Do you think games are worth their current retail price?

It's hard to say, really. Some of the big devs spend alot of money on their games. But I think they could still be rich and charge less for their games, but it's a business I guess.

Here in Sweden games are even more expensive than in the US. We can pay up to $90 for a new AAA title retail. It's pretty BS. Thank god for G2A and such. :p
 
niiro17 said:
It's actually cheaper. I know some of the big company are releasing games that has too many bugs but they spend their time to make this game. Not only one made this but a crew or more than 50 people who worked at the project. And you think it's expensive? Making games is not easy. If making games are easy, I don't need to buy games, I'll just make myself a game. But I don't know how to make it so I'll buy.
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The problem is the people working on the games the designers the programmers, the coders get paid the least in the company. the worker bees get paid nothing while the execs who sit in their 5000 dollar chairs complaining about deadlines that must be met and golf all day long get paid quadruple what the people working on the games get paid. The games are so expensive and full of bugs because of the execs who actually have no idea how to create a demand, they are paid for productivity, they organize the team, they put them together and force them produce a game in a certain amount of time. Maybe if the execs took a 50 % paycut or eliminated 1 person in thier workforce and did his job we could have more affordable games.
 
Another way I look at it is how many hours can I get out of a video game for my money. If you buy a brand new game at full retail price of $60 and you put in 20 hours of gameplay, you are paying $3 an hour. That to me is excellent value for money.

Prices on games drop much quicker today than in years past. Fifa 15, for example, was released at the end of September and was on sale over the holidays for $25-$30. You also have the option of buying used video games if the price of new games are too expensive.
 
I think the assumption that games are so expensive now comes from the assumption that $60 is a lot of money. Its honestly not!
Compared to so many other forms of entertainment, $60 for a video game is a steal! Plus, a ton of Steam games are free! None are pay-to-win either!
Take those factors into account, and you have a great outlook on the prices of video games.
 
I think the assumption that games are so expensive now comes from the assumption that $60 is a lot of money. Its honestly not!
Compared to so many other forms of entertainment, $60 for a video game is a steal! Plus, a ton of Steam games are free! None are pay-to-win either!
Take those factors into account, and you have a great outlook on the prices of video games.
 
My question is when did people think buying DLC
Ridge said:
AAA games now often have just as much, or even much more content than older games did. There are open world games that you could do side missions in for almost ever. Then DLC just gives you more. A "complete" game is whatever it is meant to be decided by the people who make them. Then DLC is content on top of that. You don't have to get DLC, the game itself is a complete experience.

Plus games cost less or the same now than they used to, while production costs have skyrocketed. Modern AAA games take a goddamn army to make, and look amazing for it. How can we complain that they cost the same as sprite art even before taking inflation into account.
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Yes but you're comparing open world sandbox games, a genre of game that more or less didn't exist during that time period. The closet you got to that were RPGS and those can't compare to the modern technology of today, going from a 8 or 16bit game that were capable of some pretty impressively large games to the infinite technology we have access to now. By comparison, the games are lacking. Not counting something likeGTA or Skyrim whwere they purposely designed a giant moddable world.
 
AmenoKaji said:
My question is when did people think buying DLC


Yes but you're comparing open world sandbox games, a genre of game that more or less didn't exist during that time period. The closet you got to that were RPGS and those can't compare to the modern technology of today, going from a 8 or 16bit game that were capable of some pretty impressively large games to the infinite technology we have access to now. By comparison, the games are lacking. Not counting something likeGTA or Skyrim whwere they purposely designed a giant moddable world.
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How are current games lacking?

Fine, let's say that they are, just for the sake of argument. Want to know why these games can't be everything you want them to be? Because making modern games is super expensive, and has just been getting more expensive as time goes on. So if games are getting more expensive to make, and no additional cost is being passed on to the end consumer (since we've already established modern games cost less than SNES games did) how is this business model sustainable?

In a lot of ways for many companies it isn't. That is why so many companies are starting to lean towards higher profit margin mobile games. So if you want AAA games to keep existing they need your support. Your shitty attitude (and others like you) are slowly killing this industry.
 
There's a balance that needs to be met. We expect quality product from AAA games, but there are instances where a company gets extremely greedy and alienates their customer base because of it. I'd be happy to drop money on a game, but I want the guarantee that it'll be a complete game and that I won't be nickle and dimed to death with an inferior product. I don't want to pay money for a defective product. I'm a practical person and I earn my money through hard work.

