Jereel Hunter said:
Maybe you should do a little research into the business side of things before declaring how much stuff should cost. A lot of new game releases lose money, even at the $50 price tag. Lowering the price substantially reduces their profit margin - stores aren't going to sell the game for a substantially reduced profit margin, which means the developer and publisher have to eat the entire hit. Which means suddenly a solid game could sell 2 million copies and barely break even. SC2 had been in development for over half a decade, it's had a massive budget, and it will continue to receive updates for the forseeable future. It's one of few worth more than they charge for it. As for piracy being "a lot less" it would have to be. If games cost half as much, they would need to sell more than 3x the copies to break even. Unless it magically not only eliminated piracy, but forced every pirate to buy a copy at full price, you're making a statement that, if it happened, would drive most PC developers out of business. They're charging $60 for an ultra-top tier AAA product, and you think that justifies piracy? An idiot face certainly needs a slap, but it's not theirs. |
You see that's the problem. The worth of those games is most definitely less than the set $50. New game releases lose money because a lot of new games just suck, in fact many that make a profit these days deserve to lose money because they also just suck. If I spent $50 on XCOM, Deus Ex, SC1, WC3, and many other titles, some of which will probably be still better than SCII, then there is no reason for SCII to cost more than them. If it is a good game, it will sell just fine, if it isn't then that is the developer's problem, not the consumers'.
The medium of video games is just like paintings. You will hardly find anyone charge more than a Picasso painting, or god forbid a da Vinci. Why is that? Because they are of lower quality. Saying "oh yeah I'll pay more for this new age painting" is absolutely retarded. You are just a bad consumer if you do that. The same reasoning is why most current games should be around the $25 mark, not the $60.
Your problem is that you are trying to shoehorn the price of SCII to the already broken model of pricing. That is not how it works. What should happen is that the title should try to fix the problem. Anchor it at $50 and any worse games than it should cost less than it. I can't believe people exist that actually want to throw their money away.
I don't know how much you have been keeping up with piracy, but most recent economic theory suggests that people want to pay for things, albeit a fair price. Piracy arises when someone wants something, but they feel its value is significantly less than what is asked for it. There are two ways to fix this situation. The developers lower the prices of their shittier games, or they they make their shittier games be worth the price they are asking. As a side note, PC developers who are releasing quality games have absolutely no problems. Heck, they don't even have to release "da best" to make money, as shown by recent Total War and Dawn of War releases. PC games only lose money to piracy when they are bad games.
