From: metroid composite | #050 I'm making the assumption that you actually care about the game makers who create your entertainment getting money so that they can continue making good games.
If you don't want them to continue making good games, then whatever.
But why should I support only a few game companies and leave the rest in the dust? That's unfair and means that only a few game companies are actually making any money.
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But unfortunately, I don't have the luxury I did back in the day. I don't get to spend all of my money on games without another care in the world. I have other things to spend money on, so I have to pick what games I want to buy new carefully.
Why is it that the game developers can't give me an incentive to really purchase the game new? THQ made me buy Smackdown Vs RAW just by including a CHRISTOPHER MASTERPIECE voucher. Netherrealms Studios made a good decision by making anyone who bought the game have a voucher so they could play online. Why aren't more companies trying to make people buy their games new? Because they should be. We shouldn't have to be guilted into trying to support their games. We should be encouraged to buy their games new.
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incentives are nice but ultimately the cost of new games is just too high. the budget for new games has skyrocketed out of control and because of that new games are $60 when 30-40 would be more reasonable. I can buy a CD or a movie for $15, games costing 4x as much as other media is a failure of this industry
you can find lots of games on steam and XBLA for $10-20, they may not have the most cutting edge graphics but...in the meantime you have nintendo still charging $50 for NSMB wii, which looks like it could have been made on the N64. digital distribution is the best thing to happen to gaming in the past 10 years
You're talking about bite sized games on PSN/XBLA. No **** they don't charge full price. Steam does have lots of sales. Come back when Games on Demand starts offering games at a lower price than retail on release.
Personally, I'm shocked we're still at $59.99 MSRP on the HD consoles, even after several years and a changing economy. I remember when you had to pay $80 bucks to get Chrono Trigger or Mortal Kombat 2 to play on your Super Nintendo.
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It will launch for $350 with some Wii Sports s***. I bet my life on it. Damn, that KoolAid guy is awesome - NGamer64
If you can only buy two or three new games per year, I would rather you go ahead and buy two or three games new, and pirate the rest. At least then some money is going to the game creators, instead of buying seven used games, where no money goes to the game creators.
Okay.
Let's say you are a company. Let's say you are Konami for the sake of argument.
The 7 games I intend to buy are made by: Konami x2 Square x2 Capcom Atlus Nintendo
If I buy: Konamix2 Atlusx1 and download the rest
You aren't going to care.
If I buy: Konamix1 Squarex1 Atlusx1 and download the rest
You might be okay with it.
But what if I buy: Capcomx1 Squarex1 Atlusx1 and download the rest
Oh look. There you are not making any money anyway. Oops.
I always buy new, unless I can't find any fresh copies or I'm deliberately trying to deny a company a sale. I don't buy enough video games that I feel that if I don't buy used, I don't eat for a week. Frankly I never understood those who do.
-- I like how each new topic you make reveals such varied facets of your idiocy. - foolmo Now this is entertainment!
this is all irrelevant anyway, there is a risk in piracy that doesn't exist with used games. by lobbying for the copyright laws that we have, media producers have encouraged people to just buy used rather than buying some new and pirating the rest. don't tell me that I should be buying some new games and pirating others when you've created extremely expensive repercussions for doing so, used games has the advantage of actually being legal(for now, how long until they lobby for that to be illegalized? good thing gamestop has a lot of money so they can buy some politicians too)
Here's a nice idea: if the game companies didn't focus so much on the older audience, they wouldn't have to worry about people not being able to buy a ton of new games a year because of money issues! Kids don't pay the bills, so they can spend their money on whatever they want. Plus, those gifts for birthdays and Christmas can mean over five new games sold to a kid a year! This would lead to a 100% increase in profit for developers (okay, maybe not quite 100%, but it could be close to that)!
