right on :D

i am willing to pay 2 or 3 euro (at most) EXTRA for a game without DRM
maybe a bit more depends on the game , and how much i like it.

DRM games?
free tot max2 bucks is what i am willing to spend on it

DRM loaded casual games: biggest example of such is: Bigfishgames
10,000 of games all nice and fully loaded with DRM
sure i wanna buy it and only be able to activate them on 1 machine at 10 cents i want to : not a cent more
So basically i am saying: i dont want DRM

You see, the developers are fraid that without DRM the same game will be used by gazillion people
well, i buy only for myself, i will never share or give away anything i bought, i rather hammer it to pieces with a sledge hammer or put a blowtorch on it :D

Whats mine is mine .... no one gets a piece of it :D
To bad the big DRM boys dont get that....
I alread bought 200 casual games (HOG) on cd, yes, 1 HOG per disc, so yes 200 plus cd/dvd
and some 100 more games on dvd (best of collections)
All DRM free, and noone gets his hands on them.... i rather burn them down.
Same goes for my DVD movies :D

Something curious to mention. I just finished watching the One Upon Atari film(s); One particular section caught my attention for this forum. I'll paraphrase the quote: To most people if you take something that costs you a dollar to make, you turn around and sell it for two dollars and you make a profit. But Atari took something that cost three dollars to produce and sold it for twenty or thirty dollars. Back then that was gutsy...

Safe to say it started heavily inflated, and the costs of making the games are just catching up.

Why would I need perspective? Without taking this silly "perspective" thing into account, and instead looking at my wallet and how much money I am taking out of it, I can say it's a pretty large amount of money for a game.
Thankfully, no one should ever pay full price for these. Eventually, $60 PC titles become same price as the $15 indies. And the $15 indies? Hundreds of them come hungry to the bundles to compete for the pennies they'll get, because there's just way too many indies asking for attention.
Just wait, and you don't have to pay too much at all.

Inflation refers to the change in the purchasing power of currency, not the change in the value of goods.

In most economies, currency inflates, one dollar or rupee or baht or yen buys less now then it did ten years ago. That's just how our economies work. A ten dollar dinner today in the US isn't much, wheras when I was a child, that was a price for a moderately fancy meal. It's hard to measure exactly accurately, but the cost of goods in general trends upwards in an economy-wide linked way independent from the specific changes in the costs relevant to the exact thing.

Therefore it is accurate to say that games today are far cheaper than they were when I was a child. In the 1980s, games would come on the market at 30 bucks typically, sometimes as much as 50. In today's dollars in the US, that's well over 100 dollars. Therefore it is accurate to point out that games today, in light of inflation, are far far cheaper than they were 30 years ago.

They aren't cheaper to make either. In 1980, the cost of 1 programmer and possibly 1 artist, and maybe a little bit of time of some people who write manuals and do box art was far less than the cost of a modern game dev team.

The obvious thing that changed was the flexible cost that it takes to make each sale (in digital downloads this is far lower than it has ever been before), and the quantity of customers, which is higher than it has ever been before.

So let me see in 2001, we in Germany got the Euro and the Deutsche Mark went down the drain, the conversion rate at that time was € 1 = 1,87 DM.

A new pc game at that time did cost between 45-60 DM. I do not remember exactly how much the games in Euro did cost at that time, but I think to remember after the conversion it was between € 20 - € 30 (correct me if I am wrong).

Nowadays a new pc game costs easily about € 50 - € 60, you have just to ask if the wages have gone up accordingly...PC Games in Germany do cost a lot more than they used to cost. Inflation aside, when we use the old conversion rate a pc game costs now about 112,50 DM.

Well, I'll agree about the "not complaining" and just waiting for a promo if a game is too expansive for you. I don't have a problem with them milking as much money as they can from people willing to spend that much, but I have a very clear idea of how much I am willing to pay for this update of the game and it is not 20$.

A couple of points there:

1) Icewind Dale EE is a relatively small expansion of a pretty old game. The original game itself retails (appropriately) at 10$.

2) 20 years ago, 10$ games (usually at least 1-2 years old) and game packs that amounted to 5$ of less per game existed. You had less selection in terms of bargains than you have now, but the point is that it's not a new phenomenon. I'd know because I was buying PC games back then and I was on a much tighter budget than I am now.

3) Economy blows here. People don't have as much discretionary income as they used to. Wages stagnate and don't keep up with inflation, jobs offerings are scarser and job security is practically non-existent in the private sector. Middle-class erosion is a very real issue and will probably end up being the death of our economy, because the economy runs on the middle-class. The elite likes to portray welfare as the root of all evil, but the truth of the matter is that if you can't provide the vast majority of people with a decent job, then minimum guaranteed income with a controlled fixed price on basic necessities would be the best thing that could happen to our economy atm.

People talk about inflation as if it was an horrible thing. Crazy inflation is bad (you don't want to make 100$ today and lose 50% of its value tomorrow), but some inflation is a good thing, because it devalues money that just sits there and is not put to some use.

The only thing about inflation is that wages need to be properly adjusted for it (currently a lot of bad faith from employers there) and of course, it won't safeguard against some problems (like investments in things that will provide good revenue, but won't generate social utility).

