99cent apps are killing the videogame industry .... but Who started with the stupidity of 60 bucks games????

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/epic-99-cent-apps-are-killing-us/

99 cents?  They're used to FREEEEEE (piracy).

To be honest, I've bought less games in the last 3 years total than I used to buy in 6 months.  Why?  The economy.  The 99 cent games don't particularly appeal to me, so I honestly haven't been buying ANYTHING.

I'M who you should be scared of, Mike Capps!

I hope a happy medium can be found. Especially when games go dl only.  I think plenty of people see value in full featured in depth games at 10-20 dollars. Just not Sixty.

Correction. They were completely free on computer for years.

Then people started porting to celphones and charging money for them.

if epic are scared of 99 cent games, that says a lot about them.

You keep making $60 games for the home consoles and we'll keep buying them. Don't worry Epic, as long as there's quality in your games then you'll make a profit.

gaming is bigger than ever as a form of entertainment, it is not anymore the "nerd" hobby...so ts just fine. 

Apart from him living in a different world to ours of technology land, in regards to the 60$ vs 99c games, ....., make a good game that's worth 60$? If you're worried about a 99c game, that tells more about how shite your 60$ game is, not how good the other one is.

The question of production value comes into play here; whether the production value that requires a $60 price to recoup development costs is sustainable to the consumer base playing these games.

If general interest ever shifts towards mobile games (majority share of market) then the current business plan of spending two years worth of a full developer studio's resources on a major budget game suddenly becomes questionable.

Would there still be a market for these games? Of course. But the question is whether the market for such games would still be large enough to sell enough units to recoup costs and justify further development of such projects to whoever was financing the studio. If not, budgets shrink, projects become less ambitious and the focus may shift away from production values to profitability. Titles like Heavenly Sword and Enslaved come to mind when it comes to examples of games that clearly had big production value, yet were often measured by consumers on the basic merit of length in regards to whether they merited a $60 purchase and underperformed financially as a result. 

The question doesn't come into play as often (paying for production value as opposed to duration of entertainment hours/minutes), but when looking at something like film, a movie that cost less than $1m to produce still has the same ticket price as a film with a $100m budget at the same theater showing both films.

In many cases in the gaming industry, there are titles that try to sneak a $60 full retail price for a game that clearly does not have the same production value/cost/man hours as say a AAA title priced the same.

That's something that definitely won't be sustainable if the trend to mobile games continues.

Worst case scenario, there might not be enough of a sustainable market for even AAA title high budget/production value games if they simply aren't selling enough units to remain profitable.

The way that the gaming industry has grown, it's no longer the core niche that sustains the market. Lose the extended market/general public audience and you simply can't keep producing 8 figure budget titles to sell primarily to a shrinking core audience.

While I don't think the industry is there yet, I agree that there is reason to be concerned for all the above reasons.

whiners whine. Nothing new here.