60 réponses à ce sujet

[Zanallen]

Neofelis Nebulosa wrote...

Zanallen wrote...

Meh, the price for games has pretty much been static for the past 30 years. A price increase was inevitable. Now, we'll have to see if the other developers follow suit and, if not, if EA is willing to reduce the price back.

<_<

It is the truth. Besides, video games are a luxury. If you can't afford to buy them, don't. Perhaps this price increase will cause people to be a little more cautious with their purchases and force developers to make better games to help ensure a buy.

[kobayashi-maru]

Zanallen wrote...

Neofelis Nebulosa wrote...

Zanallen wrote...

Meh, the price for games has pretty much been static for the past 30 years. A price increase was inevitable. Now, we'll have to see if the other developers follow suit and, if not, if EA is willing to reduce the price back.

<_<

It is the truth. Besides, video games are a luxury. If you can't afford to buy them, don't. Perhaps this price increase will cause people to be a little more cautious with their purchases and force developers to make better games to help ensure a buy.

I hope your right on better games being made to justify price - I doubt it. However I just have to say I remember buying brand new games in UK about 26 years ago, when the prices where £2-3. I also remember seeing some SNES games at over £50 so it's maybe more varied pricing than was stated.

[MichaelStuart]

Really not a good time to be raising prices in the UK with the average level of disposable going down.
But I suppose that's true everywhere.

[Cutlasskiwi]

Heh, Game and Gamestop charge around £65 here for new games right now so 55 seems cheap to me. Thankfully there is better deals on the internet.

[FireAndBlood]

That makes no sense, why just the UK?

[Naughty Bear]

Zanallen wrote...

Neofelis Nebulosa wrote...

Zanallen wrote...

Meh, the price for games has pretty much been static for the past 30 years. A price increase was inevitable. Now, we'll have to see if the other developers follow suit and, if not, if EA is willing to reduce the price back.

<_<

It is the truth. Besides, video games are a luxury. If you can't afford to buy them, don't. Perhaps this price increase will cause people to be a little more cautious with their purchases and force developers to make better games to help ensure a buy.

And so what if video games are a luxury? I hate this arguement, if video games are a luxury and no-one can afford it, you can say bye bye to millions of jobs to for those who focused their career on games.

[MerinTB]

Naughty Bear wrote...

Zanallen wrote...

Neofelis Nebulosa wrote...

Zanallen wrote...
Meh, the price for games has pretty much been static for the past 30 years. A price increase was inevitable. Now, we'll have to see if the other developers follow suit and, if not, if EA is willing to reduce the price back.

<_<

It is the truth. Besides, video games are a luxury. If you can't afford to buy them, don't. Perhaps this price increase will cause people to be a little more cautious with their purchases and force developers to make better games to help ensure a buy.

And so what if video games are a luxury? I hate this arguement, if video games are a luxury and no-one can afford it, you can say bye bye to millions of jobs to for those who focused their career on games.

He IS right that prices on video games have remained pretty stable (arguably, due to inflation, they've actually DROPPED in effective price over the years) but this is largely due to the video game market growing, growing, growing.  That growth has about peaked, but the video game makers continue to make games bigger and more expensive as if that market will continue to grow more, and that's not likely.

The luxury argument should only hold water in the sense that government and charities shouldn't work to make sure people can afford games as if they are staple needs.  Beyond that, however, even luxury goods need to be competitively priced and regulations need to exist to fight against price fixing, etc., so "it's a luxury good, if you can't afford it, don't buy it" means diddly in the face of genuine concerns about game prices.

Also, for the game industry to thrive, the price must be enough for game makers to profit, but cheap enough for even "poor" people to buy them.  The entertainment industry is upheld not by the 1% but the actually the bottom 50%.  People who can afford to go on vacations and buy cars as a hobby tend to play less video games and see less movies.

[ObserverStatus]

Volus Warlord wrote...
This just means I'll save more buying used.