I haven't seen the film, so I might not be getting it right without the context, but it sounds like bullshit to me. When you create something you factor into the price the work it took to create the thing (as well as any other expenses). When you create something that is expected to sell in large quantities at a low price, the expenses are typically much higher than the cost, and it's only the volume which offsets this. So unless in this context Atari served as a distributor and had nothing to do with creation, promotion, etc., that evaluation is unwarranted.

(I'm not saying that Atari didn't set prices higher than it could have, assuming certain sale numbers, but I don't think it would be totally out of line with other content industries of the time.)
I'm guessing you're far away from retirement age, but unless you want to have to look for a job when you're 80 you should stop thinking about "money that just sits there" as a bad thing.

15$-20$ is my cap I'd pay if I really, really like what I'm seeing. The type of games I like enough to fork that amount in tend to have a lot of replay value (ex: FTL) so they aren't short games.

Overall, I don't need the game to have 100 devs' worth of content, I just need the content that I have to hit the right buttons in my head.

15-20 EUR, kinda like Magnitus, just converted using the PROPER conversion rate. Right? Right?

At any rate, I do not differenciate between the game being indie or AAA, I pick by it being worth the price - interestingly enough, the most money I have spent lately was on Vanishing of Ethan Carter (which doesn't work properly on my computer, grr. But I do feel good about supporting such games.) and then on Battlemage: Lichdom, which turned out to be brilliant. And no AAA titles. Because there don't seem to be any which I would want all that much, aside from Shadow of Mordor and the new Dragon Age, both of which are far too expensive at full price.

I don't particularily care about replayability or length of the game tho.

I don't know, I mean... They did have to rewrite the engine to make the thing working properly on iOS devices, and taken by their own merit, those games are easily worth 20 bucks. And when somebody doesn't want whatever they offer, they can still get the originals for PC, which work perfectly fine. I suppose I would feel better about such purchase if I automatically got iOS and Android (is there one?) versions of the games, that would be really cool.

I do like the trend of re-releasing awesome old-ish strategy games tho, just got Rise of Nations and it's as brilliant as ever.

A few years ago I'd pay even 60€ for a game that was a hot seller. Nowadays with all the crisis 15€ is the maximum I can spare without cutting other expenses (FYI 15€ is equal to $18.5 where I live)
But the price isn't the only thing that matters for me when choosing a game. I usually check out youtube videos to see if the gameplay is nice. I also like games that have full 3D enviroment, good voicing and a director that is not the same person as the developer. After that I look at the price (and usually despair......)

One wonders if these companies will regret how much they have devalued games for so many people. Time will tell. For me $60 for a new "AAA" RPG, assuming it's a good game, is super cheap. $20 is my sweet spot for an indie classic style game. I do think Wasteland 2 and Pillars of Eternity are a little overpriced, but I haven't played them yet either.

Well, Atari was a publisher/distributor, and they had programmers make the games. How much each cartridge actually cost couldn't have been all that high per cartridge, and history has shown with the creation of Activision that there was a lot of money being made that the programmers weren't given a second thought about for how well they were pushing the company forward. Sales numbers of like their lowest game was 40,000 units, while something more popular like pacman was 3 million units, in a matter of a few months after release.

What's curious is after Atari gave the big middle finger to one of the programmers calling them a dime a dozen and that they were replaceable nobodys, they left the company and started Activision and quickly made as good of games or better than Atari had. When Atari realized the subset of skills for programming the Atari took years to get good enough as well as the number that could actually make games for their 2600 was a handful of people. They realized real quick and offered an incentive program (so they wouldn't all leave and join Activision or elsewhere) paying the programmers for how well their games did after; The amount they got in 'royalties' was probably about 0.5% of the actual profits, but that equated to hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions in some cases.

If you consider the actual costs involved in making the games, the programmers said they were probably paid... $30k a year? And they have to produce a game within 6 months, so that's $15k per game to produce by the programmer. Not a lot of overhead for games selling tens of thousands of copies...

Seeing as Atari started the gaming industry back in the 70's, if those prices were selling, anyone else joining the industry would charge similarly.

I don't really have much for references as most of it comes from a wiki page and Once Upon Atari, but a list of sales figures going over from Atari's entries should say quite a bit.... VGCharts



As long as this is a huge post; What would a 2600 'RockFighters' game be like I wonder? It's a small tidbit from the videos...

To be fair, for good RPGs, that would be a price I'd be willing to pay. However, pretty much all major companies do all in their power to disinterest me in their games at that price - the only time the price is actually worth paying is at release, however, at release, you will probably get a buggy and incomplete experience. And when you give devs time to fix the damn thing up and release some more content for it, you might as well wait a bit for the inevitable sale and DLC bundle. And that's not a new trend of devaluation, that's what I'd do 10 years ago as well - there were sales in retail stores you know, just not quite as deep.

That's actually incorrect. When determining unit pricing the key factor is the projected sales numbers at different price points, and the combination of price and expected sales that results in the greatest profit. Fixed costs are only a consideration with respect to whether the overall business venture is a viable one.