EDIT: Ugh, I hate the BSN on my phone with the passion of a thousand suns. The jest below blank quote should have been:
How is this an argument against the current model? My exact point regarding the $60 price point is that it allows gamers options in their purchases, while still allowing companies to in effect sell the game for $70-75 for consumers who do purchase the day 1 dlc.
and the second should be:
I suspect this is something which insiders at the company would be best able to answer.
I apologize for the confusion.
Which would go against the the whole point of raising the price in the first place. The whole logic is for a company to recoup the cost due to games having a static price for quite a while. That does not work if you're expected to increase funding of the base game to make the larger price tag justified. Generally-speaking, anytime a business increases the price of their products, is that always accompanied by an increase in quality? I'd say likely not.
The video game industry had its chance to incrementally bring up its price and it has squandered it. Now, in order for them to cover spiraling costs, they are going to have chase ever-increasing volumes (not a feasible long-term strategy) or begin aligning their costs appropriately. A 5-10% increase in cost can be slipped in without providing more services. But developers need more than that to balance their expenses, they need a $10 increase, which is more than a 15% increase to what the consumer pays. That big of a jump is going to demand a higher quality of good.
Now... that being said? I think some current games have earned that price. DA:O would have been a steal at $70, as would Skyrim. Games that have a higher level of replayability are expensive to make, but also provide a great value to the consumer. Meanwhile, an enjoyable but linear experience like Assassin's Creed or Bioshock Infinite is, by and large, a one-shot kind of deal. The experience will be largely the same - and nothing is wrong with that, but it hardly seems equitable to price those two sets of games equally.
So the industry wouldn't need to completely revamp their idea of how to make a game, but they would have the option to price a game that took five years to develop (and has the quality and quantity of content to reflect it) correctly.
Then I hope you never find yourself purchasing movie tickets or paying for fast food. Maybe you're unique like that. But given the sheer number of people who do this on a daily basis, good luck making the cost-benefit analysis argument. People obviously are comfortable paying for dlc (and many other things) on some level, as they are still doing it.
Fast food is a terrible example... because the cost-benefit ratio is remarkably equal. You cannot go to the grocery store and buy ingredients to make, say, a chicken sandwich with all the dressing, lettuce tomato that is also fried for much less than what you can buy it at a fast food restaurant. All ingredients being the same, fast food is a FANTASTIC cost-benefit ratio, not to mention more expedient on an exponential level.
Movies have slowly increased their price over the years and offer roughly the same end product - 1.5 to 3 hours of cinematic presentation. One viewing at $10 a pop is worth it in some cases, not worth it in others. Buying a DVD that let's you have unlimited viewing as well as additional features (including cut content, what we are told D1DLC is) for $30 is, also, sometimes worth it, sometimes not. So I'm not sure what your point is.
Cost-benefit ratio does not equal "what the market will abide," for the record. Buying a new car for $30K when you can buy the same model and make car that is one year older for half of the price is terrible cost-benefit ratios... but people still buy brand new cars in droves.
Because what you call "consumer choice," I (and many others) call nickel and diming. The industry should get in the habit of evaluating what their game is worth and could objectively sell for, like every other industry, instead of looking at what they can sell for $60 and then chop up and sell separately at an inflated value price.
This is like saying that a Halo dlc which features more shooting and action should be free, because gamers like shooting and action. Should 343 be releasing romance dlc instead to mitigate this? Javik is story and character content. He is not however central narrative necessary. Like Addiction pointed out, the alternative is characters like Zaeed and Kasumi who do nothing past their respective loyalty missions. I'd rather Bioware be designing content more epic in scope.
And, again, it is all a matter of perspective. You didn't buy Jahvik because you saw advertisements that said "this character is deeply ingrained to the main story" or "see background detail into the story." You bought it for the same reason eveyrone else did - it was a Prothean squadmate. Pure and simple. Just like people bought Kasumi because "oooooh, space ninja thief!" You are acting like large volumes of these sales aren't pre-orders or people who don't do through, in-depth research into how the DLC content is integrated into the main game.
People don't complain because Jahvik was or was not a huge part of ME3... they complain because the Protheans are arguably one of the most intriguing and talked about aspects of the ME lore. So its value goes beyond how integrated he is to ME3's main plot... the idea of a Prothean squadmate is integrated into the entire series, given how they are placed on a pedestal. His existence as a paid companion is going to induce fan rage simply because it was something the entire trilogy had been hyping, if inadvertently.
I'd (HIGHLY) doubt it. That kind of data can really only be gathered by self-report collections and that is one of the least effective means to determine true statistical accuracy. People don't know why they really do things. And, on top of that, how do you ask people why they didn't buy your game? You'd have to access someone who either bought previous copies of your game, registered them somehow in a system you can track, follow up with them in a venue where they would actually respond AND assume they'd give you a real answer (which is limited, especially in an automated or multiple choice type manner that is often done). There are so many false disqualifiers in that sequence that its hard to believe anyone would find that data useful.
It's just as easy (if not easier, in all honestly), for a Bioware exec to say "we included horses in DA:I and research shows that games with horses in them in 2014 did not do well - THAT'S why DA:I DLC sold poorly" rather than saying "this is more of the From Ashes, D1DLC biting us in the butt." That doesn't make it any less TRUE, it just makes it objectively harder to prove. But since it can't be easily proven, it makes a great excuse to continue engaging in a practice that ticks many of your fanbase off since it makes money, when you are ignoring the very common sense reality that ticking off your consumer base is a bad idea, even if it is an idea that earns you some short term increases in revenue.
Modifié par Fast Jimmy, 24 décembre 2013 - 04:00 .
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