Mafwek: Well, AAA titles will cost 100$ without discount in near future, 70% sale will be close to 25$.
real.geizterfahr: I'm not complaining about games being too expensive (games are effin cheap nowadays, compared to what I paid for games like Wing Commander III and IV or for NES games). And I don't really care about the release price of a game. That's something the free market will take care of (if games become too expensive, people will stop buying them and they'll become cheaper again). I know that publishers are complaining about higher and higher production costs. But maybe they should stop making every game a huge open world title, that's always three times bigger (and emptier, more boring and more stuffed with completely pointless "Get me X pieces of Y" quests) than the latest open world title from their competitors -.- No, what I'm talking about is the prices of "older" games (a year after release).
When Steam became popular we developed something like a "sale culture". People don't look at prices anymore and buy games only based on the "X% off" on the front page of their favorite store. Have a look at Steam's forums during the big sales. People constantly bitch about games like Call of Duty because they never get a better discount than 50%. Or Shovel Knight... The highest discount for Shovel Knight was 33% and people are complaining about this "lame discount" all the time.
In my eyes those are fair
discounts. I can either buy those games at full price or wait for a sale and
save a bit of money. I won't get totally ripped off. Now have a look at games like this Sherlock Holmes one. €45 vs €13,50 is totally nuts. There isn't even a choice wether to get it on a sale or to wait and buy it at some other point. There should be a big fat warning sign on the store page NOT to buy this game when it's not on sale, because the regular price is just there to give the publisher the possibility to do 70% off sales. It's not the real price of the game and they don't even expect anyone to pay that much for their game. It's just the base for the "huge discount" we gamers love. Same goes for the
Sam & Max games. €17 each? I paid 3,50 (or was it even €3?) for each of them. That's €10 for all three games vs. €17 for one of them. At least their series discount gives a pretty fair price.
Nah, sorry, I just hate crap like this. With prices like this you can basically pull the plug of the servers and only open your store for the big sales. It's stupid. That's one of the things I loved about the old GOG. When they were still young and naive they tried to fight those huge discounts. Their games were either 5.99 or 9.99 and 50% off was the best you could hope for. But that battle was lost from the very beginning. Publishers won't give you a "better" price than Steam gets and Steamers love their huge discounts, no matter what this means for the base prices. So GOG had to adapt themselves to this...
Well, average wage in Croatia is around 1000 $ a month. We can't exactly buy every new game at full price, regardless of what it is. And GOG is unfortunately powerless before the publishers when the newer games are in question.
