Some games are cheaper off the bat, like HD collections. But what's the problem with full price, most games get price cuts within a month anyway. Although for digital, they should cost half as much as a retail version. As for DLC, they will only try to charge more and more. Like COD map packs started at £8 each for COD 4 and world at war but now cost £12 each for black ops 2 map packs! They charge what they can get away with and EA usually follows

Yep, I agree.

I can only bring up my experience from it, but I've really been pleased with some of the tiered pricing Sony have been doing. For example, Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time for $40 instead of $60. Ratchet/Jak HD Collections in the UK started pricing at £30 rather than the normal £40; and for Vita certain titles seem to have a starting price of £25 (Jak Trilogy) or even £15 (Epic Mickey 2).

I hope this catches on a bit more and becomes sustainable because I really think it's a good thing to do. Just keep price in line with budget/demand rather than releasing everything at a flat rate.

Sony has been doing a good job with it in the last year.  Hopefully it will teach other developers and publishers that they can do the same and be successful.

Looks like Sony is using a similar model; Sly 4 was Puppeteer will be $40. Hopefully it becomes the norm because these are the kind of games that, at $60(£40), I won't buy at launch.

With DLC I'd like to see a resurgence of expansion packs, especially for SP, where the content consisted of extended campaigns, new gameplay mechanics or an expansion to the map (in open world games), and not just a few MP maps. Purely aesthetic items like hats and shit I can see becoming micro-transactions across the board, sadly map packs will remain overpriced because people eat them up.

I think studios need to severely cut back there budgets. There is def something wrong when a company like THQ goes under when the have many million selling franchises like Saints Row, Homefront, Darksiders, WWE, UFC. Or square losing money despite Hitman, Sleeping dogs and Tomb Raider all selling well.

I dont know how true this is but I read a long time ago that the average 6th gen game turned a profit after about 300,000 units sold, what the hell happened? I think there needs to be a tier like the op said, not all games need to be huge budget blockbusters, games with smaller budgets or less content should be $40-50 while the huge multimillion selling games can stay $60 since people are willing to pay that much.

I have no problem spending $60 on series I know i enjoy or by developers I trust like Naughty Dog or Retro but a game by a developer with a mixed track record or a new ip from an unknown dev is a much riskier investment at $60.

So lets say these mid level devs cut there budgets by 1/3 to 1/2 and sell the game for $10-20 less, they wont need to sell as many copies that way and people will be more willing to spend $40 on an unproven game vs $60.