93 réponses à ce sujet

[Pen-N-Paper]

This is all true... but ultimately not the topic at hand.

 

Marketing drums up desire among the market. However, I have seen zero marketing angled at digital distribution. If anything, retail is slanted this way, with pre-order bonuses from Gamestop and the like. 

So if they aren't using Marketing efforts to drive up sales on digital distribution means, I can't imagine a higher digital distribution price would be the reason for the higher price point ON ONE PARTICULAR form of distribution.

 

 

If the game cost $90 across the board, because the drums of Marketing beat their tune, that would be one thing. I just don't see how the pricing point of making digital distribution the most expensive version makes any sense, other than someone saying "we can charge whatever we want and large numbers of people will just accept that as the price, download it and not check to see if it is cheaper anywhere else." Which is not, in my eyes, the framework for any sort of healthy capitalism.

I am supposing the marketing machine must obviously be looking at the whole marketing effort as one homogeneous exercise - rather than allocating a department budget segmented along heterogeneous channels of distribution. That is what this tells me. The marketing communications budget is top loaded to respond against the previous game's buyer remorse/brand equity "correction." This consumer promotion budget will be included into break even analysis, as will a certain amount of loss through trade promotions.

 

The higher consumer price of a direct download may be where the company hopes to make up some of its lost margin. It is most likely the "real" consumer price point before trade promotions are included (subtracted).

 

Now when we talk about buying retail shelf/warehousing space, we also have to understand the trade promotions within that pipeline are meant to move the product/units sold. Walmart is famously known to be an aggressive take-it-or-leave-it negotiator when it comes to retail pricing. I imagine Amazon (et al) to be similar. The importance of mainstream visibility is what I believe DA3 is buying (from their lower profit margin) hoping to attract higher returns from the resulting smaller margin. 

 

This is how I understand this.

 

DA2 continues to haunt DA3 in this way - the same as DA:O originally impacted the robust sales of DA2 in a positive way. We're staring down at a marketing budget, which as far as EA/Bioware are concerned include perception management and PR, that goes back a couple of years since DA2 was paired and its remaining DLC was shelved. So this drives the price of goods up. I personally wonder what consumer reaction will be to "journalist" promotion this time (a very cost effective route to market the game - but tarnished from DA2). Maybe there will be no adverse reaction if consumers have a short attention span. But I could certainly believe that the marketing budget for DA3 is bigger than DA2 and the price point is going to reflect that. Basically they're expecting that marketing communications will create a higher demand for DA3 than DA2, which affects setting the consumer price. The financial expectations for DA3 are very high....

 

So.... All hail Walmart! S.M.H. at the "shut up and take my money" people. I actually wonder how many of those people are going to be paying customers when RPG games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance take the industry in new directions. 

 

 

 

Sorry if I am being long and redundant in reply. I’ve been interrupted several times as I was writing my post and it probably shows.

[Pen-N-Paper]

I am not entirely convinced that Steam's profit model looks at game sales the way many may automatically think. They might even give away games just so that Steam runs on individual machines/nodes. Just read their License Agreement.

 

I have Steam actively running on my machine right now - and I am not playing any games. I wonder what Orwellian thing it is doing...?

[Fast Jimmy]

I am not entirely convinced that Steam's profit model looks at game sales the way many may automatically think. They might even give away games just so that Steam runs on individual machines/nodes. Just read their License Agreement.

I have Steam actively running on my machine right now - and I am not playing any games. I wonder what Orwellian thing it is doing...?

Steam doesn't sleep... it only waits.

No, wait - that's Chuck Norris. My bad.


I honestly have much less "Big Brother" fears than some, simply because I have been behind the current of "big data" situations and there is already such a flood of demographic, financial, behavioral and God-knows-what-else information to sort through that very rarely do companies try and sneak more ways to cram more in, but rather work on interpreting it in a coherent and predictable manner. Just my two cents.

I'd say the "always on" aspect of it is more in tune with the social aspects of Steam than any type of "we are watching you." Steam wants you to have lots of friends on Steam so that leaving Steam means leaving your friends. But who wants to chat while they are playing a game? It's a way to keep you plugged into Steam friend network at times when you may be on your computer and not having your attention captured by a game.

Again, just my perspective and two cents.

[Fast Jimmy]

I am supposing the marketing machine must obviously be looking at the whole marketing effort as one homogeneous exercise - rather than allocating a department budget segmented along heterogeneous channels of distribution. That is what this tells me. The marketing communications budget is top loaded to respond against the previous game's buyer remorse/brand equity "correction." This consumer promotion budget will be included into break even analysis, as will a certain amount of loss through trade promotions.

The higher consumer price of a direct download may be where the company hopes to make up some of its lost margin. It is most likely the "real" consumer price point before trade promotions are included (subtracted).

Now when we talk about buying retail shelf/warehousing space, we also have to understand the trade promotions within that pipeline are meant to move the product/units sold. Walmart is famously known to be an aggressive take-it-or-leave-it negotiator when it comes to retail pricing. I imagine Amazon (et al) to be similar. The importance of mainstream visibility is what I believe DA3 is buying (from their lower profit margin) hoping to attract higher returns from the resulting smaller margin.

