CDiablo said:
As stated in numerous used games threads boxes, manuals and resale are features of a product. When people lose that feature the value of the item goes down. Can a company make more money by selling a game at $30-$40 on DD as opposed to a $60 retail, I dont know but its the fact that the majority of gamers arent wise to content liscensing/DD. I know plenty of more "casual' gamers that feel burned by the way XBLA games work for a number of reasons because they dont fully understand the DD concept. As people wise up to it the value of content liscenses or the willingness to pay "full price" is going to drop dramatically. As games sell less and companies stay hard headed about their prices IPs, studios and new ideas will die and the gaming market will shrink. I hope I am wrong, I really do. |
The only games i see on steam for 59.99 are console ports(Skyrim i'm waiting). I choose not to buy them either. I wait for steam sales. There will be compititon, not on the same service, but you better bet that people will be comparing game prices across itunes, android market place, xbox live and psn. If PSN and xboxlive get to expenses people will switch to android and itunes or steam. There is plenty of compition right now. Apple/MS/Nintendo/sony/valve/direct2drive/onlive. They are all competing for the same dollars. Also i think pc games only got more expensive because of dev cost. But as for myself I spend the least amount of money on games since i switched to steam. I wait till their christmas sale and buy a years worth of games at great prices. I usually do not pay over 10 dollars for a game. And the games like starcraft would of been like that in retail also. how long did the first price take for starcraft 1 in retail stores? I dont remember it happening until after the first expansion packs came out.
Edit: And to add on the compition part, consoles can be hacked to give access to another market also.