It is an interesting pardox, no? The more games cost, the more people buy them used, and the more people buy used, the more publishers raise their prices.

In all seriousness though, the burden will be on EA to prove to British gamers that their products are worth such an exorbinant price. If they don't want their customers to buy used or wait several month for online prices to go down, they'll have to do better than pointing to inflation and posting pictures of Cliffy B. eating ramen noodles.

[Zanallen]

MerinTB wrote...

The luxury argument should only hold water in the sense that government and charities shouldn't work to make sure people can afford games as if they are staple needs.  Beyond that, however, even luxury goods need to be competitively priced and regulations need to exist to fight against price fixing, etc., so "it's a luxury good, if you can't afford it, don't buy it" means diddly in the face of genuine concerns about game prices.

Also, for the game industry to thrive, the price must be enough for game makers to profit, but cheap enough for even "poor" people to buy them.  The entertainment industry is upheld not by the 1% but the actually the bottom 50%.  People who can afford to go on vacations and buy cars as a hobby tend to play less video games and see less movies.

Which is why my earlier post said that we now have to wait and see if the other companies will follow suit and raise their prices to match or, if not, if EA will relent and drop their prices back down. We have no word from the other producers, so this is all very much still up in the air. If all games go up to this new price and people still buy them, it becomes the new competetive price.

[billy the squid]

Zanallen wrote...

MerinTB wrote...

The luxury argument should only hold water in the sense that government and charities shouldn't work to make sure people can afford games as if they are staple needs.  Beyond that, however, even luxury goods need to be competitively priced and regulations need to exist to fight against price fixing, etc., so "it's a luxury good, if you can't afford it, don't buy it" means diddly in the face of genuine concerns about game prices.

Also, for the game industry to thrive, the price must be enough for game makers to profit, but cheap enough for even "poor" people to buy them.  The entertainment industry is upheld not by the 1% but the actually the bottom 50%.  People who can afford to go on vacations and buy cars as a hobby tend to play less video games and see less movies.

Which is why my earlier post said that we now have to wait and see if the other companies will follow suit and raise their prices to match or, if not, if EA will relent and drop their prices back down. We have no word from the other producers, so this is all very much still up in the air. If all games go up to this new price and people still buy them, it becomes the new competetive price.

No it doesn't. Fixing the price at £50 odd pounds does not establish a new competative price when your underlying market shrinks to an extent that it can't support the industry, it's a classic inverted pyramid, particularly now that the level of disposible income is declining in real terms due to inflation and salaries not keeping pace, while the production cost of large publishers have balloned out of proportion to the reality of the market. The insanity of Square Enix selling 3.5 million copies of Tomb Raider (£140 million) yet stating it's a failure highlights the inherrent problem on the production and development end they continue to ignore. Yet by comparison CDPR sold 2 million with the Witcher 2 and were pleased with the success, while Dark Souls also sold 2 million and was considered very successful for the developer. So increasing price per unit, is a lazy way of covering large publisher short falls.

It's also a psychological threshold, £40 is easier to swallow up front than £55. I can easily see people clamping down on the number of games that they pick up, hence EA's yearly release rubbish under their former CEO is a pipe dream.

Modifié par billy the squid, 13 juillet 2013 - 08:38 .

[Captain Crash]

Just when I thought things couldn't get worse. Still laced with micro-transactions and DLC I bet.

The price for the next gen consoles in the UK are already way over what the US will pay.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...gazine-22868787

Not really finding any reason to go out and buy one right of the bat when they try and milk every penny from you. Just glad the pre-owned market will still exist

Modifié par Captain Crash, 13 juillet 2013 - 08:43 .

[Zanallen]

billy the squid wrote...

