Leveling Down

Is Left 4 Dead a $60 game? Or is it really only worth half that?

Recently, news hit the gaming industry that Valve’s Left 4 Dead half price sale ($24.99) on the PC was met with remarkable success. Gabe Newell, one of the co-founders at Valve, remarked that it was an experiment that surprised them: when Left 4 Dead went on sale for half price, it actually made more money for Valve than the initial launch window of the game when it sold for its full price. This is pretty unprecedented, because when you think about it, who ended up buying it for $24.99? Didn’t we all already buy it back in November? I’ve never taken an economics class, but I’ve heard people state that according to economics theory, if a game is selling ridiculously higher with a reduced price then perhaps the original price is too high.

Today’s discussion topic between cmfl3x and me revolve around the pricing of games and what we feel they are worth.

I’d like to start this discussion off with a question: How do you decide what games are worth buying at full retail price? When I finally got my 360, it was a bit of a shock to me to find out that new games cost 60 dollars instead of 50. In fact every time new games prices have been raised I’ve been shocked, though I probably shouldn’t be.

Personally, I buy games at full retail price for two reasons: 1) I am so excited about a game that I can’t wait or 2) I think I will get enough value out of it to justify paying full price. I don’t calculate value precisely or anything, but I kind of just estimate how many hours I will play the game. Usually if I can get 20 hours out of a game I don’t mind paying full price if it’s a game I’m really interested in. Of course, the trick is figuring out whether I will actually play the game that much (especially since I’m not the completionist you are).

The weird thing is, I didn’t want to buy Left 4 Dead until it was 40 dollars. In fact, I still don’t recommend that people buy it unless it’s 40 or less. In reality, I think I’ve put in 100 hours or so into L4D, so even at full retail price I would have more than gotten my money’s worth. Yet for some reason because there is no single player game I don’t feel comfortable buying it for 60. I’m sure I won’t put that many hours into Halo Wars, but I already have that game on preorder. I think I’m willing to pay retail for it because I’m excited about it and I am loyal to the franchise (even though this game isn’t Bungie). I’m pretty sure everyone has strange buying rules like this. What are yours?

I’ll share with you (and the readers of this blog) a little secret: I rarely, if ever, buy a game at full retail price these days. Street Fighter IV was an exception, because I felt that I needed to have a copy of it to take to the party I went to over the weekend, and I couldn’t wait for it to go on sale. But it wasn’t actually until maybe the last year or so that I stopped buying games on launch day for $60. After seeing several games sitting in my backlog pile unopened that I paid $60 for (Eternal Sonata and Ace Combat 6 come to mind), I realized that it was just silly for me to continue buying games at launch when I had a backlog queue already.

I decided to switch over to an “only buy games when they’re on sale” mentality, and have now adhered to realistically only buying games when they’re in the $20-$40 range, rather than the $60 sticker price. Even following that mentality, I’ve had a tough time preventing my backlog from continuing to bloom because believe it or not, it’s not difficult to find games for that price.

While I have the disposable income to pay $60 per game if I want to, I’m now in a situation where I feel it is more practical that I don’t, considering how many games I have yet to touch. Games are a depreciating asset, so if you don’t need to buy one right away, your best bet is to wait for the sales, price drops, etc. Each game will start at $60, go on sale for $40-$50, then drop in price to $40, then more sales at the $20-$30 range, before dropping to $30 and finally $20. Depending on how popular the game is, it can take weeks or months. Maybe I’ll attribute it to the wisdom that comes with age, but if you’re patient enough, you’ll save more in the long run.

Of course, the big argument against waiting for games to become $20 titles is that nowadays, gaming is a very social thing. If your buddies are playing a multiplayer game but you’re waiting until it drops in price before joining them, you may miss the boat completely since they may have already moved onto something else when you’ve just bought the game. Or even if the game in question is just a single player game, it’s nice to be able to talk to friends about it and what both of you are experiencing in the game – sort of like a book club. Even today, look at this: we’re writing for a blog based on games. I’m sure the readers would prefer to read about our thoughts on Street Fighter IV and Halo Wars rather than Perfect Dark Zero, a game that was released years ago. Older games are perhaps just less relevant – so while you save money waiting for them to drop in price, you also lose out on the social element of the gaming industry flock. There are exceptions to this, however: people will continue to play Call of Duty 4 even after its sequel comes out. It’s because the game is just that good and for that reason its price has dropped very, very slowly. With game as high quality as that, you have to sometimes just bite the bullet and pay the price.

So as you can see, I have sort of a balanced view of waiting until the game is dirt cheap and getting a game right away to stay caught up with the “society of gaming”.

Here’s the order I use to determine whether to buy a game at retail price or not:

1. Will it drop in price or go on sale a lot soon?
If I feel that game is not a mass market AAA game, I’ll most likely skip out on it because I know that one week can mean the difference between $60 and $40. Ubisoft games are especially notorious for dropping to $40 very quickly after the release date, so I almost never buy a Ubisoft game at release nowadays.

