"Gamers aren't overcharged, they're undercharged"; New study claims games are too cheap.

[Wanaknow]

There is indeed a genuine discussion to be had here. But the study should be done by an appropriate and independent instance (maybe a university?). and maybe it is time to see what gamers want as an increased price? is microtransaction the answer? for developers it seems so but is this in the best interest of both parties? are we willing to pay more for additional DLC or would we rather pay more for a game with no or free DLC (witcher has don it)?

 

In my opinion i would opt to pay more for a game to begin with, with no or at least minimal additional costs.

[-TesseracT-]

44 minutes ago, sinkesnnj said:

Americans are such a masters of marketing and spinning things back and forth. I like how this sounds like they are threatening consumers to settle down and stop this massive outrage or they will increase prices.

Comparing it with other ways of entertainment is dumb. Gaming popularity comes exactly from having lower prices. I'd like to see how many gamers would commit to a 200$ SWBF2. 

 

lower price => more popular

higher price => less popular

I think gaming popularity comes mainly from chance + the quality and accessiblity of a game. I could think of a lot of examples of really cheap games which are really cheap, but I can also think of equally as many quite expensive games which are highly popular as well (PUBG). Why is PUBG so popular? It's not even a finished game, and it runs like ass, but many say that its a quite unique game. How did Gta 5 sold 60 million copies? Because its gta. How come angry birds was such a popular game? Well, the developers weere probably quite lucky, but its a cheap game that anyone could run on their phones.

[Rocko Modaro]

Now this is Fake News!

[ADM-Ntek]

seriously for me a new game is already half an month wage. if those go up will just switch to prating every game.

[Taf the Ghost]

13 minutes ago, Wanaknow said:

There is indeed a genuine discussion to be had here. But the study should be done by an appropriate and independent instance (maybe a university?). and maybe it is time to see what gamers want as an increased price? is microtransaction the answer? for developers it seems so but is this in the best interest of both parties? are we willing to pay more for additional DLC or would we rather pay more for a game with no or free DLC (witcher has don it)?

 

In my opinion i would opt to pay more for a game to begin with, with no or at least minimal additional costs.

It's the "whale" effect. If you give people the ability, a small fraction can fund an entire game's profit.  This is why the F2P market is likely bigger than Hollywood by at least a factor of 2. Possibly more, but we don't know because solid stats out of Asia are hard to come by.

 

Valve's revenue between Dota2 & CS:GO is likely over 1 billion USD per year, ignoring Steam completely.

[leadeater]

37 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

The entire Final Fantasy series is based around killing 40 hours of your life with each iteration. And Kojima wants you to spend that much time watching cut scenes!

Ha 40 hours, that little. Add another zero for me . I know I've wasted over 1000 hours on FF7 over the years, probably about the same for FF10 and FF8/9/12 wound't be far behind.

[Wanaknow]

2 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

It's the "whale" effect. If you give people the ability, a small fraction can fund an entire game's profit.  This is why the F2P market is likely bigger than Hollywood by at least a factor of 2. Possibly more, but we don't know because solid stats out of Asia are hard to come by.

 

Valve's revenue between Dota2 & CS:GO is likely over 1 billion USD per year, ignoring Steam completely.

Interesting. are there any numbers on how many people are playing free-to-play actually for free? or what the average amount spent is per year? 

[Trixanity]

2 hours ago, Pohernori said:

Overworked and underpaid devs, I can see that. 

This is true but games are already a profitable business for corporate. If they increased prices, I doubt the developers will see much if any money. I'm quite sure corporate will pocket the difference and give the developers 10 extra lashes for even suggesting better working conditions.

[CyanideInsanity]

So dark souls should cost hundreds of dollars because some players put in thousands of hours? K

[Wanaknow]

11 minutes ago, CyanideInsanity said:

So dark souls should cost hundreds of dollars because some players put in thousands of hours? K

Is that the next step? paying per hour?

[Trixanity]

8 minutes ago, Wanaknow said:

Is that the next step? paying per hour?

This is the future:

[CommandMan7]

Lemme just leave this here...

[Drak3]

Game prices haven't risen with inflation, so yeah, they're being under charged for. But raising the price isn't an option with so many entitled pieces of shit chanting that $60 is too much for games and ready to boycott or pirate the second the base price is raised a cent.

[Brainless906]

lol.

 

2.5 hours for 365 days (a full year) is 912.5h of gameplay. Whats the last game you bought that had 912.5h of gameplay in it.

 

This is the stupidest thing i've ever read.

 

"business guy thinks you pay to little for products"

 

shocking.

[handymanshandle]

3 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Game prices haven't risen with inflation, so yeah, they're being under charged for. But raising the price isn't an option with so many entitled pieces of shit chanting that $60 is too much for games and ready to boycott or pirate the second the base price is raised a cent.

I don't really don't think that the publishers should be charging the same price for a digital copy because you don't have the cost of making the game discs and packaging and shipping, unless they started saying that the game itself is $60 and then threw on whatever they feel is good for packaging, the disc itself and shipping.

[Drak3]

Just now, wcreek said:

I don't really don't think that the publishers should be charging the same price for a digital copy because you don't have the cost of making the game discs and packaging and shipping, unless they started saying that the game itself is $60 and then threw on whatever they feel is good for packaging, the disc itself and shipping.

The costs to manufacturer discs is pretty damn small, to the point that it's extremely likely that the disc version is cheaper than digital due to fees required by digital store fronts.

[handymanshandle]

1 minute ago, Drak3 said:

The costs to manufacturer discs is pretty damn small, to the point that it's extremely likely that the disc version is cheaper than digital due to fees required by digital store fronts.

Eh personally I think games prices are fine as they are.

