I saw the blurb on the Gamedev homepage about the FairPlay campaign. Looking over their site, there are definitely things I don''t agree with. 99% of the cost is development? If they are saying you should only spend $10,000 manufacturing, distributing, and marketing a $1,000,000 game, thats a little absurd if you ask me. But that isn''t the thing I want to debate about the campaign. What I am interested in is their idea of "dont buy any games for a whole week...that will show them". Does that type of thing actually work? Does EA really care that you bought John Madden 3012 next week instead of this week? Does that type of thing concern them at all (assuming enough poeple participate for it to even show up on the radar). To me, I would think all it would say is "Hey, I tried really hard not to buy your game, but you guys got me hooked. When John Madden 3013 comes out, you can have my first born son". If you want to show them and teach them a lesson, then do it the right way...don''t buy their games at all. They say they want reasonable prices for games, but we indies already have reasonable prices. Don''t buy your next game from a mega-publisher. Buy from Kronos Software, or Dexterity, or Positech, or Hamumu, or one of the many other developers that are creating great games at low prices. Of course, people complain that you can''t get good RPGs or FPSs from the indie market, but thats only because nobody buys them. There are would-be indies making great FPS games, but nobody wants to buy them, so they are forced to sign with a publisher to get anywhere. I see some other up & coming FPS developers, and I hope they won''t have to follow in those footsteps. Ron Frazier Kronos Software www.kronos-software.com Miko & Molly - Taking Puzzle Games to A Whole New Dimension

Talked about this some with one of my friends who works at a studio for one of the major publishers. No, they won''t care one bit. Slumping their sales for a week is a joke.

Video games, to make a broad generalization, are NOT overpriced. This sounds like something little Bobby and Tommy down the street started because they can''t save up the $40 to buy the latest FPS.

Well, it is ridiculous that the retailers take 50-60% of the price you''re paying.. If you think about it, had the publishers simply sold their games online you''d pay half the retail price.

quote: Original post by FenixDown
Well, it is ridiculous that the retailers take 50-60% of the price you''re paying.. If you think about it, had the publishers simply sold their games online you''d pay half the retail price.

I guess you''ve never worked in retail (I''ve been an admin handling monthly supplier pricelists, which meant adjusting markups on merchandise). A 50% markup is the norm (in fact many items are normally much higher, they need to be to allow clothing stores to have 50% off sales every 2 weeks) just to cover the cost of workers (expensive!), rent, utilities, advertising, etc. Selling online does not make it free either. You need to pay not only for servers and bandwidth, but for high tech warehouses where employees go around finding merchandise, wrapping it up for individual order and shipping it out. While this does give a savings of about 20-30%, you lose most/all of that when you factor in the shipping cost.

Well from what I''ve seen many online sites often offer games 40% cheaper than you can get in stores (for instance when Diablo II came out I bought it for $30 online as opposed to $50 it was in stores), and even with shipping it would still be 30% cheaper. So it would be somewhat cheaper, especially if they''d forego making a box for it which is good only for display in the store.

Games are not overpriced. Games are too cheap. Look at the price of other kinds of software (Word 2002, etc.). They easily charge you a lot more and nobody complains. Of course the fullprice games would need to be more fun to play than they are now to be worth more money. Although they are becoming better, I still believe they put too much work in the graphics and too less in the gameplay.

The normal kid doesn't buy games, he downloads the cracked fullversions. The money comes from the older guys who already earn money and don't have the time (or want to take the risk) to handle pirate sites.

And it is not working to try to compete with other products by making them cheaper. I don't buy Karl Karlssons Soccer game for 5$ if I've fallen in love with Fifa 2002.

Just my opinion.

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My companies website: www.nbsd.de
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[edited by - Jester101 on October 3, 2002 11:29:28 AM]

Or we could stop this insanity of games having to be so big they ship on a CD anyway. My latest game is 1.2MB and its good fun with 16 levels , nice graphics...
When you can download the full version from the web (like the RealGames or dexterity games) you get much reduced production costs and thus much cheaper games. hurrah!

http://www.positech.co.uk

If games weren''t pirated the sales would increase (albeit slightly) and costs could fall (maybe 5 bucks). I wouldn''t expect them to fall right away, I would suspect competition would be introduced somewhere then the overall prices would fall.

Honestly though. Why punish the game publishers/retailers/developers? Start reporting Piracy. If a force of people would go out and report every pirate site, this would do more damage than not buying anything for a week.

Sales are slow until the golden Quarter anyways (right after Thanks Giving sales go up!).

Better yet, wait a year and the game''s price will gome down by half. Another year after that and you can buy it for 10 bucks at Wal-Mart.

Games are priced according to how they will sell. Just like almost everything else. If people weren''t buying them at the current prices, the prices would come down. And I can assure you that if they would sell for more, they already would be.

As for comparing game prices to the prices of productivity software...it''s not a valid comparison. Two different types of software, with different needs to fill, and different overall markets.

DavidRM
Samu Games

quote: Original post by tls284
Video games, to make a broad generalization, are NOT overpriced. This sounds like something little Bobby and Tommy down the street started because they can''t save up the $40 to buy the latest FPS.

Eactly what I thought, but I didn''t want to get into an argument over that with anybody. I don''t really think games are overpriced, for the most part. When I sell a game for $20, I don''t think "The reason I am giving you this price is because I''m NOT ripping you off". I tend to think I can offer that price because I am in a unique position to sell into a market that the large publishers can''t reasonably cater to. I don''t have a large staff or corporate shareholders I have to make millions to support and make happy. Therefore I can settle for a much smaller slice of the pie. Doing so enables me to cut out a lot of the expenses, and thus reduce the price accordingly.

Ron Frazier
Kronos Software
www.kronos-software.com
Miko & Molly - Taking Puzzle Games to A Whole New Dimension