Good question....

No. When the prices of games drop below $40, the game's sales don't jump significantly. So I don't see why game developers would want to sell games at a cheaper price when they can make more money and sell lots of units at a higher price.

it is an econ problem. you have to know what's the game price elasticity of game demand quantity. and I feel the elasticity number could be relatively large number larger than 1. so I guess game publisher will be able to earn more revenue when they decide to drop game price.

But I could be wrong, since those game company might have already done some research to find the most reasonable price for video game.

The point I was making wasn't that it was any good, but lower pricing probably made people avoid the titles.  It probably would have sold better if they released it and charged people $60 when it launched instead of $40.

Sly Thieves in Time was the other one that launched at $40.  Had cross buy on it also.

Good for most consumers, but certainly bad for a lot of people who are working for GameStop etc.
Not sure if that's the ideal that anyone (not talking about profit oriented companies) should pursue.

In the US we really are spoiled and live in the golden age of cheaper games. I know people see $60 in 1994 and $60 in 2014 and think games are the same price, but the fact is back then I remember SNES games holding to $60 for a long time and maybe hit $30 after two years. These days it is not uncommon for a game to drop quickly or have sales within weeks or months of release. I wanted to get "The Last of Us" and it was on sale for $45 a week after release. I can pretty much predict games that will drop within months, and Tomb Raider was a classic example as I got it for $30 only three months after release.

My PS3 library dwarfs my SNES library, largely due to my per game investment going from $50 back then to $25 these days. I have least twenty games bought for sub $15, which would have been unthinkable back in 16 bit era. So, this thinking has definitely worked on me as know many games would not have bothered with if not for being in the bargain bins.

I agree. Compared to past generations some game prices are not any different. But remember, when the ps2/ xbox1 was in their early stages, games were often priced at $40 sometimes $50. Its only till the ps3/xbox360 that game prices jumped to $60 all across the board. I'm also guilty of waiting for a price drop on certin games, but I also have to have certain games on day 1.  Most of my playstation franchises I purchase day 1.  Their quility and my love for them makes them diserve my $60.

What would happen if ALL gamers waited for a price drop before they purchase their games ?

meh.

my wife's great grandpa was a really rich guy owning a massive business servicing horse and carriages.   lost it all when he refused to believe automobiles would ever be successful.  i could cry about all the jobs lost in the horse and carriage business but it's hard to knowing how many jobs were created in the manufacuture and maintance of cars.

i've got nothing against gamestop but brick and mortar is doing poorly in all segments (not just video games).   if digital distribution doesn't kill gamestop then amazon.com will.    ..but amazon employes over 110,000 people and MSony employes a lot to.   as long as money is being spent it's going somewhere.  the jobs/work doesn't just go away,..  it moves to a different task.

But in this case there weren't really any jobs lost. Just transferred. Obviously not everyone of these people became a mechanic, but others without a job found a new one in that growing business.
Amazon is a similar case. It's killing retail stores and their employees, but at the same time Amazon needs more drivers to get the cargo from the harbors to the local warehouses, then many people for filling and emptying these warehouses and additional Fed Ex (or whatever) drivers who deliver the packages.


Here as you said before, the aim is to cut out the retailer (and distributor). How many jobs would be created by distributing everything digital in return?
Maybe one additional IT guy per publisher who is looking after a few new servers.

The same could happen to book stores, although that's not gonna happen in the next few months or possibly even years.

For the second part I've bolded:

none of these retail clerks get a lot of money. For 3 retail clerks you could employ 1 network administrator.*
That's a 66% job loss right there.

*numbers taken from salary.com

PS2/GC/XBX games were $50 in the same ratio PS3/360 are $60.  PS1 had $40-50 games, while N64 was $50-60.  So games went down in price and then up a bit if you were a day one MSRP type gamer and ignored inflation.

On your hypothetical: The market would shrink and many studios would go out of business.  Same way every console would fail if no one bought them at launch.  The odds of us seeing such a complete shift are very remote.  People have waited for drops and bought used games for decades, and yet there is still a healthy group of people that buy day 1.   This reminds me how the film industry was terrified of VHS because people could just wait and never go to the cinema. Of course now DVD/Blu-Ray represent a great form of income that has benefitted the film industry massively.  If the content is compelling enough people in enough numbers will support it.