No it doesn't. Fixing the price at £50 odd pounds does not establish a new competative price when your underlying market shrinks to an extent that it can't support the industry, it's a classic inverted pyramid, particularly now that the level of disposible income is declining in real terms due to inflation and salaries not keeping pace, while the production cost of large publishers have balloned out of proportion to the reality of the market. The insanity of Square Enix selling 3.5 million copies of Tomb Raider (£140 million) yet stating it's a failure highlights the inherrent problem on the production and development end they continue to ignore. Yet by comparison CDPR sold 2 million with the Witcher 2 and were pleased with the success, while Dark Souls also sold 2 million and was considered very successful for the developer. So increasing price per unit, is a lazy way of covering large publisher short falls.

It's also a psychological threshold, £40 is easier to swallow up front than £55. I can easily see people clamping down on the number of games that they pick up, hence EA's yearly release rubbish under their former CEO is a pipe dream.

That's where the "if people still buy them" comes into play. In a capitalist system, the ultimate power belongs to you, the consumer. If you feel that the price is too high, don't buy the games. If enough people agree wiith you, the developers are then forced to come up with a different strategy. I only buy around five games a year anyway. An extra 15 to 20 dollars a game doesn't terribly effect me, but if I feel it is too much, I'll only buy four or wait until the game becomes cheaper. No real loss on my part. Ultimately, you vote with your wallet.

And yes, if every game costs 60, 70, 80 or however many dollars and there is very little flucuation in price, that then becomes the new competetive price point. Now, we could have many smaller game companies making games for cheaper and thus selling them for cheaper, but I don't that happening widespread without a major upheaval. Perhaps what we need is a new video game market crash like back in the 80s. That certainly produced some excellent games from the survivng companies. Hm...I would welcome it. Sure, a lot of people would lose their jobs, but the market is a bloated beast that needs trimming.

[Volus Warlord]

bobobo878 wrote...

Volus Warlord wrote...
This just means I'll save more buying used.

It is an interesting pardox, no? The more games cost, the more people buy them used, and the more people buy used, the more publishers raise their prices.

In all seriousness though, the burden will be on EA to prove to British gamers that their products are worth such an exorbinant price. If they don't want their customers to buy used or wait several month for online prices to go down, they'll have to do better than pointing to inflation and posting pictures of Cliffy B. eating ramen noodles.

This is EA we are talking about here. They will continue to spam the market with uninspired watered down crap with half-baked QA, with maybe a couple of solid titles here and there.

[Cyonan]

Neofelis Nebulosa wrote...

Besides the argument that games have to become more expensive because the developers/publishers pour more and more money into their A, AA and AAA titles doesn't hold water when you have games like Minecraft that started for free and took off like a damn rocket.

And no one, absolutely NO ONE can tell me there's no alternative if ressource cheap games like Minecraft turn out a gold diggers wet dream, whilst games that hogged up millions of dollars like Medal Honor get axed because they don't deliver enough return.


End of rant.

Saying that because Minecraft did it everybody should be able to do it is an extremely bad argument.

If that was the case then a lot more indie titles would be breaking 1 million units sold, let alone 10 million like Minecraft has on PC.

You'll also never make Mass Effect on the budget that Minecraft had. Not without cutting out over half the game.

Modifié par Cyonan, 13 juillet 2013 - 09:59 .

[billy the squid]

Cyonan wrote...

Neofelis Nebulosa wrote...

Besides the argument that games have to become more expensive because the developers/publishers pour more and more money into their A, AA and AAA titles doesn't hold water when you have games like Minecraft that started for free and took off like a damn rocket.

And no one, absolutely NO ONE can tell me there's no alternative if ressource cheap games like Minecraft turn out a gold diggers wet dream, whilst games that hogged up millions of dollars like Medal Honor get axed because they don't deliver enough return.


End of rant.

Saying that because Minecraft did it everybody should be able to do it is an extremely bad argument.

If that was the case then a lot more indie titles would be breaking 1 million units sold, let alone 10 million like Minecraft has on PC.

You'll also never make Mass Effect on the budget that Minecraft had. Not without cutting out over half the game.

