I know the economy is bad and all, but the discounted games this weekend were ridiculous! Everywhere I turned, there was a game calling my name. I ended up picking up Left 4 Dead 2 from Amazon for $35, but other than that I managed to stay strong. There were, however, tons of deals I skipped out on that I almost pulled the trigger on:
Assassin’s Creed $10
Dragon Age: Origins $35
DJ Hero $95 (with $40 Amazon Credit)
FIFA 10 $35
Guitar Hero 5 $30
Guitar Hero: Metallica $25
Marvel Ultimate Alliance: 2 $30
Resident Evil 5 $20
FYI, some of those deals are still out there as I am writing this. Is it me, or were there not these kinds of deals last year? For some reason, all the big retailers are slashing their prices in an attempt to move units – maybe they’re not meeting their sales projections or something. What’s even better is that Amazon is matching all of these deals. Now, if I see a deal at Best Buy or Walmart, I know I don’t need to make a trip because Amazon will match the deal within a day or two. When the big boys are competing, it can only be good for the consumer. What a great time to be a gamer!
Anyway, the reason I managed to resist all these games is because I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed 2 non-stop all weekend. They’ve added some “challenge” levels that I find completely addicting. Between that and wanting to prestige in Modern Warfare 2, I didn’t really need to get in on those deals. Plus, if they’re going to offer all those deals now, I can be confident that they’ll be there again in the future.
Let the madness continue!
surprisingly, i didn’t end up buying anything from Amazon this past weekend. this is because – i basically had everything I wanted that they put on sale already! (even DJ Hero, which I bought from Amazon when it was $110 with the $40 credit -_-)
the only game I wish a retailer would put on sale is Grand Theft Auto 4 – Episodes from Liberty City. That’s practically the last “to buy” game I need to pick up on my 2009 checklist. come on Amazon, don’t let me down…I got lots of credit to burn!
to me the $60 price tag for video games is the breaking point. i mean, it’s just software, how expensive is that? with technology becoming cheaper and cheaper, why is software getting more expensive? production cost? i don’t know and don’t really care but paying retail price is just not worth it to most people i think and consumers are showing retailers that by not buying and waiting until these crazy sales or buying used (hence the big push for stores to have a trade-in dept.)
I feel as though we had this discussion before. Video games stayed at $50 for the longest time, and only went up when the media became more expensive (N64).
Sounds like a consulting question. The production budgets are much larger for video games now than they used to be. This is a result of having larger teams work on marketing, art, modeling, sound, programming and hardware. Each person you add to a team adds their salary * the number of years on the project to the budget. If you ever take a look at the credits at the end of the video game, you start to realize how big these teams really are.
Factor in publishing, distribution, retail markup, possible licensing fees, risk margin for potential losses, and $60 isn’t really all that much. Should ALL games cost $60? Probably not. There’s a little bit of psychology involved in the price, but I don’t see a problem with $60. Just be sure you’re going to get your money’s worth out of those $60.
Capcom recently talked about it:
http://www.eventhubs.com/news/2009/nov/11/capcom-price-developing-games/
eeyore, i think we have, but maybe LargeLobster wasn’t visiting the site back then.
in any case, i know developers in the video game industry and to be honest, the poor development studios that actually make the game see very little of that $60. the money goes to all the things that eeyore mentioned and i’m hoping that games move closer and closer to digital to eliminate costs associated with publishing, distrution, and retail. maybe then we’ll see cheaper prices or at least the developers get appreciated a little more for the amount of sleepless nights they put into making good games.
it’s weird though that games are all set to the $60 price when they are certainly not all worth it. if you think about a game like world of warcraft, which charges a monthly fee of $15 and has over 10 million players, the game has the content to keep people coming back. if they’re paying almost $300 a year to play it, apparently it’s worth it.
activision took a lot of flak for deciding to overprice modern warfare 2 over in the UK, and while that sucks for the gamers, it was good business strategy. modern warfare 2′s multiplayer will have people playing the game for months or even years, and if it costs the fans more, many people would still probably buy it. that’s probably why activision is trying to figure out some way to monetize the game. anything with online that has you coming back to play often like even street fighter iv has potential to be worth more than $60.
and then of course are the games that can certainly be worth less than $60, which is practically any single player game that you can beat in a few hours, no matter how critically raved they are. when you compare batman: arkham asylum with modern warfare 2, what is their true value? i would argue that neither is worth $60 – batman would probably fall closer to $20, while modern warfare 2 would be worth more than $100. just walk into any gamestop and look at the used game shelves – you’ll see stacks of recently released used single player games, but you’ll have a hard time finding even one recently released used multiplayer game.
of course, then there’s ppl like us – adults with lots of disposable income that buy both single and multiplayer games at release. but if i were really trying to watch my wallet, i’d invest in multiplayer games to get more bang for my buck…at least, while they’re still free to play on consoles…
Hopefully if everything goes digital there will still be steam type deals, since without hard copies sales might be less frequent (no physical shelf space to clear out).
As for monetizing MW, bah. That’s for another post.