2. Interesting and appealing multiplayer
With games being as social as they are, I look for some sort of multiplayer hook to keep the game still going long after I’ve completed the single player. However, I would still rather have no multiplayer at all than to have a game with throwaway multiplayer. I’ll gladly pay full price at launch for a game if my friends and I agree that this is the next multiplayer game we want to devote many hours to. After all, you can’t really put a price on having fun with friends!

3. Single player length
If the game doesn’t have multiplayer or has bad multiplayer, does the single player length make up for it? I don’t want to pay $60 for a game that I’ll be done with in 5 hours.

4. Polish
Does the game impress me? Do I feel like I’ll really enjoy the game or will I feel like it was some sort of rushed project that was simply thrown out the door to steal my money?

5. Do I like the publisher/developer?
Sometimes, when evaluating the first four parts, I still have a tough time deciding if I want to buy the game. That’s when I turn to the publisher/developer of the game. If it’s one that I like, it may be all that I need to push me into buying the game. I tell myself, if people like me aren’t buying this game at launch, the publisher or developer may not have enough funding to create another game that I will love. So sometimes I will just pay full price on a game when I want to support the companies behind it.

Here are some specific examples to adhere to my “decisioning criteria”: Gears of War 2, Street Fighter IV, the future release of Resident Evil 5, and Left 4 Dead.

I held off on buying Gears of War 2 at launch because I wasn’t the biggest fan of the first game and felt that multiplayer in Gears of War 1 (and 2) were not enjoyable. $60 was not enough for me to just play through the single player campaign, so I waited to get it on the cheap.

I wasn’t planning on buying Street Fighter IV at launch, but ended up buying it at $60 because I was going to a party to play it with friends. Had I not gone to the party, I probably wouldn’t have bought it last week since I figured I could wait for it to go on sale. But yeah, being able to play with friends for me is often the easiest way I will pay retail price on a game, since I tend not to skimp on cash when it comes to friends.

I thought Resident Evil 4 was the best game of last generation. But after playing the Resident Evil 5 demo, I’m not too excited about it. I even read somewhere that it’s only an 8 hour game. Is it really worth the $60 then when it has no multiplayer? Of course, I do like Capcom though, but don’t want to support them for releasing lower quality products. So Resident Evil 5 is tough for me. I still don’t know if I will buy it at launch or not, so I’ll just wait and see.

Now here’s an interesting thing – I bought Left 4 Dead on the 360 when it was on sale last year, and I still ended up buying the PC version of the game for $25 earlier this month. I had already sold my 360 version of the game (having gotten all the Achievements on it) but why would I buy the game again? Part of me suspects that it’s the branding that the game has earned – I really enjoyed it on the 360, and with it being on sale for so cheap, it was an impulse buy to pick it up again. Have I even really played it since buying it? Nope. But just the sale price alone got me to think it was worth paying for. Why?! That is the psychological question I am trying to figure out even now.

I think we always buy games that we have strong ties to. Like, I think I’ve purchased Full Throttle and Monkey Island 2 3 times each, which if you think about it is kind of ridiculous. If I ever lost my Starcraft CD and saw it on sale I’d probably buy that again too. To follow up on your games as books analogy (I’m sure people love that!), there are certain books that I have multiple copies of for various reasons. Sometimes there are newer, nicer editions, sometimes I just want to continue supporting that author, and sometimes I lend out a copy and then want to get one for myself to read. It’s all a bit ridiculous but it happens. For games, I think it’s the same thing, like I own Final Fantasy IV in multiple iterations, I’ll eventually pick up Chrono Trigger again, and on Virtual Console on Wii I’ve rebought like a million games (Punch Out!). So for Left 4 Dead, I think your nostalgia just kicked in a little early maybe.

To respond to your not buying on launch day, I wish I had that kind of discipline. I’m just such a sucker, I see trailers, I start reading reviews as soon as they come out and then get so amped for certain games that I can’t stop myself from buying them on launch day. Case in point, Street Fighter IV I promised myself I’d stay away from, but I only managed to wait one day after launch to buy it (though I don’t regret it).

I’m actually afraid game prices are going to go up though. XBLA games seem to be 10 dollars on average now, whereas a year ago it felt like there were a lot more 5 dollar games. Publishers are squeezing dollars out with like 80 dollar collector’s editions, and like we said in our previous DLC for something, our hobby is becoming more and more expensive. So I think it’s wise to come up with gameplans in terms of purchasing games.

I try not to keep a backlog because I know I’ll never get to it, so that’s one way I keep from spending too much money. Another thing I’ve started doing is trading single player games with friends, even though it costs like 3 bucks to ship we save a lot of money that way. That’s potentially 57 bucks in our pocket.

Don’t feel guilty about succumbing to buying on launch day. Publishers like EA base estimates for their sales based on that first week or month of sales alone, as that’s where the lion’s share of sales are for a game. The industry thrives because the marketing and all that has most of us buying games on launch day. I’m more of an outlier in that sense where I’ve stopped buying games at launch, but the norm is definitely buying as soon as it comes out.

