Wait, whose side are these journalist on? and in the middle of a pandemic, jesus..
"It's ok everyone! $70 isnt that much really, in fact it's cheaper than ever!!!"
"It's ok everyone! $70 isnt that much really, in fact it's cheaper than ever!!!"
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The $70 Video Game - Top-end game pricing has never been lower when measured in constant dollars [Ars]
- Thread starter Syriel
- Start date
Let me be clear that I don't want more money going into CEO's pockets the same way I don't want government bailouts being used to pay CEO's big bonuses, but that's in institutional failure.
Also I think if more is demanded of a game, expenses rise and at some point that is not tenable. Raising prices seems to make sense if that's the case.
yeah first reply, need that chart up there too, going back to the 70s
hm, what do i believe, data-driven conclusions or a guy who wears silly masks in a youtube video. decisions.
Eh, the ideal price max for me with games is $50, I like the "neatness" of being able to get at least two games for $100 personally. $70+ is what I justified paying for things that required a bit of a markup to get, like an import from another country or something particularly rare, not a standard US copy with an essentially infinite supply sitting around on some distribution server somewhere. It's basically a "don't bother until later" price unless there's a nice opportunity for me to not pay that full price.
The main publishers who seem to be pushing for $70 games are also the ones who frequently and rapidly reduce their game prices anyway. I have enough other games I'm willing to play that there's barely any upside or value in buying a game from Sony, 2K, etc. day one.
The main publishers who seem to be pushing for $70 games are also the ones who frequently and rapidly reduce their game prices anyway. I have enough other games I'm willing to play that there's barely any upside or value in buying a game from Sony, 2K, etc. day one.
Yes I know you don't know, as evidenced by your repeated bad faith responses.
hard agree.
it's wild to think about compared with other consumer goods and electronics that could last you for years.
Where do you think it will go seriously.
We have examples of ATVI getting cash from governments, posting record profits AND firing employees at the same.
Do you think CoD being 10 bucks more expensive is gonna benefit anyone that isn't a C suit or something?
If you have shares in these companies, at least it would make sense.
Lol the audacity of you to say this after all the crap you've posted in this thread
Meanwhile other forms of entertainment have never been cheaper. Paying $100 for a SNES cartridge made more sense when you had ten channels and streaming services (games, music, movies) didn't exist, not to mention the abundance of F2P and extremely cheap mobile games.
Comparing boxed game prices only to inflation doesn't make much sense honestly.
Comparing boxed game prices only to inflation doesn't make much sense honestly.
$70 was always a money grab, and the amount of corporate apologist excusing it is embarrassing.
Videogame fanbases are a lot more fanboy driven than any other media. There's so many people making excuses in the name of publishers, even on Era, it's only natural to see opinion pieces like this imo. Though there's always a chance :p
"Top End" video game prices? So they're counting the maximum amount of purchases across battle passes and loot crates? Fighting games with all of the DLC characters and stages and costumes purchased? The complete day 1 editions with all the fix-ins? All of the retailer pre-order bonuses? Subscription prices that have popped up across platforms AND individual publishers AND individual games?
Oh wait they aren't doing that, they're literally counting the absolute minimum prices and completely ignoring the gigantic sea changes that have occurred in buying habits and revenue models.
Oh wait they aren't doing that, they're literally counting the absolute minimum prices and completely ignoring the gigantic sea changes that have occurred in buying habits and revenue models.
These less developers getting more money are precisely the ones whose games will cost more in the majority of cases. Indies will proceed to sell a lot less copies of 10/15/20$ games.
Meanwhile, big games costs more, have bigger playerbases and are reporting record profits.
If the consumers base isn't important to the equation, people would have to pay some fortunes to watch an Avengers movie according to its budget?
You're not giving any actual points or facts, I'm not saying I want to pay $10 more, I'm saying this is a natural response to inflation, rising game costs, more demands from gamers and a more competitive market. Everyone else including you is saying "but this won't work and CEOs will make more money." To that I continue to say maybe but some of that is an institutional failure, inflation is real and you can't cover your eyes and pretend it isn't because you live in a dream world, and yes the AAA model is broken. Something has to be done, crunch is bad, studio closures are bad, CEO's making all the money is bad. Hopefully these increases help, maybe they will, maybe the won't, but it was going to happen eventually. Spend your money how you want to.
Now present one fact beyond 'nuh uh' or go away. Y'all haven't given one actual fact and reasoned response. These boards are nightmares for any discourse, this thread is why.
I think the people who ground away making MKX for $13hr should probably get paid better. The women who made $12 doing the same thing should also get raises too.