This is how I understand this.

DA2 continues to haunt DA3 in this way - the same as DA:O originally impacted the robust sales of DA2 in a positive way. We're staring down at a marketing budget, which as far as EA/Bioware are concerned include perception management and PR, that goes back a couple of years since DA2 was paired and its remaining DLC was shelved. So this drives the price of goods up. I personally wonder what consumer reaction will be to "journalist" promotion this time (a very cost effective route to market the game - but tarnished from DA2). Maybe there will be no adverse reaction if consumers have a short attention span. But I could certainly believe that the marketing budget for DA3 is bigger than DA2 and the price point is going to reflect that. Basically they're expecting that marketing communications will create a higher demand for DA3 than DA2, which affects setting the consumer price. The financial expectations for DA3 are very high....

So.... All hail Walmart! S.M.H. at the "shut up and take my money" people. I actually wonder how many of those people are going to be paying customers when RPG games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance take the industry in new directions.



Sorry if I am being long and redundant in reply. I’ve been interrupted several times as I was writing my post and it probably shows.

I dig TL;DR posts, so no apology needed.

Although I would say that since we've just seen this price discrepancy in England and not across the board (I'll freely admit I haven't researched other markets exhaustively for DA:I digital price vs. Retail outside of North America and the poster in this thread about England's Origin price). So I'm going to lean back on the possibility that someone did a typo or error.

Pricing Analyst 1: Man, I'm starving. You want to grab some lunch?
PA 2: Uh, sure. I just need to set these Origin prices before.
PA 1: Come on man, I've got Taco Bell on the brain!
PA 2: Crap... what's the price conversion on the pound to dollar?
PA 1: It's like 1:1, right? Keep the price the same as the U.S.
PA 2: Eh, screw it. Time for some Chalupas!
PA 1: 'MURICA!


This is probably a 100% accurate re-enactment of the underlying cause for the price difference.

[Fast Jimmy]

I forgot the exact download size now. It's 41 gigs installed though.

Ah. Sorry. Thought you meant a 40 gig download. That would be monstrous.

[SilentWolfie]

I was thinking of buying a physical copy over the digital copy, but then I saw a poster's comment on DA2. Thanks for reminding me about the buyer's remorse (totally remembered ME 3 and DA 2), I'll probably skip DA:I unless it gets perfect 10s from critics. Some of the "deluxe items" digital goods are incredibly trashy and should be worth as a 1 dollar DLC. The amount of money grubbing feels over the top here.

 

No preorders from Bioware until proven otherwise.

[Panda]

I went today to game shop to check if they are going to get it and what price for PS3, they weren't sure if the price but said under 70 euros. That's quite huge amount of money though, 89 dollars and 55 pounds. I have seen it sold as "low" as 60 euros which is 76 dollars and 47 pounds and shipping prices aren't included there. So anyways, this game is going to be expensive!

[Pen-N-Paper]

I dig TL;DR posts, so no apology needed.

Although I would say that since we've just seen this price discrepancy in England and not across the board (I'll freely admit I haven't researched other markets exhaustively for DA:I digital price vs. Retail outside of North America and the poster in this thread about England's Origin price). So I'm going to lean back on the possibility that someone did a typo or error.

Pricing Analyst 1: Man, I'm starving. You want to grab some lunch?
PA 2: Uh, sure. I just need to set these Origin prices before.
PA 1: Come on man, I've got Taco Bell on the brain!
PA 2: Crap... what's the price conversion on the pound to dollar?
PA 1: It's like 1:1, right? Keep the price the same as the U.S.
PA 2: Eh, screw it. Time for some Chalupas!
PA 1: 'MURICA!


This is probably a 100% accurate re-enactment of the underlying cause for the price difference.

 

Well, I will say that I bought the World of Ice and Fire book for 21 quid (total) on Amazon.uk rather than pay the $30 + (20-25%) shipping from Amazon.usa. At one time, the book alone was 30 GBP, then it dropped to 15. So I moved my purchase from USA to UK and saved. This might sound logical, me being in Poland and shopping on Amazon UK, but I usually shop USA for better overall cost reasons (also involving currency exchange; 3:1 vs. 5:1). Amazon's (algorithym) formula that sets my purchase behaviour does not make sense either.  

 

And, well, look at some Kindle versions of books priced higher than paperback versions - just to show it is not strictly a software entertainment industry problem.

 

As for Steam, I continue to use Google for my default search engine so I am not really worried about Steam's business model. It would be better if they adopted the Google business model full on and gave the games away free, of course. I am one of those people who answers marketing questionnaires honestly. But I object to having my PC performance compromised: slowed down, or interrupted, or crashed outright as a result - easily a problem if end-user software or hardware are outdated. (The XP os interacting with, e.g. examiner.com, is only one example.) That I strenuously object to!

