Video game sales are a trend of up and down, down and up over the past 10 years or so now. Were at the end of one generation, seeing the PS3 selling over 80 million consoles, as well as the XBox360 and the Wii selling well over 90 million units. So in all fairness, any game that is of good to great quality should sell pretty well if its a multi platform release, lets say around 8 million units. But in most cases, its not.
There are tons of multi platform games that are released that bearly sell 3 million copies. Give or take the heavy hitters, GTA, COD, Battlefield, Fifa, NBA2K.
Developers have always cited that they do not make back enough revenue from game sales to make up for the amount of money that was put into the project. For instance, the latest Tomb Raider has sold well over 5 million units hopefully at $60 a pop, yet Square-Enix claims that their projected revenue was not met. I myself do not believe that, but hey, I have no factual numbers to back it up, but it just sounds kind of off.
Me personally I own 2 ps3's, a ps4 and a Vita. I purchase games for all my consoles, but the biggest hurdle for me is pricing of games. Most times I pass on full price $60 games. Skyrim, Bioshock, Tomb Raider, NBA2K, SFIV. I waited for a price drop for all those titles. Only games that I purchase full price day 1 are mostly my favorite series, MGS, Uncharted, God Of War, Killzone and so on.
I think game are way over priced. $60 is too much for a video game. Video game publishers need to take a cue from the Blu-Ray format. When Blu-Rays 1st got introduced, they were priced at around $30-$40 per movie at most big retailers, Best Buys, Target, Walmart. But even with the great clarity and superior sound, consumers were not willing to pay that much for a movie and within 2 years or so, we saw a huge drop in Blu-Ray prices, to about $19.99- $25.99 per most new releases. And look at Blu-Ray movies now. Their flying off shelves.
(1) Should the Video Game industry adopt a new price structure on big budget games ?
(2) Would big budget new releases priced at $40 sell better than they are selling now ?
(3) Can Handheld games compete with Cell Phone games sales if they were priced at around $19.99 instead of $39.99 ?
As always, Keep on Gaming.