While Minecraft isn't a great example. I don't see any problem in comparing TW2, Demon Souls or any number of games like these which provide visuals as good as, if not better than Mass effect, let alone more involved charcters plots and concepts, in the case of TW3 £40 million inc. Marketing, yet the equivalent by their counterparts in EA, Square Enix, Ubisoft cannot turn a profit without selling 5 million plus. Or Why can Bethesda take 6 years to release a Elder scrolls game, and have it become the fastest selling game on Steam ever. Yet EA in particular rely on churning out the same tired tripe year after year, and still are the most maligned company in the industry for their business practices. 

There's numerous examples of games taking over 5 years to develop or being well under the cost of the likes of EA's and Activisions AAA titles, but deliver similar if not better performance. And both still turn profits. 

For instance, Fuse flopped, which missed the obvious, that everyone already has CoD so why would they want CoD in a different skin? Its the social desireability bias in focus testing and the disaster of new coke all over again. 

If EA and it's ilk can't either generate healthy revenue in the same ways it's competition can, then they deserve to die.

[Cyonan]

Neofelis Nebulosa wrote...

The funny thing is I don't more than a single working alternative to prove my point. It IS perfectly possible to make a game for next to nothing if you compare the cost with contemporary AAA games that will outsell them even after it was already F2P to a significant degree.

My point was there is no need to burn money with one AAA title after another, trying to outshine everything with "never before seen graphical quality", hiring Hollywood actors for voice acting and spending fortunes on marketing. And it can still earn you a golden nose.



So if EA can't survive without increasing their prices, they are doing something wrong. Because it does work the other way.

Maybe, just maybe not trying to publish two or three AAA titles every year might do the job. And frankly, I'd very much prefer if developers actually had that surplus time to let some ideas grow instead of desperately working themselves to burn-out trying to meet deadlines all the time.

What you don't grasp(or are choosing to ignore) is that because something is possible does not mean it's viable for the entire industry to do it. Minecraft did not even succeed because of what Notch did. It succeeded because of YouTube and people like the Yogscast. Attempting to use that as your business strategy is a terrible idea.

If you want AAA games and the upsides that come with, you need to spend more money than people like Notch did on Minecraft. You're going to need a lot more money.

A much better example would be The Witcher 2 as noted.

Possibly Bethesda, but they publish quite a few games and even with 6 years in between Elder Scrolls games they did also develop Fallout 3 in that time(which was a damn fine game).

[Maverick827]

Semi-confirmed rumor.

[Gatt9]

Cyonan wrote...

Neofelis Nebulosa wrote...

Besides the argument that games have to become more expensive because the developers/publishers pour more and more money into their A, AA and AAA titles doesn't hold water when you have games like Minecraft that started for free and took off like a damn rocket.

And no one, absolutely NO ONE can tell me there's no alternative if ressource cheap games like Minecraft turn out a gold diggers wet dream, whilst games that hogged up millions of dollars like Medal Honor get axed because they don't deliver enough return.


End of rant.

Saying that because Minecraft did it everybody should be able to do it is an extremely bad argument.

If that was the case then a lot more indie titles would be breaking 1 million units sold, let alone 10 million like Minecraft has on PC.

You'll also never make Mass Effect on the budget that Minecraft had. Not without cutting out over half the game.

Actually,  it's a very good argument.

A key piece of information not being assessed here is that a title like Mass Effect,  especially ME3,  has a vast amount of wasted money spent during it's production.

-For each trade show,  significant portions of the team are pulled off the main project and redirected to making trailers.  To show press people,  not customers.  Nevermind the expense of renting an area at the show,  and shipping people and equipment to it.  Which could all be replaced simply by not going to a pointless tradeshow,  and just showing press people the actual game in their office.

-Most of those trade shows also involve lavish after parties,  to impress press people.  Contrast that to the people who actually matter,  the 140 million console owners and the much larger PC base,  and it becomes obvious how much of a waste it is.