[Drak3]

Just now, wcreek said:

Eh personally I think games prices are fine as they are.

Given how microtransactions are becoming more common amongst large games, prices obviously aren't.

[79wjd]

2 hours ago, Princess Cadence said:

Please don't even spread this bullshit of a study around, not to mention it only even considers the $ life of New York residents, as if the rest of the world was that well paid.

I'd love to know where I can see a movie in NY for $3/hr. A standard format movie in NYC is $17~/ticket, IMAX/3D are $20+.

[handymanshandle]

Just now, Drak3 said:

Given how microtransactions are becoming more common amongst large games, prices obviously aren't.

Not to the devs at least lol

 

Part of it could be inflation, but I'd like to think it's more about wanting to bring in more $$$ which isn't inherently a bad thing...

 

Truthfully, it's more about having a constant revenue stream so that you don't have to rely on sales of the game as much as you can sneak in microtransactions in games that are actually f2p it makes the most sense but in $60 games, it makes the least sense or how some devs/publishers are implementing it. 

[Princess Luna]

Just now, djdwosk97 said:

I'd love to know where I can see a movie in NY for $3/hr. A standard format movie in NYC is $17~/ticket, IMAX/3D are $20+.

Exactly my point? undercharged only if by NY logic because in more than half the world the current pricing on gaming is high enough to render piracy still being a thing.

 

Even if the price itself doesn't change just think about minimum wage from USA vs Brazil for comparison:

 

 

This shows how many months you have to work earning minimum wage to be able to buy a Toyota Corolla in 2016, and under how many liters of gasoline you can buy with a 1 month worth of minimum wage, see the screaming difference? this discussion should go way beyond simply the games price but the individual reality of each country the game is commercialized.

[Okjoek]

I'm still going to play games I can get free/cheap and that aren't pay-to-win.

[Sfekke]

Since when do we pay per hour?

I'd be broke!

Some players get more hours out of their games too, so how can you globalize that?

I played Team Fortress 2 over 700 hours, that means I'd pay more then a thousand € for it?

While in reality for that entertainment I paid a grand total of € 40 of cosmetics and strange weapons.

 

Analysts like these do not know what a game is.

They know how profit works & how mathematics work.

 

When I had my PS2, I paid € 30 for a game. We even said 'damn that is pretty expensive' and bought games secondhand more then new.

It hurts me & my wallet every time I pay more then € 60 for a new game, let alone the ludicrous €70-€90 + transactions we are moving towards.

At that point I cannot afford games, I have other things I need in life. Food/Paying off Loans/Gas/Various vehicular costs/bills/etc..

Games are becoming a luxury item aren't they?

 

Either we protest here and now, or just be plucked until we are paying way too much for way too little.

[Misanthrope]

3 hours ago, IKnight said:

Star Wars Battlefront II" player. He said if a gamer spent $60 for the game, an additional $20 per month for loot micro-transaction boxes and played around 2.5 hours a day for one year, it comes out to roughly 40 cents per hour of entertainment. This compares to an estimated 60 cents to 65 cents per hour for pay television, 80 cents per hour for a movie rental and more than $3 per hour for a movie watched in a theater, according to the firm's analysis.

"If you take a step back and look at the data, an hour of video game content is still one of the cheapest forms of entertainment," 

 

There's other 3 points here but I feel they're basically irrelevant vs the last one I'm going to make.

 

Spoiler

1) There's a false equivalence between movies and games just because they're bot "forms of entertainment" or leisure. Going to a movie theater just isn't comparable since the costs of production, distribution and marketing are completely different in nature.

 

2) Even ignoring 1) We're still ignoring the fact that movies have been, in recent history, trending down precisely because of things like gaming: The only reason for the recent wide mainstream popularity of gaming is that people gravitate to what they perceive as a more solid investment when it comes to entertainment because of the value.

 

3) Perhaps the most glaring flaw is the fact that gaming creates far wider accessibility at no extra costs or very little extra costs to the developers: There's nobody being able to buy a "movie theater" experience for their homes so there's definitively differentiation that's enough to encourage the price premiums of theaters whereas specially with consoles but also with PCs the experience is duplicated 1 to 1 for all the users.

 

4) Companies like EA are basically still not doing regional pricing vs other publishers meaning that before adding a ton of Microtransactions or other exploitative ways to get more revenue out of their most rich customers they could also incur veeeery little distribution cost and address regional pricing. See the beauty of this point is that you can ignore all other points and still consider the data as 100% valid and it still means your solution is fucking shit. You're leaving thousands of clients in the dark or pushed in to piracy by refusing to acknowledge that the same study, done outside the US for example would show you that actually the average gamer in a weaker economy would pay the equivalent of anything between 200% and over 1000%  for entertainment vs an American once you consider their income and general expenses so you're reducing your potential market to very tiny minorities abroad when you could easily and cheaply reduce your pricing to what's actually fair to some international markets.

[Master Disaster]

3 hours ago, IKnight said:

According to one New York analytical company, games are too cheap for the hours of entertainment that they provide. KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Evan Wingren wrote in a note to clients on Sunday,

So how was this 'found out'?

The analyst instead reiterated his overweight ratings for Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard and Take-Two with price targets of $134, $78 and $144 respectively.

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/20/gamers-overreacting-on-ea-star-wars-game-firms-should-raise-prices.html

This study was brought to you buy the gaming industry consortium......

 

Seriously though, what a load of nonsense. Games are designed to be play and forget experiences just as much as TV shows and Movies are, thats the whole reason why this currect bullshit has taken hold. They claim "games as a service" but the fully understand that outside of a few fringe cases games are played for a few months tops then their uninstalled and never touched again.

 

Try 2 hours every other day for 2 months, 3 tops, and see how those figures work out.