Fanboys would be ok with making used games illegal if their corporate overlords pushed for it.
We had that debate before, there are a lot of people who don't mind giving their whole paychecks to publishers for no reason.
Also this.
The fuck am I going to be happy about giving more of my money to Bobby Kotick when I pay more tax than Activision.
You not only pay more taxes than ATVI, your tax dollar is paying ATVI.
ATVI get a tax refund every year.
We're already paying them regardless or not we're buying their games!
Game companies are posting record profits, they aren't in jeopardy of declining revenues due to inflation and game prices. They've already developed a multitude of revenue streams that don't involve raising the base game price (MTX, deluxe editions, special editions, DLC, etc.). The idea that inflation is the only or even the most important metric by which retailers and publishers set prices is absurd, it's not even close to being the most important factor for why you would raise prices. Increases in the consumer base, average wages in the market you are operating in, general consumer spend in your market segment year over year, the prices of your competitors, etc. are all vastly more important.
Crunch and studio closures and CEO pay have nothing to do with game prices, these problems would exist if the price of games increased by $20 or fell by $20, because they are institutional problems on both the industry level and a societal level.
The industry has gotten much more flexible with pricing. Most games I'm interesting in playing go for anywhere between ten and forty dollars.
In theory, if a publisher wants to charge seventy dollars, I don't give a shit, do it. But I probably won't buy it? I'm not a triple A gamer and I get much better value from lower priced titles. There isn't an industry-standard "price" nearly as much as there used to be, and those hitting that standard are games I rarely look at.
In theory, if a publisher wants to charge seventy dollars, I don't give a shit, do it. But I probably won't buy it? I'm not a triple A gamer and I get much better value from lower priced titles. There isn't an industry-standard "price" nearly as much as there used to be, and those hitting that standard are games I rarely look at.
I'm still waiting for you to explain to me how a company makes more money from a product by increasing the price of a product that has no demand. Whatever self awareness you want me to have, I'll gladly donate to you because you seem to really not understand why so many people here continue to respond to your absurd comments with the type of confusion that could only be had by someone who was hearing someone speak to them in a language they don't understand.
Let me know when you can explain the whole increasing price on product that doesn't have demand equals making more money thing to me. Otherwise I'll just add you to the ignore list.
Yes! Preach it.
Can't be said enough. These publishers are making more money than they ever have. But hey, why not$10 more?
Even ignoring all of the legitimate rebuttals in this thread, my simple issue is that I am not gaining any value by paying more. Aside from shiner graphics, I haven't seen any valid reasoning as to what my additional money is buying me. And that's enough for me to happily sit on the sideline.
the ~5 year AAA dev cycle has been a thing long before that, to split hairs. luckily things came up milhouse and the industry expanded accordingly but it was at a point threatening to blow up everything
i'm not exactly doing cartwheels and backflips over paying more for games that may or may not skim additional costs out of me but it's not like this came out of the woodwork. we eventually have to eat our peas
So creating the monster franchise that is COD (first one released 2013) didnt have anything to do with Activision sucess?
Its very easy to point at one companys revenue to make a point but thats not looking at the whole picture. What happened to Eidos? THQ? Respawn? Lionhead? The list of failed companys is quite big isnit?
Yeah, capitalism is a b*tch and create mega corps who finds ways to make insane amounts of money. But the video game business is far from only champagne and sucess stories.
As a counter point to many in here: Lookin at all the nominees at TGA i dont really see many games with "must have dlcs" or other shitty mtx either. People dont really want that anymore (excluding multiplayer and Sports games).
With that said im not sure the price hike was warrented anyway. Just tired of shallow argument made to amplify opinions.
You're not dunking on anything. Videogames aren't exempt from the value of the dollar decreasing over time just because you have a special attachment to them.
Videogame prices are still significantly higher in other countries outside the US, including some countries with significantly lower average annual wages.
That's a ridiculous misrepresentation of what I actually said. If anything, your comment reads like we're on a similar page here. Once these threads recognize all economic factors that go into a consumer's ability to purchase a non-essential good, that will be the starting point. It's just exhausting to see countless threads and countless comments from people who googled "inflation calculator" as if that's an accurate representation whatsoever of the mean economic situation for a consumer purchase non-essential goods in year (x) compared to year (y).
60 US dollars is worth less to a company in 2020 than in 2005. Companies don't set prices based on real wages of consumers. If they did, game prices in New Zealand would be lower than in the US, not higher. They set prices in individual markets based on what they think will maximize revenue.