-Additionally,  there's the oft-reported perks like "Spend a day learning to race a ferari!" and "Here's a helicopter ride to the hotel!" for press people.

(All of which is just to get them to proclaim the game the greatest thing ever on release day,  so people will buy the game before they find out it's a disaster)

-Then there's the massive amount of money wasted of forced multiplayer in ME3.  I highly doubt anyone bought the game for multiplayer.

-TV spots,  like anyone buys a game because of a commercial these days.

There's a fantastic amount of money being wasted on AAA games,  the goal of which is just to trick people into buying something before they can read reviews.  The Industry would be in much better shape if they actually did what Minecraft did and tried making a good game,  instead of wasting all of that money on a mediocre game and trying to trick people into buying it.  It's really impressive when you think about it,  if they took just half of that wasted money (and time),  and put it into development,  they wouldn't have to worry about bad reviews tanking the game!.

[f1r3storm]

The Baconer wrote...

http://www.cinemable...4-99-57437.html

Well, this is unfortunate.

39,99? Most RRPs are 49,99.

[Get Magna Carter]

current recommended retail price in UK is £49.99 ($75 approx)
But competition (from online retail etc) means that shops are UNABLE to sell at the RRP so actually charging £39.99 ($60 approx) which means they are getting hardly any profit from sales of new games and are dependent on the used games market to stay in business.
Many smaller shops have either closed or abandoned the stocking of new games because they make little profit selling them and have potential big losses over unsold copies

The games industry's response to this is, apparently, that the shops should charge the full RRP, not make any sales, lose a lot of money, go out of business causing game sales to fall hurting the industry.

[vometia]

Get Magna Carter wrote...

current recommended retail price in UK is £49.99 ($75 approx)
But competition (from online retail etc) means that shops are UNABLE to sell at the RRP so actually charging £39.99 ($60 approx) which means they are getting hardly any profit from sales of new games and are dependent on the used games market to stay in business.
Many smaller shops have either closed or abandoned the stocking of new games because they make little profit selling them and have potential big losses over unsold copies

The games industry's response to this is, apparently, that the shops should charge the full RRP, not make any sales, lose a lot of money, go out of business causing game sales to fall hurting the industry.

I'm reminded a lot of the music industry's antics about 20 years ago, where the price of CDs was shall we say "optimistic", starting at least twice that of the same album on vinyl and rising, but less and less of it was invested in producing new quality acts: it's widely suggested that most of the profits disappeared up music executives' noses.  They got away with it for a good long while as people gradually replaced their old vinyl and cassette collections with CDs, but once that revenue stream dried up they found themselves in trouble.

EA and friends don't have that luxury.  What's their answer, re-release old games on Origin with added DRM and microtransactions?  Er, no thanks.  I can't see how this is going to end well for EA unless retailers continue to ignore the RRP and play tough with any publishers who try to eat into their margins.

[kobayashi-maru]

It is definetly getting into the area of the CD pricing shenanigans we had before. However I have thought about it and the only workable solution I would except - apart from a backtrack of MS comparison - would be a discount option on DLC. Maybe introduce something where if you buy a new game you get a specific code that can be used against all DLC for a 20-30% discount. EA still profits but consumers feel less cheated that way, essentially a discount pass rather than online one, so that you can get 20% off single DLC or 30% off a season pass or something along those lines. Maybe even just including the special edition type digital content in all new games via code, with the current abbundence of special editions scaled back to be physical content only rather than digital gifts.

Being honest the current thing with releasing special editions of everything to get more money is getting boring to the point it's saturating the market. It's no longer special like it used to be and more or less seen as a price gouge as the quality of them falls. You used to get Statues, OST, bonus making of's etc now a weapon skin and an MP character count as special.

Modifié par kobayashi-maru, 14 juillet 2013 - 07:20 .