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General discussion (archive)sence when is 10 bucks over priced?(113 posts)(113 posts)
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Posted March 09, 2012
sence when is 10 bucks over priced?

sence GOG started selling BOG

:)
Posted March 09, 2012
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Magnitus: I just saw Hannah the other day for 9$. I almost bought it (liked most of the movie, felt so so about the ending). It's a bit less than a year old.
I didn't think it was humanly possible to enjoy that trainwreck of a movie, to be honest :P.

Fight scenes weren't too bad, though.
Posted March 09, 2012
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AFnord: I'm absolutely not saying that I want to go back to a time when games were far more expensive, but I do wonder what will happen to the (PC) market in the long run, if this goes on.
I think it will just find the equilibrium, one way or another. Game development costs are pushed down even more, some wannabe developers and publishers will exit the market in disgust and go back to flipping burgers, while some others continue...

The discussion seems to circle mostly on who is to blame for the dwindling PC game prices. IMHO it is because there are more and more commercial (indie) game makers nowadays, mostly thanks to the easy digital distribution. Part of the "problem" is that there is no restricted shelf space to sell older games either, like GOG demonstrates.

In the retail-only times, the restricted shelf space made sure there are only n number of games being sold at the same time. With digital distribution, there is no such restriction.

So, if we wanted to go back to the times of all new games costing fixed 50€ (no matter how much gameplay they offered or what were the development costs), it would mean most of the current PC game development teams or small publishers couldn't have ever even entered the market to try to compete with other developers/publishers. More competition means lower prices.

The old big publishers are the losers in this game (and the few old indie developers like the Spiderweb guy who is now miffed there are other indie developers out there in a price war with him), while the new players who finally have a chance to try to get their place in the sun are the potential winners.
Post edited March 09, 2012 by timppu
Posted March 09, 2012
Actually nobody talked about the increasing number of customers. Probably many, many more people nowadays play computer games and buy them than 10 or 20 years before. So the average price per unit sold can indeed go down without having less money for production. Of course production costs have soared too. And this while productivity of game makers surely increased also using this modern fenzy programming tools and more...
Posted March 09, 2012
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Trilarion: Actually nobody talked about the increasing number of customers. Probably many, many more people nowadays play computer games and buy them than 10 or 20 years before. So the average price per unit sold can indeed go down without having less money for production. Of course production costs have soared too. And this while productivity of game makers surely increased also using this modern fenzy programming tools and more...
All fine points and basically if someone who makes games is bitching about cost versus profitability they're probably lying to you (one only needs listen to the stockholder meeting notes to see this). It's apples and oranges (probably with turtles all the way down). However, the point stands that costs are dropped dramatically on PC in a far quicker manner than they used to and something is causing this phenomenon. A lot of the statements above are probably a pretty accurate assessment of why its happening.
Posted March 09, 2012
$10 is overpriced for a gog because any other distributor would sell a game of similar age for much less.
Posted March 09, 2012
sence when is 10 bucks over priced?

Since I only had 2 bucks left!
Posted March 10, 2012
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AFnord: And in regards to the indie situation. The person behind Spiderweb software pointed out a few years ago that all the undercutting of prices in the indie scene will make it very hard for indies in a few years.
He has since changed his stance.
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-all-our-games-are-now-cheaper.html
Posted March 10, 2012
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Magnitus: If you're talking about movies, I just saw Hannah the other day for 9$. I almost bought it (liked most of the movie, felt so so about the ending). It's a bit less than a year old.
Are we talking new SRP? I doubt it. GOG is new SRP. Also you said $10 is too much.
Posted March 10, 2012
It's all about if you want to make maximum profit from one sold copy, or from quantity of copies sold in total.

It's good that Spider's Web Soft. decided to go the other way. It looks like it suits more digital distribution in general.

And great link, in general. It shows that some of indie devs know the market is evolving, and they need to adjust the pricing. And $25 for an indie game is too much. Some of them don't know it yet.
Now: Indie developers can make excellent livings selling lots of copies of cheap games.
I'm a dumb person in plenty of key ways, so it took me a while to observe the key fact:

A LOT of money is being made by selling games for cheap.
quotes are from here: http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-all-our-games-are-now-cheaper.html

I want to hear more "cheap games make indie devs poor" bs from gog users. ;)
Post edited March 10, 2012 by keeveek
Posted March 10, 2012
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maycett: $10 is overpriced for a gog because any other distributor would sell a game of similar age for much less.
Dunno about that. I just did some quick comparing, so here's a totally unaligned chart with the local prices in dollars
Game | GOG | Steam |
Bloodrayne 2 | 9.99 | 13.17
Hitman 2 | 9.99 | 13.17
Deus Ex | 9.99 | 13.17
Far Cry | 9.99 | 13.17
Sacred | 9.99 | 13.17
Jagged Alliance 2 + Unfinished Business | 15.98 | 26.37

JA2 has Unfinished Business added on because you can't buy it on Steam without it. You can get some games cheaper there, but that's beside my point that the "over 5 dollars" prices for old games aren't exclusively GOG's thing. Even my preferred retail store asks $21.24 for Jagged Alliance 2 + Unfinished Business, and to top that they're out of stock :p

Maybe if you replaced "any other distributor" with "some other distributor".
Posted March 10, 2012
Deus Ex GOTY on GamersGate is currently 2.5€, one fourd of the regular price and one third of the regular price on GOG (meaning GOG is normally better) for european users.