I'm not blind to the production costs that goes into making modern games, however a lot of AAA level games spend a ton in marketing. In fact a good quarter of any production budget, Hollywood, games, whatever is marketing. Now if they scaled back the marketing budget then perhaps that expense can go into polishing the game. Then there's ridiculous deadlines, over hype and a higher push to publish games that aren't complete onto the market. All these factors combined makes people like myself rather negative towards the studios and companies in general. At this point it's no longer about making a good product but doing everything they can to try and take my money for something that's subpar.

I support what I think is quality. Nothing more and nothing less. If a company can't give that to me then I'll go elsewhere. I'm not going to spend my hard earned money on what I think are inferior products even if it comes from an AAA company. If they lose sight of that then it's nobody else's fault but theirs. Things will only exist if there's a demand for them. If people collectively show that they don't want something then the companies will have to change or die.

Expense is in the eye of the beholder and what they make of it. To me I'm willing to drop between $60-100 retail, if I feel that the game will meet my expectations and hold my interest for more than 60 hours. Let's take Diablo 3 for example. Upon release it was $60 retail, however I personally don't feel that the game's initial launch was worth the $60 and considering how people felt about it from beta/alpha testing- I wasn't going to pay that much for it. When Blizzard offered D3 for free as part of promo, it was pretty apparent that D3 wasn't going to be as good as they hyped it out to be. After a while with fixes and tweaks the game got better, but it took them a while to get to that point.

Games at full retail price are seen as expensive because if you think of it, a huge proportion of the US (40%) makes less than 20k annually in wages, I'm part of that percentage. I make $10 an hour so for me to purchase a game brand new at full retail price of $60, I'd have to work 6 hours to get that game- that's almost a full day's worth of wages. Actually more because of taxes, so let's say about 6.5. If the game only had a shelf life of 20 hours of gameplay, it's not worth it because I had dropped 6 hours of work for only 20 hours of gameplay. So cost effectiveness of hours of entertainment vs hours of work...it's just not justifiable.
 
its not the cost of the game that bothers me, its that games that are very clearly not equal say, Ninja Gaiden vs some shitty movie tie-in game are the same price.

how can they both be $60? does quality not count?
 
It's a hard question to answer. Obviously, you can't make a general statement with regard to every game out there right now. I've bought games and got hundreds of hours out of them, and I've had others that lasted me only a few days if I played them for a couple of hours each day. Those are the ones which left me feeling as if I'd paid way too much for what I'd got. In the end, I think prices are still reasonable, so long as you do your research beforehand and make sure whatever you're dropping money on is going to last you a length of time proportional to that amount of cash.
 
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Video games live up to their prices in our times than back then when I was a kid. I remember when I was growing up and one of those games cost about 60-100 dollars and that was with mainly 2 d graphics. Do not even get me started with PlayStation games as well as the accessories needed to play some of those games.
 
I'm a bit in between. I definitely feel that games are expensive, but I also know that years of work go into the project and they need to get their money back. Some games aren't worth the price they ask though. I prefer to just wait a couple months and buy them on sale. If they haven't gone on sale by then they're usually really good. :D Although, I do get irritated when I pay a hefty preorder fee and get a game full of bugs and have to wait days for it to be patched. Anymore I just wait a month after a game comes out to buy it. If it's bad, it'll be on sale already.
 
I think it's too high, especially considering that they can distribute it now for almost no cost since they can just do so digitally. However, I do understand the preemptive measure since they still have to deal with piracy and also from what I understand they usually sell consoles at a loss to profit off of the games. I think it can be a little cheaper to be more balanced and fair for both sides. Probably $40 would be a good area for brand new titles.
 
Saccharine said:
It's a hard question to answer. Obviously, you can't make a general statement with regard to every game out there right now. I've bought games and got hundreds of hours out of them, and I've had others that lasted me only a few days if I played them for a couple of hours each day. Those are the ones which left me feeling as if I'd paid way too much for what I'd got. In the end, I think prices are still reasonable, so long as you do your research beforehand and make sure whatever you're dropping money on is going to last you a length of time proportional to that amount of cash.
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This makes alot of sense.

I feel like we're partially responsible for what games should be priced really high. If we just do our research on it, read other buyers opinions and "reviews" and look at gameplay and all that other jazz we most likely won't be disappointed. And if a game sells badly at a high price, they'll most likely discount it pretty quick and if they see people buy it at a lower price and read some consumer feedback they'll adjust their games and pricing to what the masses think is acceptable, right? Why wouldn't they. They have to.

But if we just spend $60 or whatever on the new CoD on pre-order every time they won't give a crap about the content or the pricing. They'll make money either way.
 
Ridge said:
How are current games lacking?

