Video Games are an odd medium. It's new, and still trying to find acceptance and identity in the mainstream. Unfortunately, standardized pricing is really holding this industry back.

In the US, prices are pretty standard.With few exceptions, $60 for a new console game is the magic number. But for that $60, what do you get? 5 hours of content? 10? 40? 100? Despite having a standardized price, the value for your dollar can vary by orders of magnitude.

Compare this to Film. If you go to a theater, price is the same for each movie, but the length much more stnadardized. It'll be between 80 and 180 minutes minutes long, which is a significant difference, but by comparison it's much more homogenized. Rarely do people complain that they overpaid for a short movie.

Yet we often hear the complaint that games are overpriced for the content they offer, because every game is basically sold at the same price. Worse, in some cases the response to this complaint is to standardize content by including token multiplayer or online support into games that don't need them in order to justify the $60 price tag. Or padding the gameplay with repetition to give it the appearance of greater length. And the end result is a worse experience.

As long as pricing remains standardized, we're going to have this issue. Unlike film, where sstandard pricing and standard value go hand-in-hand, games have a much wider variety in levels of content. Thankfully, especially with digital distribution, we're seeing a lot more variable pricing in the industry. Here's hoping we can leave this artifact of early gaming in the dust.

Thoughts?

Its just an illusion. The prices of crap games drop to what they are really worth anyway.... unless its a game where not many copies were published so its holding its price because of supply/demand.

Everything drops in price with time. The problem here is that the standard pricing leads smaller games to compete against larger ones at the same price level. Which leads to more money/effort being put into it that ends up watering down the final product.

But by lowering the standard price, they have nothing extra to gain. If the game sucks, its not going to have legs anyway, they would just lose out on however much less they sell it for at launch and the first week or two.

Also, pricing would then become a means to judge the games quality. If a game's RRP is set to £30 instead of £40, most people will know the £30 game isnt as good as the £40 one.

If you judge a game's quality solely by the quantity of content, then that's a problem. But some of the most highly regarded games of the last generation were never sold at full price, and they did alright for themselves.

Least there is always a way to get something for no price at all har har har

Not only is there no standartized value  the medium is completely overpriced.


You can buy the newest bluray movie for 8€ on Amazon.  If you wait a bit you get bluray movies for 5€ or even less.

Games cost 60€ even tho 95% of the so called AAA games are cheaper to make than the hollywood blockbusters.  Sure GTA5 is excluded here but it also offers far mor value than most AAA games that just have a shit 3h campaign with idiotic A.I etc. and rely on other people keeping you busy instead of the game itself. 

Just imagine you go to the cinemas and watch a 4min flick that cost you 10 dollars to watch and then you end up talking to movie goers for 2hours. The movie industry will argue  "see you had 2h of fun. So 10 bucks is a good price!". Thats basically  multiplayer gaming.

They give you the bare minimum and argue that you have 1000h of fun but thats actually because of other people not because of the content. And if the entry fee (console price would be lower) and the game price also would be lower then the gaminng industry would have far more impact on todays society and more people would play games.

But instead of going cheaper they go more expensive and as a result  studios go bankrupt and free/99cent mobile gaming steal some consumers. And less NEW people come into gaming because of the price hurdle.


Games actually drop in price pretty fast but thats because there is way to many games out there and because people dont want to pay those high prices.  The problem here is that the industry has this stupid mentality  NO SALE DURING FIRST THREE MONTHS = FAILURE and then they drop the price. They devalue their own products way to fast.   Start with a lower price and keep it  isntead of having extremely high prices and then whining about bad sales during the first months.

If we ever come around to digital-only distribution of games, I think we'll see cheaper prices and fewer complaints.

Value differs as much from person to person as content differs from game to game. Hours of gameplay is one of the worst metrics to determine the value of a game. Though some people do and that's fine too.

The market regulates itself mostly by seeing less appreciated games dropping their price faster.

Spot on. Regardless of how much actual content there is, publishers will insist their game is worth $60, and all too often they aren't.

I understand where this started. Physical distribution is expensive, which means higher up-front costs, but with digital distribution maybe we can finally get around that and responsible companies can start offering their games at different prices.