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happydolphin on 03 February 2013
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RolStoppable said:
happydolphin said:

 

@bold. If my argument is bad, then there needs to be a reason other than "look, you had to use non-platformers to make your point", when that doesn't take aways from the heart of what I was trying to highlight in the first place, irrespective of genre. And you know that. ;)

"How much entertainment is this game going to provide to me?" How do you put a price tag to entertainment? Usually, price is based on cost and revenue. If I'm selling you a very fun game that took me 10 days to make, should you buy it at 50$? I wouldn't expect you to... In theory I understand what you mean, and I agree that entertainment value needs more place in the discussion, I don't agree that it's the golden standard for pricing either. I think there's more to a price than entertainment value. When a great book can be bought at 20$, I'm not sure 50$ is a reasonable price when only entertainment is the topic.

I think RO shows that Nintendo's games has unmatcheable brand power. In the movie industry, there are some excellent movies that would never hold a candle to hollywood blockbusters in terms of BO sales. Are they less good? Exposure, popularity =/= value.

The purpose of any entertainment product is to entertain people. The prices for any medium (books, music, movies, video games etc.) became what they are, because that's what the market has been willing to pay over an extended period of time. These entertainment products aren't judged based on their production costs. People don't say: "There's no way I am going to watch this movie in a cinema, because it only costed $25m to make.", or: "I am not going to buy this book for $20, because I've heard the author only needed one month to write it. I only pay $20, if it took at least six months." - So why should video games be judged any different? Why would anyone say that they aren't going to pay $50 for a video game that costed less than $10m (or $5m) to develop?

Your last paragraph is defeating your own position. At the beginning you argued that Nintendo can't do this forever. Now you argue that Nintendo has unmatchable brand power which basically means that they can do it forever.

@bold. You're projecting onto my PoV. In my opinion, their unmatchable brand power leads to exhuberant markups. Over the long run, as people see value in new propositions like Angry Birds and Trine, they will realize that the brand power and traditional value of Nintendo games doesn't reflect the modern market value.

The price for movies is largely standardized. Whenever I go see a movie at the cinema, it always is roughly 10$ a ticket. For a book it's 15 to 30$, depending on the size of the book.

With a video game, in today's market, the range is so vast that I'm not sure that same "that's what the price is" mindset is meaningful. When the option is between 1$ and 50$, it makes the decision-making process a little more difficult than a movie rental or the buying of a book. (I might be wrong about books now with the whole e-book market, but for movies this is true)

Also, the videogame market is getting very crowded, so asking people to pay 30-50$ for games is not reasonable in such a competitive landscape.