With all this frequent sales of -75% I really wonder what meaning regular prices have? In principle you can forget them. They are unrealistic and if nobody buys at this price also irrelevant.

It's actually less than a lunch. 2.5€ is just a sausage and a bun or a beer in a really cheap tavern but not both.
Posted March 10, 2012
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AFnord: And in regards to the indie situation. The person behind Spiderweb software pointed out a few years ago that all the undercutting of prices in the indie scene will make it very hard for indies in a few years.
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Immoli: He has since changed his stance.
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-all-our-games-are-now-cheaper.html
That was an interesting read. Thanks for the link.

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timppu: The old big publishers are the losers in this game (and the few old indie developers like the Spiderweb guy who is now miffed there are other indie developers out there in a price war with him), while the new players who finally have a chance to try to get their place in the sun are the potential winners.
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keeveek: I want to hear more "cheap games make indie devs poor" bs from gog users. ;)
While I don't think it quite has reached the state where it is unsustainable, if prices stays roughly where they are, and the market grows at the current rate, then I can see a bright future for indie gaming. But if prices goes even lower, then it will probably be an issue. Look at the smartphone app-stores, those are filled with cheap junk, and many developers have pointed out that due to the fact that games are so cheap, and the customer base is not large enough in comparison, it is rarely worth developing more ambitious smartphone apps, like larger, more involved CRPGs and such.
Posted March 10, 2012
I agree. Indie games market seems to be saturaring fast. To sell well, indie devs might have to offer something more, what would differ them from other indie devs.

It's not so easy to find and pick a good indie game nowadays.

On the other hand, it's good that costs of developement and entry point (how much you have to invest to enter the market) is set so low, that anyone can make an app / write a book / record music and sell it.

Fortunatelly, on most sites you can sort search results by user rating and item popularity, which slightly helps to make a choice.

Market is swarmed with cultural goods now, so it's natural prices get lower. It's natural, because high supply always mean low prices. And with Digital Distrib. supply is almost unlimited. 10 years back you had to go to the local store to buy a game, and you were limited to the games they had in stock. Now, such limitations don't exist.

Like Gog, for instance. One would say "who on earth would want to buy old games?" It appears, that a lot of people. Also, GOG wanted to be different than any other digital distrib. so they offered DRM free service and free additional goodies. That's what makes a difference, when you have several places where you can buy old game, and GOG is the best.
Post edited March 10, 2012 by keeveek
Posted March 10, 2012
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JeCy: <snip>
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shane-o: Bravo, Sir!

I've been asking the same thing. So many times I've seen people whinging and whining over prices that are the same as a fast food meal, a packet of smokes, some alcohol, or whatever other "spoil myself" moment someone may have for themselves

It really surprises me

$6 or $10 for a game? Why the hell not? $10, $20, $30 to support a game being made cause I see it has potential... why the hell not!?!

I understand some people may be a little worse off than others, but geez, are people really THAT stingy?
Depends on who you are.

Look at my Quake 3 thread. In Economics, happiness and the value of a commodity is measured in 'utility'. A game may be equivalent to 2 movies, but people would rather spend on those 2 movies than the game, even if the game has longer lasting appeal. This may be so because people derive more satisfaction from being able to watch those 2 movies than the game. There is a multitude of reasons for this - perhaps they don't feel like they get their money's worth from playing Quake 3 an hour a week; the amount they have spent on Quake 3 could be better used in some other form of social investment.

Then there's benchmarking too. There are people who get the same amount of enjoyment from an iOS game, and a PC game. Few will look at the two platforms and think, "Wow the developers have put in a lot of effort into the PC game, even if I think I'll only spend the same amount of time on it as the iOS game".

Considering the future returns of this investment is an important factor. It's not because people are stingy, which is, pardon the expression, a one-dimensional way of looking at things. Not all of us are earning a comfortable salary; most who get on with their lives, with gaming as a side hobby, have internalized the idea of stretching the value of a dollar. It's not uncommon.
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General discussion (archive)sence when is 10 bucks over priced?(113 posts)(113 posts)
(113 posts)