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Liquid Wind posted... incentives are nice but ultimately the cost of new games is just too high. the budget for new games has skyrocketed out of control and because of that new games are $60 when 30-40 would be more reasonable. I can buy a CD or a movie for $15, games costing 4x as much as other media is a failure of this industry
I don't get this sentiment. For one, most games give you at least 4x as much content as a CD or a movie. Secondly, game prices have remained static for decades (and have even gone down since the end of cartridges).
Adjusting for inflation, people paid more for Donkey Kong than they pay today for LA Noire. I think that's actually a credit to the industry.
The only reason CDs got cheaper is because everyone stopped buying them. 10 years ago, getting a new one for less than $20 was a real bargain. This is what's happening with Blu-rays now, too.
Maybe the rise of digital distribution will cause game prices to drop similarly, since it decreases the production costs overall.
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whatisurnameplz posted... Here's a nice idea: if the game companies didn't focus so much on the older audience, they wouldn't have to worry about people not being able to buy a ton of new games a year because of money issues! Kids don't pay the bills, so they can spend their money on whatever they want. Plus, those gifts for birthdays and Christmas can mean over five new games sold to a kid a year! This would lead to a 100% increase in profit for developers (okay, maybe not quite 100%, but it could be close to that)!
You do realize that kids get their money largely from their parents, who in turn have the same bill-paying issues that adult gamers do.
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I am a big supporter of digital distribution for the record and enjoy its increased influence and popularity throughout the industry. There are more games now, on more platforms, at a large variety of prices, then ever before. A lot of my favorite games of this generation come from XBLA/PSN/similar online platforms, and I'm a big fan of Steam.
From: JaKyL25 | #063 You do realize that kids get their money largely from their parents, who in turn have the same bill-paying issues that adult gamers do.
That's nullified by gifts for birthdays and Christmas.
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Give up some love for the Guru! Ladies and gentleman, the Incredible Black Turtle!
You don't just magically get more money to spend on your kids gifts. You have to save up for it the same way you'd have to save up to buy games for yourself.
Sure, maybe Grandma and Grandpa will buy the kid a game that otherwise you wouldn't have been able to, but I think the effect here is minimal, because kids can't save up for the other 10 months a year that they don't have Christmas or a birthday to buy any more games.
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The only reason CDs got cheaper is because everyone stopped buying them. 10 years ago, getting a new one for less than $20 was a real bargain.
in other words, there's no reason they should have been so expensive to begin with, consumers just need to learn to abstain a bit from time to time to keep manufacturers from getting too greedy
I don't get this sentiment. For one, most games give you at least 4x as much content as a CD or a movie.
movies yes, CD's I can't agree with, I'll listen to a piece of music hundreds of times in my life, maybe 3-5 games a generation seriously warrant replaying to me
That's a personal thing though. The amount of content itself is still far greater on a game, and you can still replay it as much as you want, just like the music. You just choose not to.
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From: JaKyL25 | #062 The only reason CDs got cheaper is because everyone stopped buying them. 10 years ago, getting a new one for less than $20 was a real bargain.
I think you mean 20 years ago. 10 years ago, people had already stopped buying CDs.
This argument extends far deeper that you realize. Although ultimately I believe it's up to the gaming industry to adapt and not make games with such huge production budgets, there are a lot of different gamer philosophies that are also at work here.
Growing up, I didn't get money from my parents. Instead, I got one game on my birthday and one at Christmas. Maybe. We had a treasure trove of old C-64 games, so my parents essentially expected me to play those, if anything. So the games I got, I treasured and played to death. I learned them inside out and beat them repeatedly. I got a lot of shareware games back when that was still popular for the PC market. I traded with my friends or visited their houses constantly to try to see other games I wouldn't be buying. As a result, I'm a very focused sort of gamer who only buys a few commercial releases each year, and targets ones I'll get good replay out of. In the last decade, a good chunk of my playtime has gone toward MMOs. The rest has gone toward games I'd still get a bare minimum of 30 hours of playtime out of. I treasure my old games and hold onto them. I heavily regret the day I traded in all my N64 stuff, even though I had barely touched any of it for years.
