - 04:33 .

[AlanC9]

Deadmac wrote...
PC games use to cost $29.99 for a full version, and then $19.99 for an expansion pack

Really? When was that? Pulling a copy of CGW from ten years back, I find NWN1 selling for $49 and BG2 for $43. I have to go back before 1990 to find games selling under $30, and the RPGs actually cost $35. What's that in 2011 dollars?

[CoS Sarah Jinstar]

Morroian wrote...

Do people really not expect inflation to impact game prices? Costs are undoubtedly rising every year. Prices of most other goods rises.

Right... PC games have been  50 dollars in the US for the better part of a decade. You're going to tell me all of a sudden because Activision decided to sell Starcraft2 and the lastest yearly iteration of Call of Duty 2kX at 60 and a couple other publishers jumped on the bandwagon for higher profile titles, and funny thing, higher profile titles only, that its all of a sudden inflation? I'm pretty sure you're not that nieve  Morroian.

[Taint Master]

LOL@ this thread.



After all the holiday sales retailers and online stores had for the preorder, if you're paying 60 now it's your own fault.



What's 10 dollars anyway? If you're a PC gamer you're looking at 600+ dollars just for an entry level gaming rig. Suck it up.

[Ziggeh]

CoS Sarah Jinstar wrote...
Right... PC games have been  50 dollars in the US for the better part of a decade. You're going to tell me all of a sudden because Activision decided to sell Starcraft2 and the lastest yearly iteration of Call of Duty 2kX at 60 and a couple other publishers jumped on the bandwagon for higher profile titles, and funny thing, higher profile titles only, that its all of a sudden inflation? I'm pretty sure you're not that nieve  Morroian.

You believe they would need to go up small amounts annually to qualify for the effect of inflation?

[Nintendan]

Taint Master wrote...

LOL@ this thread.

After all the holiday sales retailers and online stores had for the preorder, if you're paying 60 now it's your own fault.

What's 10 dollars anyway? If you're a PC gamer you're looking at 600+ dollars just for an entry level gaming rig. Suck it up.

10 Dollars is enough for steam users to get the DLC the where F'ed out of.

[AlanC9]

CoS Sarah Jinstar wrote...
 PC games have been  50 dollars in the US for the better part of a decade. You're going to tell me all of a sudden because Activision decided to sell Starcraft2 and the lastest yearly iteration of Call of Duty 2kX at 60 and a couple other publishers jumped on the bandwagon for higher profile titles, and funny thing, higher profile titles only, that its all of a sudden inflation? I'm pretty sure you're not that nieve  Morroian.

This actually makes it sound mysterious that game prices stayed stable for so long.

[StingingVelvet]

AlanC9 wrote...

CoS Sarah Jinstar wrote...
 PC games have been  50 dollars in the US for the better part of a decade. You're going to tell me all of a sudden because Activision decided to sell Starcraft2 and the lastest yearly iteration of Call of Duty 2kX at 60 and a couple other publishers jumped on the bandwagon for higher profile titles, and funny thing, higher profile titles only, that its all of a sudden inflation? I'm pretty sure you're not that nieve  Morroian.

This actually makes it sound mysterious that game prices stayed stable for so long.

Exactly.

It's very weird we had no price increase over 20 years.  Actually we had price decreases in many areas, since many cartridge games on the SNES and N64 were priced as high as $80, and many old PC games with tons of FMV or discs were priced higher as well.  The Playstation brought about a swing toward cheaper software that lasted all the way until the Xbox 360 launched, which is pretty crazy if you think about it.

$60 really isn't that much, I think people largely overreact to this.  If it is too much for you though, feel free to wait for a price drop.  That's the cool thing about games, they drop in price relatively quickly so short games or games you aren't sure about can be obtained for much less after a few months.

[Lyssistr]

investors, inflation, console prices should be equal to pc prices blah blah ...



could be a trillion of things, e.g. they increased us prices in specific because they needed to hedge against the dollar and the cost of hedging was added only to us products, they plan to hold the dollars and increased price to accommodate for the low US IR+QE2, they expect unemployment to go down, easier access to credit, QE2 $ reaching "everyday" economy and causing inflation or increase in demand (e.g. by extrapolating DAOs sales), they're desperate for more income, they heard their favorite astrologist recommend 60$, someone had a dream with 60$.



Most likely, it's a trend(*) for us publishers to increase prices and EA jumped on the train. They saw SC II got away with it, so they're giving it a shot.



(*) don't try to rationalize a trend.



All 60$ means is that they want to try & start selling at that price, if it's not sustainable, they'll go lower, depending on how many people are willing to buy at 60$. It's not like any fundamentals are necessarily affecting DA2's price.