 

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=bOnRHAyXqYY

[Fast Jimmy]

Well, I will say that I bought the World of Ice and Fire book for 21 quid (total) on Amazon.uk rather than pay the $30 + (20-25%) shipping from Amazon.usa. At one time, the book alone was 30 GBP, then it dropped to 15. So I moved my purchase from USA to UK and saved. This might sound logical, me being in Poland and shopping on Amazon UK, but I usually shop USA for better overall cost reasons (also involving currency exchange; 3:1 vs. 5:1). Amazon's (algorithym) formula that sets my purchase behaviour does not make sense either.

And, well, look at some Kindle versions of books priced higher than paperback versions - just to show it is not strictly a software entertainment industry problem.

As for Steam, I continue to use Google for my default search engine so I am not really worried about Steam's business model. It would be better if they adopted the Google business model full on and gave the games away free, of course. I am one of those people who answers marketing questionnaires honestly. But I object to having my PC performance compromised: slowed down, or interrupted, or crashed outright as a result - easily a problem if end-user software or hardware are outdated. (The XP os interacting with, e.g. examiner.com, is only one example.) That I strenuously object to!

...but...
...Chalupas...

[Fast Jimmy]

It could very well be close though. I'm looking at other similar games to download, and Battlefield 4 is a 36 GB download.

This is on the Xbox One btw. I'm curious what the size is on other platforms.

36 GB download? For the XB1?

Did Microsoft lose their copy of Winzip or something? Jeebus.

[Fast Jimmy]

Winzip/Zip won't do anything if the files are already compressed with some other scheme (and games usually are). You can only compress something once.

I was making an attempt at humor. I know that a company providing professional digital distribution has compression software much more sophisticated than Winzip.

Like jZip.

[Fast Jimmy]

Ah good. Because you usually seem more intelligent.

Well, I'd much rather seem intelligent than be intelligent. There's a lot of work involved with that.

[Walker White]

40 Gigs? I'm tempted to blame that on poor compression work. Geez. Put it in a zip file, if anything.

 

I guarantee you that is compressed already.  Compression algorithms are not magic wands.  Most image and sound formats in games are already optimally compressed.

[berrieh]

Unless people here have inside knowledge of Origin's accounting, nobody here can say how much it costs exactly to digitally distribute.

 

 

This was basically my point; people assume digital is cheaper and better and thus publishers should favor it or discount it, but if they don’t, I assume they have reasons (monetary) for it that mesh with their bottom lines.

 

As to all the Steam stats, I don’t know how much of Steam sales is loss leaders, really. And those typically aren’t new games.

 

Anyway it's not really the point I was getting at originally. If you are a console user, you are fine with the price, games weres $60 a decade ago and they are still $60 today. If you are a PC user, it was £30 a decade ago and for many games it is still £30 today (e.g. Civ, SOM, Borderlands, etc). The exceptions being the AAA PC titles like DAI which are selling for £40 on Amazon or £50 on Origin.

 

 

I’m an everything user (I literally have every system in my house - though some haven't been turned on in awhile - since Nintendo and Sega to the current/next gen consoles, including the Wii U, and two gaming PCs, one for myself and one for the boyfriend), personally, though I favor console. My gaming PC is used only for games that cannot be played elsewhere or are ridiculously more somewhere else (for instance Sherlock was $30 on STEAM but $60 on console; that was a no-brainer – it wasn’t worth $60 to me but fine for $30 and still had controller support). I used to buy more games on PC for various reasons, but as the graphics and features of the new consoles are so good, I'm feeling less and less need. (I always prefer controller and TV set up, whether using PC or console, except for RTS games or something.) 

 

I am fine with prices not because of history but because I can afford the games I want badly enough, as an adult with a modest middle class salary, and wait for the rest to go on sale, and because games provide me with a better cost-per-hour entertainment value than any other form of entertainment. But truly, I remember, in the time before Steam, PC games were relatively expensive (I was much poorer then, of course, a student and such). I know I paid $60 for some PC games. I think I paid 50-60 dollars for Baldur’s Gate when it first came out (not digital, obviously - though PC). Though, granted, that was more than a decade ago. I definitely paid just shy of $60 for Skyrim at launch ($55 I think). Steam will have sales; it will be easier to get games cheaper on Steam. Origin has sales too – good ones sometimes. But sale prices are rarely for launch, except saving maybe $5 for a pre-order incentive.

 

The mix of pounds and dollars here confuses me. I do understand that games are more expensive in Britain (£60 is not $60 obviously so if you're saying the price for one is $60, but the other one is nearly double, I get that problem, but it looked like no more than a $10 difference earlier in the thread - $10 is nothing) and if prices have risen steeply in Britain vs. other countries, I can get the problem (though I'd pay more for games if I could have a British passport/visa) but I don’t get the argument with “digital should cost less.” Just because Steam sells low doesn't mean digital HAS to cost less. 

[Corephyfish]

I paid $210(AUD) for the Inquisitor Edition.

 

Otherwise, standard edition is $80.