My two roommates are brothers. They grew up in a small house in a family of eight, and never had a lot of money to go around for games either. However because they also didn't have space to keep a lot of stuff and they were strictly console gamers, it plays out very differently for them. Typically, they buy a game, play it for a week, and then trade it back in. They use those funds to get another game. Games come through our apartment faster than bad girlfriends, but I never get a chance to try any of the games they buy because the instant they decide there's another game they want more, it's gone. In spite of my couple-games-a-year budget, I have more actual games on tap than the two of them combined because they each have about 3 or 4 games total remaining.
So I don't see too many different current games. They do. They certainly have the capability to extend one purchase into a 60-hour adventure on some epic RPG, but once they are finished with a game, they don't revisit it and view a game on the shelf as dead money. I take a more nostalgic view. Needless to say, they love the used game market because they are sellers. They don't often buy used because they're always getting the new releases, and thus there's no point. OTOH, if I deal in used games, it's to buy because I'm going back and checking out non-current games I missed. Neither of us is going to change our operating budget for games, but we're very opposite in how we approach the gaming industry.
Oh, and by the way, I absolutely hate "incentives." Maybe I'm jaded because of the couple games I've dealt with that had them, but including a DLC pack that I would otherwise have to pay $15 for and having it come with an expiration date of a couple months after release is pretty bad. Not a move I would have expected from a company like Bioware. Considering that I installed Dragon Age on my old computer, I hope I don't get the itch to play it again now because I'm not sure if I'd still have access to those materials.
And most incentives I've seen are dumb. Buy now and your character gets a hat! Or, buy now and you get a hat in Team Fortress 2! (Um, wtf? Why do I care about TF2 when I'm looking at Skyrim?) No, I don't want companies to "find a way" to get me to buy more games at $60. I want them to sell more games at under $60 so I can buy more of them.
15 years ago might be a good compromise. I know I never even owned a CD player until 1994, forget about 1991.
EDIT: No, I'll stick with 10 years ago. I know that 2001 is post-Napster, but it's still before most people had broadband internet, and I don't think MP3 sales were super-strong yet. Heck, 10 years ago (on this date at least), the iPod hadn't even been released yet.
2005 seems to be the real turning point where digital music sales (and piracy) completely overtook the CD market.
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Dauntless Hunter posted... From: JaKyL25 | #062 The only reason CDs got cheaper is because everyone stopped buying them. 10 years ago, getting a new one for less than $20 was a real bargain. I think you mean 20 years ago. 10 years ago, people had already stopped buying CDs.
Not everyone hopped on the Napster train of internet piracy as soon as they caught wind of it. I still occasionally buy CDs because I like having the physical resource. And CDs weren't always $20. Maybe when the technology first came around and people were still buying cassettes. But as long as you didn't buy from Sam Goody in the mall, you usually didn't spend $20 on a CD. $15, tops.
It's kinda crazy to remember how even as recently as like 2007, there was so much shelf space at places like Best Buy for CDs, and they were front and center when you entered the store. 1/4 of the whole store was physical music.
Nowadays it's off to the side and you get maybe 2 rows of shelves for it. Each individual video game console gets about as much shelf space for its games as the entirety of the CD section.
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Digital delivery of games with smaller budgets is definitely what's needed for games. Some games just don't need $30 million budgets and aren't worth $60. The problem is, with physical copies, each game takes up the same amount of shelf space, so retail locations are less interested in stocking cheap games because it essentially causes them to lose money. But for a game to have a chance to sell at $60, it needs to meet consumer expectations for what a $60 game should be, and that drives up the budget.
If the game had been digitally delivered, it could basically be whatever price it needed to be, because it isn't competing with other games for shelf space so retailers' price needs aren't a consideration. If a game would sell 1 million copies at $20 vs selling 300,000 copies at $60, then they can charge $20 and not have to worry about getting the game stocked at retail.