[PrinceOfFallout13]

complaining about the price of a normal game? when they waste hundred of dollars on a graphics card smh tell australians that lyssistr i would like you to try and tell them that 60 dollars is an outrage we get games cheap compared to the uk and australia be greatfull for that

[Lyssistr]

StingingVelvet wrote...

AlanC9 wrote...

CoS Sarah Jinstar wrote...
 PC games have been  50 dollars in the US for the better part of a decade. You're going to tell me all of a sudden because Activision decided to sell Starcraft2 and the lastest yearly iteration of Call of Duty 2kX at 60 and a couple other publishers jumped on the bandwagon for higher profile titles, and funny thing, higher profile titles only, that its all of a sudden inflation? I'm pretty sure you're not that nieve  Morroian.

This actually makes it sound mysterious that game prices stayed stable for so long.

Exactly.

It's very weird we had no price increase over 20 years.  Actually we had price decreases in many areas, since many cartridge games on the SNES and N64 were priced as high as $80, and many old PC games with tons of FMV or discs were priced higher as well.  The Playstation brought about a swing toward cheaper software that lasted all the way until the Xbox 360 launched, which is pretty crazy if you think about it.

$60 really isn't that much, I think people largely overreact to this.  If it is too much for you though, feel free to wait for a price drop.  That's the cool thing about games, they drop in price relatively quickly so short games or games you aren't sure about can be obtained for much less after a few months.

 Looking at 80s prices and extrapolating them to today by looking *solely* at a *mean inflation index* is not possible. a trillion of things are missing, manufacturing costs, cost to produce software, cost to distribute, # of clients, correlation of software sales (&prices) to other sectors and many many more. The whole economy is *fundamentally* different, looking at mean inflation is not necessarily indicative.

[Taint Master]

Nintendan wrote...

Taint Master wrote...

LOL@ this thread.

After all the holiday sales retailers and online stores had for the preorder, if you're paying 60 now it's your own fault.

What's 10 dollars anyway? If you're a PC gamer you're looking at 600+ dollars just for an entry level gaming rig. Suck it up.

10 Dollars is enough for steam users to get the DLC the where F'ed out of.

I'm a steam user.  I didn't get F'd out of anything.  I paid 44 USD for the SE.

It's not their fault you didn't take advantage of your options.

[Emperor Mars]

Personally, I am happy that the trend stayed at $50 for as long as it did.

[Lyssistr]

Emperor Mars wrote...

Personally, I am happy that the trend stayed at $50 for as long as it did.

Then buy when the price is at <= 50, consumer conscience is a good thing. 

[AlanC9]

Lyssistr wrote...
 Looking at 80s prices and extrapolating them to today by looking *solely* at a *mean inflation index* is not possible. a trillion of things are missing, manufacturing costs, cost to produce software, cost to distribute, # of clients, correlation of software sales (&prices) to other sectors and many many more. The whole economy is *fundamentally* different, looking at mean inflation is not necessarily indicative.

Why would we be interested in the production costs, though?

[Durallan]

If you think prices are going to go down once they go up, thats wishful thinking. Steam might be able to manage a deal or 2 but I don't see bricks and mortar stores dropping prices below 80 dollars in australia, thats about as cheap as new games get

[Lyssistr]

AlanC9 wrote...

Lyssistr wrote...
 Looking at 80s prices and extrapolating them to today by looking *solely* at a *mean inflation index* is not possible. a trillion of things are missing, manufacturing costs, cost to produce software, cost to distribute, # of clients, correlation of software sales (&prices) to other sectors and many many more. The whole economy is *fundamentally* different, looking at mean inflation is not necessarily indicative.

Why would we be interested in the production costs, though?

if something is cheaper to make today, it's usually cheaper to buy. If eg. in the 80s cultivating 3 x awesome_fruit costed 1 penny ph (totally hpothetical value) and today these 3 _awesome_fruit are bought from emerging_country_A, where cost is 0.01 penny, even if goods have on average risen in price, awesome_fruit will likely be cheaper.

 In software this could translate e.g. to outsourcing, less cost to do some things (e.g. by buying middleware instead of developing everything). it's not only production costs, more buyers in the video game area since the 80s (most people didn't have a computer back then), so many things are entirely different since the 80s in software related industries.

 to keep it simple, if instead of the 80s we look at the 60s and inflation adjust computer prices, then only millionaires and national labs would afford computers today. It's not the case because the hardware industry has drastically changed since the 60s (probably allot more than the software industry has changed since the 80s)

 All mean inflation says is how the value of a *basket* of goods changes over time. You cannot look at this one number and apply it everywhere. A reasonable price today is not 80s-price inflation adjusted for all things.

  They want to start selling at 60$, if enough people buy there, they'll keep it that way, if many people buy they'll increase the price, if people won't buy, in their future games they'll revert to $50.