With today’s economy in sort of a state of turmoil and all, I think publishers will be hard pressed to actually raise the price of games. It’s been established already from the getgo that 360/PS3 titles will go for $60 and Wii titles will go for $50. For any of that to be changed (i.e. 360/PS3 jump to $70 and Wii jump to $60) there would be a lot of pissed off people. It’s just not realistic to bump the price on retail games up like that. With XBLA, it’s another story though. I’m not happy that Braid and Castle Crashers were actually charged more than the typical price of $10 (at least I thought that was typical). But I don’t really buy XBLA titles anyway, so I’m not going to comment too much on that.

I do feel like we see more and more limited Collector’s Editions for games these days – more bloated, more expensive, and on titles that I would argue should not “garner” Collector’s Editions. Take for example Saints Row 2 or Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway. Do both of those games honestly warrant Collector’s Editions? Do they have a large enough fanbase? Of course, it doesn’t matter these days because the little trinkets or “making of DVDs” cost the publishers almost nothing to make so earn a decent chunk of change off of these more expensive versions.

Even for games that I could see being justified as having collector’s editions, like Fallout 3 and Street Fighter 4 – it’s no longer a $70 collector’s edition, but an $80 one. The Resident Evil 5 collector’s edition is a freaking $90. What the heck? More and more expensive special editions. At least the regular edition still exists. I rarely every buy special editions these days, as I’m really just interested in playing the game, but to each his own. It’s completely out of wack that the figurine you’re putting your desk is costing you half the price of the game itself. But, hey you can’t really put a price tag on collecting items can you? I just hope they don’t push special editions to $100…

I think going with your backlog-less approach and paying full retail for every game still works. Sometimes I wonder if that’s possibly even a cheaper option than what I do, which is buy any game that I find a good price on that I’m mildly interested in. Then I get stuck with all sorts of mediocre titles that I didn’t pull full retail on, but aren’t necessarily the most enjoyable games to play either. I guess the best game buying experience to be had is to buy a AAA game as soon as possible for the cheapest price possible. Frequently all three don’t line up – you may not be able to get a AAA game on launch day on sale, but maybe you can find a B- title at launch on sale. Or you may be able to get a AAA title a couple weeks later at a discount, but you gave up some time in order to get it at a discount.

Here’s an interesting psychological test I started applying to my own game buying habits when things got out of line and I was buying many more games than I could actually play. Simply ask yourself, if every single game out now and all games coming out were all free, what would you play first? The games that you would want to play first most likely have higher value, so it could simply be more justifiable for you to pay that extra cost to play them sooner.

If Resident Evil 5 and Final Fantasy XIII both came out and were free, which one would I want to play first? Probably Final Fantasy XIII – hence it has more value to me so I can sort of mentally value Resident Evil 5 as being less than a $60 title. You could kind of do this with all games, scaling their price from $1-$60 based on what you want to play most as being a $60 title, versus what you want to play least as being $1 – or even free.

Luckily for us, spring will be a relatively slow season so we can catch up on some of the games in our backlog. I do wish companies would experiment more with their pricepoints like Valve did with Left 4 Dead – I really do believe they could make money if they had games at the right prices. The problem with the gaming industry is that it costs so much to develop now it’s tough for companies to take that risk.

In this economy, I think we’ll get deals earlier, so hopefully I can learn to practice some patience and wait a couple weeks after the AAA titles hit to save some money. Though I’m still waiting to find a deal on Mirror’s Edge, I think I waited too long for that one…

Mirror’s Edge was pretty enjoyable. EA drops the prices on their games very often – so if you wait a bit longer Mirror’s Edge will go down to $40, then $30 like Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 did.

You know, I wonder if we even successfully talked about whether or not games were really worth their $60 price tag. Seems like I sort of went off on a tangent there talking about why I don’t buy games at launch for full price and my decisioning criteria. But perhaps that is valid information to think about when trying to value an upcoming game. Value is in the eye of the buyer – because while I mentioned above that I would rather play Final Fantasy XIII than Resident Evil 5 if both were placed in front of me, someone else might not feel the same way. Thus Resident Evil 5 would be worth more to them.

I guess the next time you’re going out there to buy a game, maybe think about what we talked about here today. “Is this a game I have to have now? Or can I wait a month and get it for half the price?” If you take cmfl3x’s approach of buying the big name games on day 1 and play through every game one at a time, it’s certainly viable since you are paying that “early adopter” cost but the resale value will be higher. Or you could go with my approach, and make a list of all the games you’re interested in buying, but setting specific price points before you are willing to buy them. I don’t always get to play the newest games right away, but I certainly have many older ones to choose from. Of course, their resale values suck but then I have less pressure to try to finish a game so I can sell it. I would say both cmfl3x and I are pretty happy with our game buying habits. (Although, my backlog of 30+ games is crying out right now.) See you next time!

Be Sociable, Share!

•