Fine, I guess there's a different turning point for when CDs finally died vs when they began to die. But they still weren't regularly $20+ in 2001. $12-$15 was pretty standard by the mid-to-late 90s, although I think it did actually start going back up in the early 2000s when sales started declining. Still don't think it got higher than maybe $18 standard, though.
For me, it's just a matter of my personal budget. I don't make that much money and I basically live paycheck to paycheck. While I would love to buy every game I want brand new, it simply just isn't ideal when I could save money by buying used and still have money leftover for groceries/other bills. I don't feel bad about it at all, and see no reason why I should. I do my part when I can - the past 4 games I've bought were brand new, hell I dropped $100 on the Kollector's Edition of Mortal Kombat when I could've spent $60.
I'm becoming less and less interested in handheld gaming as time goes on!
indeed
if anything the problem with handheld gaming is that nintendo is taking after smartphones, I loved the GBA but I find little on the DS that enamors me when every other game pushes touch controls where it doesn't belong
Personally I'd rather have the one game if its a really, really well-made one game that last for hours.
Yeah, me too.
Problem is, we're a small minority. As more and more consumers opt for the model of cheap games, more and more companies are going to focus on that as opposed to the big-budget blockbuster sort of games, which will likely rise in price.
-- SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized http://img.imgcake.com/lolkrugmanjpgry.jpg
From: The Real Truth | #026 For example, if you purchased Borderlands new, and all of the DLC that came with it, you would have paid more than $100
So you mean it didn't count when I bought Borderlands new with all of the DLC that came with it for $7.50 on Steam a couple of months ago?
The problem with this situation in the gaming industry right now isn't that only new games provide money to the developer, but it's that only recently released games do so. With retail games, there is no good way to reduce the price of games when they become older, so as to compete with used gaming. You can only reduce the price so much before manufacturing and retailer cuts make it a loss to sell games. So instead of competing with used games, like Steam/other DD does, they try to subvert the competition altogether with the project $10 dollar type stuff.
It's not even like the solution is to go fully digital, people like their physical copies. But people need to just start doing everything on the internet. Sure, gamestop is good for having so many locations so anyone can just go in and get a game, but you can do that on the internet, with FAR less overhead in terms of costs to maintain stores/employees and such. Not to mention the far superior selection. Gamestop doesn't even have PS1 games... what kind of a used games store is that?
-- _foolmo_ 'To be foolmo'd is to be betteropinion'd.' - Blairville
I really don't think games are ever going to really rise in price moving forward.
Well, maybe not the *immediate* future, but I do see an environment where the overall mainstream and majority of gaming is focused on cheap stuff with microtransactions, to the point where the "hardcore" gamers, if they want some ridiculous 50-hour epic with ZOMG graphics and whatnot will have to pay more, because it's essentially a luxury item that caters to a small demographic.
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I think its a loooong ass way from digital distribution being the main channel of selling video games. Not unless the internet infrastructure in USA/UK suddenly gets a complete overhaul, get rid of bandwidth caps, big full-length games stop taking several hours to download, etc.
I guess we'll see. Until then, Assassin's Creed, Uncharted, Gears of War, Halo, and Zelda will keep coming out, keep selling millions of copies, and keep being sold in Gamestops all across the country.
Right, those games do sell a lot, but I'm curious as to which games offer the greatest ROI to the companies. That's where this battle will be determined.
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I'm all up for some cheaper-budget games, if that means lower prices, more freedom to do creative ideas, and less companies going under because Giant Blockbuster Action Game failed to light up the charts.
From: SmartMuffin | #094 Right, those games do sell a lot, but I'm curious as to which games offer the greatest ROI to the companies. That's where this battle will be determined.
F2P games with microtransactions e.g. TF2
-- _foolmo_ 'Most people at least try to say something funny. See foolmo's post as an example.' - The Real Truth
Don't forget that big budgets ALSO provide more freedom for creativity in development. The past few years have proven this, just look at LA Noire. That game would've been canceled years ago if it weren't for R* throwing so much money at it.
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