[StingingVelvet]

Lyssistr wrote...

Looking at 80s prices and extrapolating them to today by looking *solely* at a *mean inflation index* is not possible. a trillion of things are missing, manufacturing costs, cost to produce software, cost to distribute, # of clients, correlation of software sales (&prices) to other sectors and many many more. The whole economy is *fundamentally* different, looking at mean inflation is not necessarily indicative.

Sure, sure... plus more people buy games now.  None of that prevents it from being true that people have much more money to spend today than they did in 1980 though.  The average wage and cost of living is higher, thus products are generally higher in price as well.  The minnimum wage in 1980 was $3.25 an hour for God's sake.

All that said though, the important thing to know is that the right price is the price people are willing to pay.  That is capitalism 101.  Raising the new game price to $60 5 years ago on consoles did not lower sales, people accepted the price, therefore it is the right price.  Now they are finally raising the cost of new PC games to $60 and Starcraft 2 and Modern Warfare 2 certainly did not suffer for it... people accepted the price.  No matter what the passionate want to say on this or any other forum it doesn't matter, the people have accepted the price, therefore it is the right price.

[Lyssistr]

StingingVelvet wrote...

Lyssistr wrote...

Looking at 80s prices and extrapolating them to today by looking *solely* at a *mean inflation index* is not possible. a trillion of things are missing, manufacturing costs, cost to produce software, cost to distribute, # of clients, correlation of software sales (&prices) to other sectors and many many more. The whole economy is *fundamentally* different, looking at mean inflation is not necessarily indicative.

Sure, sure... plus more people buy games now.  None of that prevents it from being true that people have much more money to spend today than they did in 1980 though.  The average wage and cost of living is higher, thus products are generally higher in price as well.  The minnimum wage in 1980 was $3.25 an hour for God's sake.

All that said though, the important thing to know is that the right price is the price people are willing to pay.  That is capitalism 101.  Raising the new game price to $60 5 years ago on consoles did not lower sales, people accepted the price, therefore it is the right price.  Now they are finally raising the cost of new PC games to $60 and Starcraft 2 and Modern Warfare 2 certainly did not suffer for it... people accepted the price.  No matter what the passionate want to say on this or any other forum it doesn't matter, the people have accepted the price, therefore it is the right price.

 Do you have any sales (not shipped units) numbers in comparison to previous sales for MW2? (SC II is too far apart from SC to compare sales) if they're high then yes, it's the US market price for MW2. It's not necessarily the same for DA2 tho. Keep in mind that companies usually publish # of shipped units, not actual sales, most likely we'll never learn how many were actually willing to buy at that price.

 Personally, I didn't buy SC II yet because I'm not spending 60$ for 1/3rd of SC II.

[AlanC9]

Lyssistr wrote...
 All mean inflation says is how the value of a *basket* of goods changes over time. You cannot look at this one number and apply it everywhere. A reasonable price today is not 80s-price inflation adjusted for all things.

Why isn't that the reasonable price? Or rather, what do you mean by "reasonable"?

I'm thinking of game prices purely in terms of personal utility, and applying the mean inflation rate works pretty well for me.

Modifié par AlanC9, 14 janvier 2011 - 06:49 .

[Lyssistr]

AlanC9 wrote...

Lyssistr wrote...
 All mean inflation says is how the value of a *basket* of goods changes over time. You cannot look at this one number and apply it everywhere. A reasonable price today is not 80s-price inflation adjusted for all things.

Why isn't that the reasonable price? Or rather, what do you mean by "reasonable"?

is expected better? I mean that if somehow you (magically) had at hand yearly inflation numbers for the next 20 years *today*, and used these to calculate an expected value for e.g. video games, this wouldn't necessarily be the same you'd see in 20 yrs.

[AlanC9]

But that would work for me in terms of whether I'd find those future games to be good values. Future me will probably have similar tastes to current me; he might value games more, actually, since I don't think I'll be going out to bars as much in 20 years as I do now. But it's still going to be something along the lines of this game equals this many beers, or this many movies, etc.

[Lyssistr]

AlanC9 wrote...

I'm thinking of game prices purely in terms of personal utility, and applying the mean inflation rate works pretty well for me.

 Your personal utility is highly subjective, and it probably is not the average utility for most buyers. If people were willing to buy at prices that are as high as (80s+inflation adjustment), this is how much video games would sell on average today.

 Publishers want to gauge if people are willing to buy at 60$ @ release, if they are they'll price all games at 60, if they're too willing they'll increase, if they wait for prices to drop (videogames become much cheaper as time passes) they'll have to revert at 50$. 

Modifié par Lyssistr, 14 janvier 2011 - 07:36 .