Topic: Games too Expensive?

[jacktheripper305]

http://www.edge-online.com/features/valve-are-games-too-expensive#expensivegames

Here's the full Story:

Games may be too expensive.

That is the message Valve Software President Gabe Newell gave the assembled developers at the annual DICE Summit on Wednesday. While the topic of his keynote was the game industry's transition from retail industry to service industry, he revealed sales data from Steam that suggests games are too expensive.

The reason why few have arrived at this conclusion is because you cannot easily experiment with pricing at retail, says Newell. But you can with Steam, Valve's burgeoning digital distribution platform.

On the PC-only Steam service, a wide range of prices are attached to games, and attractive weekend deals throw more pricing variability into the mix. Although Valve was initially afraid that volatility or variability in pricing would confuse or anger its customers--or even cannibalize retail sales--Newell says that was not all the case.

In fact, it dramatically increased sales. Illustrating his point, Newell showed the results of a Left 4 Dead promotion Valve ran last weekend, which cut the price of the game in half to $25. The discount (and promise of new content for the game) rocketed sales of the game on Steam by 3,000 percent.

"We sold more in revenue this last weekend than we did when we launched the product," says Newell. "We were driving a huge uptick in revenue and attracting new customers." And while people believe that we're "screwing" retail, Newell showed that brick-and-mortar sales were unaffected by the online discount.

This phenomenon is not limited to Valve games. Over the holidays, Steam discounted third-party titles. Sales increased 300 percent and units-sold increased by 600 percent.

Still skeptical? Newell said that a weekend sale of one third-party title drove that game's sales up by 18,000 percent and units-sold increased 36,000 percent. It energized the user base, says Newell. When the sale ended, baseline sales were double what they were prior to the weekend discount.

Discounting games does not only increase unit sales--it increases actual revenues. During the 16-day sale window over the holidays, third-parties were given a choice as to how severely they would discount their games. Those that discounted their games by 10 percent saw a 35% uptick in sales--that's dollars, not units. A 25 percent discount meant a 245 percent increase in sales. Dropping the price by 50 percent meant a sales increase of 320 percent. And a 75 percent decrease in the price point generated a 1,470 percent increase in sales.

The conclusion: The games industry is not pricing its products correctly. It's only through the experimentation that such services as Steam allows will the industry be able to find the golden ratio of price and sales. As Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences President Joseph Olin concluded Wednesday night, this is going to generate a lot of controversy about pricing.

I find this to be very, very true. the main reason i dont play much video games is because they're too expensive.
(the other reason is time).

However, if games were a lot cheaper, i would play them more often.

What do you guys think?

[Robin-Graves]

I remember when the old Atari 2600 series hit the market.
Ralph Nader exposed the markup in prices compared to creating the games. The markup was over 1000%.
 Yeah,,I think games are WAY overpriced.
Look at the X Box 360 and the PS3 when they came out.
Even the games they have are too expensive today.

[chekovsulu]

I agree.  I tend to buy games a long time after they're initially released.  It's nice playing games after all the bug fixes are released.

In fact, it dramatically increased sales. Illustrating his point, Newell showed the results of a Left 4 Dead promotion Valve ran last weekend, which cut the price of the game in half to $25. The discount (and promise of new content for the game) rocketed sales of the game on Steam by 3,000 percent.

I missed this.  I feel sad now.

[Santafer]

They sell the ps3 greatest hits at 30$ and still make a profit, so sell them at 40 and I'm happy.

[JackFrost]

Left 4 Dead is not a very good game, which is why they'll let you have it for half price only a few months after release.

I wanted to like it, but it's just too over the top in numerous aspects.

Most especially swarms of zombies jumping onto and over buildings that the player had difficulty reaching...

But yeah, games have always been too expensive.

That whole economic principle where you charge less and  you'll sell more units seems to have been lost on video game developers.

[jackalope21]

That is why i have the game pass at blockbuster......Plus, i get bored way too easily

[laama]

Games are too expensive,but I rather buy them because original games always work.

[jacktheripper305]

personally i prefer to attempt the torrent/cracked version before i fork over any amount of money for a game. if there isnt a version that works available, then ill consider buying it.

[hmed2390]

^ And I was just going to ask if anybody here finds it too expensive to download their games. 

[chekovsulu]

I can't download games because of my bandwidth limit.  It kinds sucks, because I've been wanting to play Portal again this past month.  I had a pirated copy, but I deleted it after I bought it off Steam.  I regret that now.

[hmed2390]

^ i feel for you chek, with your bandwidth restriction and all. When I was in Egypt, I would complain about the actual bandwidth(in terms of KB down/KB up ) it sucked. I had a 256 connection with 5 hours latency,lol.

[jacktheripper305]

wow, thats shittier than AOL.

[hmed2390]

wow, thats shittier than AOL.

Tell me about it. I'd have given anything to hear"You've got mail!" back in those days.
 

AOL sucks....   

Anyway...  I hate cable companies...

I pay $79.99 (why is it always .99?) for 10 megs down/1 meg up...  And I'm sure I'm getting shafted somewhere! 

That's pretty damn expensive? What's your company? You can get a package deal with comcast for about $60. That includes television,
telephone, and of coarse the internet. 20Mbs down/16Mbs up.

[hmed2390]

Charter...  I don't need a landline...  Or television.  And I've looked at the packages, for the bundles it's only for 5Mbps...  (what does that mean?)

I have 10Mbps...  I don't know.  I'm looking at my bill and these things are CONFUSING!  My connection is fast, I do alot of.... *cough*  things on it. 

Well if you say you have a 10 Mbs down speed. Take the "10", and divide it by 10, and that's what you have in KB/s.
So technically you can download at 1MB/sec(1000KB/sec roughly).
The same concept for upload.
Since your connection is a 5Mbs connection, your top download speed should be somewhere around 500KB/sec.

[jacktheripper305]

Well if you say you have a 10 Mbs down speed. Take the "10", and divide it by 10, and that's what you have in KB/s.
So technically you can download at 1MB/sec(1000KB/sec roughly).
The same concept for upload.
Since your connection is a 5Mbs connection, your top download speed should be somewhere around 500KB/sec.

Im sure you mean multiply 

but yes, thats basically how it works.

the numbers just mean how much information can be received/sent at a time.

so if your service says 10Mbs/5mbs, that means you can download 10 Megabits per second and upload 5 Megabits per second.

Keep in mind that megaBITS are different from megaBYTES, 1 Byte=8 Bits.

So if you have 10Mbs/5Mbs means that you can download 800 Kilobytes per second, and upload about 400 kilobytes per second.

and yes, it can be very confuzzling.