| Mythmaker1 said: 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? |
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.