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It's difficult to look at ATVI in particular over many years because of the big acquisitions of Blizzard then King. And yes, their revenue went up, but OTOH that number includes the revenue of the companies they acquired/merged with, and many other publishers went bankrupt since then.So lets look at a couple of things.
First let's look at earnings which are basically flat since 2000
Let's take a look inflation adjusted wage development and the picture is basically the same as 40 years ago
Now take a look at our friends at activision which revenue doubled more than 4 times since 2005
2005 $1.406 billion
2019 $6.489 billion
Activision Blizzard, Inc Revenue 2010-2023 | ATVI
Activision Blizzard, Inc revenue from 2010 to 2023. Revenue can be defined as the amount of money a company receives from its customers in exchange for the sales of goods or services. Revenue is the top line item on an income statement from which all costs and expenses are subtracted to arrive...www.macrotrends.net
Now the argument is always development is more expensive so lets have a look at how their bottom line was impacted since 2005
2005 $135 million
2019 $1.503 billion
Activision Blizzard, Inc Net Income 2010-2023 | ATVI
Activision Blizzard, Inc net income from 2010 to 2023. Net income can be defined as company's net profit or loss after all revenues, income items, and expenses have been accounted for.
So to sum up while publishers like Activision quadrupled their revenue and increased increased their income by a factor of more than 15 consumer wages haven't really increased at all.
Looking at inflation alone to justify a price increase when all your other positive KPIs have exploded in the past two decades is hilariously misinformed at best and journalists carrying the torch for publishers just shows how awful the journalism in this industry is.
We paid a lot of money sometimes yes. Mowed a lot of lawns to support my habit as a teen.
These threads get so heated but I will add one thing from an 37 year old perspective. It's never been a better time to be a gamer. We can bitch about everything under the sun but if that game I bought for big bucks back then had a bug it had a bug forever. And our options were way more limited. And I rarely remember giant sales on games like we have now. I saw someone said Amazon had Valhalla for 40 bucks a bit back. That's close to half off in under a month! Maybe my memory fails me but I can't remember popular games being 30 bucks less anytime soon after launch.
The old days weren't better. More on topic I've been on the wait train for a while now and others seem to be jumping on. It seems like everyone has been expecting this increase for a long time. Wishful thinking perhaps but hoping we can reduce crunch and pay developers a little better.
People can preach that apologist stuff on behalf of publishers all they want.
Al I know is, there's psychological barriers between an impulse buy and a serious purchase.
And when an entertainment product starts to cost me more than a week's commute, I'm definitely gonna re-assess buying full-price.
Al I know is, there's psychological barriers between an impulse buy and a serious purchase.
And when an entertainment product starts to cost me more than a week's commute, I'm definitely gonna re-assess buying full-price.
"U.S. video game content generated $35.4 billion in revenue in 2019, a 2 percent increase over 2018"
www.theesa.com
"The combined game industry grew 3% to $120.1 billion in 2019, according to market researcher SuperData in its year-end report."
venturebeat.com
U.S. Video Game Content Generated $35.4 Billion in Revenue for 2019 - Entertainment Software Association
U.S. video game content generated $35.4 billion in revenue in 2019, a 2 percent increase over 2018*, according to new data released today by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and The NPD Group.
www.theesa.com
"The combined game industry grew 3% to $120.1 billion in 2019, according to market researcher SuperData in its year-end report."
SuperData: Games hit $120.1 billion in 2019, with Fortnite topping $1.8 billion
The combined game industry grew 3% to $120.1 billion in 2019, according to SuperData. Fortnite generated $1.8 billion in the year.
venturebeat.com
All that is completely irrelevant, tbh.
"Stop complaining about the risk and expense in making and marketing games and simply make games as good as RDR2 or GoT"
You think Square set out to make a mediocre game?
Except that the general consensus on Era was that Prey and Dishonored 2 were very good games that people didn't buy because...marketing.
I think it's clear I put up those examples to show that despite headlines of 'record profits' and 'crazy industry growth', it doesn't apply to everyone. The craft is still as risky as ever.
The problem with the industry media being so American focused is that you get arguments like "70 isn't so bad" like everyone is paying 70 lol. Australian prices are up to 125 for base games and Europe is probably around 80-90 euros.
The only thing I'll say about the old days is that it was easier to keep up with the Joneses and be across all the "major" releases while also playing jank games for goofs
I look at real ease calenders now and have to basically pick 1 or 2 things and that's all I'll get aside from the odd indie or gamepass darling
You know what, I think EA and Square will be fine. They don't need to raise the price to keep being fine, either.
