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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Would Cheaper Video Games Sell More ?

sabastian on 18 February 2014
fleischr said:

They do sell more.

Interesting example: Mass Effect 3 on Wii U. Now selling for $10 on Amazon (was $20-30 for the last half of 2013). The game has a lot going against it. Outside the fanbase. It's an old port. Can't move your saves to it. Missing some DLC.

But now that it's selling for less, the sales have spiked considerably. If it continues it's current rate of sales, it'll be up considerably YOY from 2013. It's also outselling the 360 and PS3 version in this time frame (which are currently just a few more bucks more expensive). The only compelling reason to justify that difference is price.

But is EA raking in big money from it? Heck no. Had they priced it this aggressively much earlier on, would they be better off? You tell me!

ME is a pretty solid game.

But on the flip side of your statement, what about the publishers, will they make back enough to justify a sequel ?



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fatslob-:O on 18 February 2014

No the only way to make games sell more is to make it higher quality. A lower price only helps for already high quality titles such as call of duty but at that point why would you lower the price when you could be getting higher margins of return ?



Landguy on 18 February 2014

Won't work.

Even if they dropped the price of the games to $40. Or even $30.

People pay for what they want. If you dropped the price, there wouldn't be millions of more people interested in the game. The people who plan to buy it will, and the people not interested won't.

Sure, when games get extremely inexpensive, they begin to sell to people that will impulse buy them. Developers already have that scenario in their sales plan for the lifecycle of the game.



It is near the end of the end....

sabastian on 18 February 2014
NiKKoM said:
They would sell more in absolute numbers but the revenue would be down.. The core market is just not big enough to support a low price massive numbers system..


I'm not sure I got your point. Please elaborate more ????



wolfofthepack on 18 February 2014
Landguy said:
Won't work.

Even if they dropped the price of the games to $40. Or even $30.

People pay for what they want. If you dropped the price, there wouldn't be millions of more people interested in the game. The people who plan to buy it will, and the people not interested won't.

Sure, when games get extremely inexpensive, they begin to sell to people that will impulse buy them. Developers already have that scenario in their sales plan for the lifecycle of the game.


agreed !



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Barozi on 18 February 2014

lol surely, but they would also generate much less revenue and thus profits.
Now all ~20m COD gamers who would've spent $60 for a game now only pay $30. For getting the same kind of profits you'd need to find another 20m people willing to buy the game at $30. That's quite risky.



sabastian on 18 February 2014
Landguy said:
Won't work.

Even if they dropped the price of the games to $40. Or even $30.

People pay for what they want. If you dropped the price, there wouldn't be millions of more people interested in the game. The people who plan to buy it will, and the people not interested won't.

Sure, when games get extremely inexpensive, they begin to sell to people that will impulse buy them. Developers already have that scenario in their sales plan for the lifecycle of the game.


Huuum ?? So how do you explain impulse iPhone games buy ? 

Example, on the ps3 the custom themes are sold for around $2.99. If they were priced at .99 cents, I would buy more.



sabastian on 18 February 2014
JazzB1987 said:

yes absolutely.

The movie industry shows us how to do it  they price the movies so low everyone can buy them there is no hurdle like a high price. And if you buy a shitty one you also dont feel burned that bad because it was just 10 bucks.

And since gaming became even more mainstream than movies and alot of games now have 5h campaigns etc selling games for 10 bucks should be enough. (obviously does not apply for great games with 20h - 80h of gameplay etc) We will never go back to developers making games for gamers instead of mainstreamers so pricing the "games" accordingly would just be fair.

I mean you can buy a single song for a few cents or buy a full album for 20bucks or whatever why does the game industry insist on having unified prices for titles of different size/quality etc? It is either 60bucks or indie. Does not make sense

I agree. I used to never buy Blu-Rays when they were priced at $39.99. Now that they are priced at $19.99, I buy all releases that im interested in. 



Barozi on 18 February 2014
sabastian said:


Huuum ?? So how do you explain impulse iPhone games buy ? 

Example, on the ps3 the custom themes are sold for around $2.99. If they were priced at .99 cents, I would buy more.

assuming you buy one theme a month. How much more would you buy ? Because three times as much wouldn't be enough.



JazzB1987 on 18 February 2014
sabastian said:
Landguy said:
Won't work.

Even if they dropped the price of the games to $40. Or even $30.

People pay for what they want. If you dropped the price, there wouldn't be millions of more people interested in the game. The people who plan to buy it will, and the people not interested won't.

Sure, when games get extremely inexpensive, they begin to sell to people that will impulse buy them. Developers already have that scenario in their sales plan for the lifecycle of the game.


Huuum ?? So how do you explain impulse iPhone games buy ? 

Example, on the ps3 the custom themes are sold for around $2.99. If they were priced at .99 cents, I would buy more.

Same would apply to me on WiiU Virtual Console games.

I would never ever pay $5 for a NES game rofl.    I would buy 500 NES games for 30cents each tho simply because WHY NOT? ITS CHEAP!.
So Nintendo either gets 500 x $0.3 = $150 or nothing.

(I mean there was the 30 cents promotion for NES and SNES games on WiiU last year that was AWESOME I bought all games but two because I had no internet for a while)