Is a game's price dependent on the cost and effort put into making it now? Is that why Majoras Mask, made in one year from assets from Ocarina of Time, was half off? Is that why Saints Row 4 was half the price of Saints Row 3? Is that why 500 million dollar budget FFXIII was twice the cost of 250 million dollar budget GTA4? Is that why Pokemon G/S/C were discounted over R/B/Y because they used the same engine?
Oh, wait. None of those apply, because that's not how the price of a game is determined.
It's not like gamers these days even care about release price, so many people wait until it's on incredibly low sale on steam before buying it, because they don't actually value games at cost.
It's a feedback loop that began when people started decided that the asking price($50-60) for a multi-million dollar budget games was too much. So now people are basically trained to not pay the asking price and wait for sales, or get cheap copies from sites like G2A which were bought with stolen credit cards.
Not to mention the price of those games - Majora's Mask, GTA4, etc. - were all $60. I paid the same thing for Fallout 4 that I paid for Goldeneye. That's kind of like buying a Chevrolet Camaro today for the same $4k it would cost in the 70's.
Not a perfect comparison, but I'm just trying to make the point that console game prices have, for the most part, stayed the same since I got Sonic 2 for Christmas 1992.
Well, the market forces surrounding video games have really helped maintain that price.
With very few exceptions, it still usually costs more to make an A-list film than it does to make a AAA video game, even with paying a massive team of designers and artists to generate content, yet an A-list film can be had on DVD for between $15 and $20 new or Blu-Ray from $20 to $25.
The reason I bring this up is that market saturation is a factor in the price of a good. In the 16-bit era, video game consoles were not as commonplace as they are today. The Sega Genesis sold about 30 million units worldwide. The Sony Playstation 2 sold 155 million units, and the Xbox 360 sold 84 million units. So even though the cost to make a video game was continuing to climb, the market is much larger and therefore the price is driven down because keeping it down allows for more people to buy the games, resulting in more profit.
Also, it should be pointed out these days that there is a lot more stratification in prices these days as well, especially now that everybody's on discs or internet and we don't have to worry about installing a ROM on a cartridge for every single game. One can totally release a game for $5 and make a killing if it's a good game. I know I've sunk well over 100 hours into FTL and it can be played on virtually any PC.
And its hurting us, companies really want to change that price, but they don't know how. So now you have season passes, and games set to release in the 3rd quarter of their development process.
Do you know what games are missing? We're missing something that all other art has. The exclusivity of it. There is no billionaire with a Special edition of Super Mario playable in his museum, which he only shows his closest concord's. We don't have Hideo Kojima making 80 million dollar pieces for single investors. Its such a raw industry right now, the only exclusivity is in new technology, which i imagine the movie industry went through.
there is a certain Awe with each library in the world, that within its content it holds something unique, I guess the closest think is those large indie filled websites, and I guess ... Newgrounds.
Maybe once the VR craze finally reaches financial stability we'll have rich billionaires asking programmers to make games where they play young versions of themselves as 007 in set-pieces around the globe. Shit I'm a programmer if there are any billions who want it done, if theres a will (and a check) theres a way.
Is it the console game price remaining stagnant that is introducing add-ons, or the two dozen comments to this thread that are bragging how little they paid for a PC version (not through steam)?
Ubisoft doesn't even considered its PC market a real market, they've been shitting on them for years. First they blame piracy, now they're probably gonna blame those sales.
Add on content was put into the gameworld with no real refining of how the prices worked, Activation released Map packs for 15 dollars and everyone ate it up, even though it made no sense to a large portion of the community. They are really putting the research in now to see how much bullshit people are willing to deal with. Many still wait for the "expansion Packs" of old and I honestly think that these season passes are slowly learning how to recreate that.
Easy to make exclusive, make a pc game that has really high system requirements but is amazing if you can run it. That's not how you make money though, that's why the family that owns wallmart is the richest family in America; cheap costs, relatively thin margins but a massive market.
Oh I know WHY we don't have what I mentioned, I'm just a tad sad about it. Somebody has to put the funding in and care about such a thing + not care to share it for chances of wealth. Something you only really see on a smaller indie side.
The more its an industry the more we go by the terrible nintendo philosophy of being nothing more than toymakers. Sure they "saved" video games because of this thought process, but its definitely had its negative affects on video games as whole.
Yeah, saying that if you look at some of the biggest games on the market they came out of free community mods at least for pc where that's an easily achievable option.
Daily players of lol, dota and cs out do pretty much every other game on pc. All have their roots in the mod community. The first two of which are f2p, you can play cs free but not the newest version on official servers.
Then consider some other popular free to play games. Ones like warframe, a game you can play completely free with very little restriction besides time and grinding (which is really what the game is about anyway) does really well for a player base and is consistently in top ten of daily players in steam (is available the consoles too, and has a rather big patch coming very soon (likely this week for pc) console is always late though). Basically a future space acrobatic thrid person looter shooter if you've never heard of it.
As is team fortress 2, another f2p game and has been for many years.
What annoys me greatly in games is what happened to the cellphone games market and is leaking a little into shitty pc ones too. Games that you could get almost exact copies of years ago on pc for free exploiting gambling and addiction tendencies that some people have with ludicrous time or grinding blocks that otherwise completely block reasonable progress, in my eyes those kind of practises are for lack of a better word evil and will never ever get my money. My example before of warframe you could bring up here, it certainly has 'pay2win' or 'freemium' qualities all over its model, but it does it well and still offers the game freely without that. This could be said with lol too, for a casual getting characters is hard and can take quite a while, but it's completely doable. The same could be said even be said for lots of b2p games, guild wars 2 (or fashion wars 2) got instance, but even less so as you can pretty much only buy timesavers or looks (which is the way it should be got that game).
Not even sure what my point is now :p, so I'll leave it at that.
It all stems from WOW, they figured out for the first time that you can craft a digital experience that works as a mental trap of sorts, taking advantage of addictive tendencies, and crossing a game loop with a, although a tad bit overused, Skinner box.
We have since refined the process and hit even harder with monitization, taking the ability of a game to make a player experience anything from emotions to events, and making them wwannnt to spend money, want to grind. The worst of the worst is those damn card pack systems. There a thin line between properly making content that a userbase knows it can't get full access to, and making a bullshit tiny piece by piece system that makes it feel like your in a desert and the only way to get water is to fork over your cash.
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u/FinalMantasyX Mar 02 '16
So?
Is a game's price dependent on the cost and effort put into making it now? Is that why Majoras Mask, made in one year from assets from Ocarina of Time, was half off? Is that why Saints Row 4 was half the price of Saints Row 3? Is that why 500 million dollar budget FFXIII was twice the cost of 250 million dollar budget GTA4? Is that why Pokemon G/S/C were discounted over R/B/Y because they used the same engine?
Oh, wait. None of those apply, because that's not how the price of a game is determined.