Fine, let's say that they are, just for the sake of argument. Want to know why these games can't be everything you want them to be? Because making modern games is super expensive, and has just been getting more expensive as time goes on. So if games are getting more expensive to make, and no additional cost is being passed on to the end consumer (since we've already established modern games cost less than SNES games did) how is this business model sustainable?

In a lot of ways for many companies it isn't. That is why so many companies are starting to lean towards higher profit margin mobile games. So if you want AAA games to keep existing they need your support. Your shitty attitude (and others like you) are slowly killing this industry.
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I refuse to believe that making modern games are as super expensive(at least in the way you're processing it) purely because in the old days of game creation most devs had to make their engines to even start to design the game, in today's world they can license the engines for as low as 20 bucks(something that used to be ridiculously expensive in the 90s), and these are some pretty high powered game design engines. outside of the standard fees for the teams themselves which depends on the company/game.

The games themselves are quite sustainable with today's digital market, something that didn't exist in the days of the SNES, although we're talking about PC games, not console games. So it's not exactly that hard to make their money back if their product is actually GOOD. I only support quality triple A titles, I refuse to support companies with repeated lack luster game releases, there are too many mega gaming corps that will gladly sell people like yourself and other sheep game titles based purely off the title of the game alone and you will eat it up. And that sets the tones for what they can get away with, which is providing you a game, stripped of its content, repackaged as a 60-80 DLC or some form of paywall, and even then providing you with a game that isn't fully developed or ridden of bugs because they are already working on the sequel to that game to pull more money from you.

I have backed plenty of indie games for a price less than the majority of retail games, and I have received far superior products in return. When it comes to only a handful of titles being worth their price, and the rest being a mislead piece of shit, there's a problem. I have willingly paid as much as $300 investment into games at their launch, but as someone mentioned before you look over at something like CoD, people eat it up, as the price slowly raises and the game quality is inconsistent. Some of this is due to some suit that pushes a game out of the door before its ready, in most cases the devs are lazy.
 
I don't have time to keep arguing the same points over and over in this thread. We are just going in ridiculous circles repeating ourselves at this point.

I'll just roll my eyes at the igorance in this thread and continue my live. Agree to disagree.
 
This question obviously depends on how much time you're going to spend playing the game, and what game you're talking about. I saw Call of Duty Advanced Warfare in a shop the other day and I thought the game was expensive but worth it. When I look at mobile games it's a different matter. Most mobile games cost a few bucks, but I will still not buy them because there are so many other fun games that are available for free.
 
Making games cost money, a lot of money that is. hey pour millions of dollar into a game hoping that they would get the return back.

Not back to your question. Is $60 a lot to pay for a game? It depends on the game. If you are talking about Call of Duty or BF series, yes they are expensive. On the other hand, there are games like GTA V and Skyrim with tons of content, which are totally worth $60. Heck, I would happily pay $120 for these type of games.
 
Millions of dollars are not poured into a game. that is the big misconception, we think millions of dollars are paid to create a game, but in today's world its more close to maybe a few hundred thousand. but once they publish the game, they sell it in a few different ways, then if it is a PC game they even have continuous add ons that take developer minutes to create and they charge 5 to 20 dollars per item or upgrade and they sell those and the games over and over for eternity. To be fair as time pushes forward the price of that specific game decreases, however they are still making a huge profit, as the overhead they spent developing the game is paid for in the first month of its release, everything after that is just profit in their pockets.
 
cyberpinoy said:
Millions of dollars are not poured into a game. that is the big misconception, we think millions of dollars are paid to create a game, but in today's world its more close to maybe a few hundred thousand. but once they publish the game, they sell it in a few different ways, then if it is a PC game they even have continuous add ons that take developer minutes to create and they charge 5 to 20 dollars per item or upgrade and they sell those and the games over and over for eternity. To be fair as time pushes forward the price of that specific game decreases, however they are still making a huge profit, as the overhead they spent developing the game is paid for in the first month of its release, everything after that is just profit in their pockets.
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To date, there have been 38 games that have cost $50 million or more to create and develop. The most expensive game based on development alone was Star Wars The Old Republic which cost $200 million to develop. Destiny holds the title for most expensive game to develop and market with $500 million being invested.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop
 
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Actual cost and estimated cost are 2 different things, If I take your code and make a few changes to it, follow your financials and see where you spent 500,000 to create what you did , does that mean I spent the same 500,000 to copy and paste your code, or that the code used was worth 500,000. Thats right just because a number reflects a valuer does not mean the gaming industry spent that actual value in creating that game :) It just simply means that at some point somewhere some company spent X amount of dollars to produce a section of the game that was used in creating the game you are buying. They don't pay for the same code over and over, but they do use that value to estimate the cost of creating games.
 
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