The reason should be clear. It's the fundament of the economical system. Everybody tries to optimize his personal wealth. So when there is a chance to get something for less, people will always persuit it - and that's not wrong, it's wanted.

The profit of the industry is determined by their own ability to market themself, by their own production costs, by the level of competition (more competition potentially lowering profit but also increasing efficiency), by the level of price comparability and by the overall demand for the products by customers. Investment money will always flow to the place where profit seems to be highest. In the end everybody gets most of what he/she wants most. The most effective strategy of customers is using elasticity of demand, aka waiting for a sale. I bought 80-90% of my games on GOG during a sale, lately only during sales.

Now, do customers in video game industry really have a too strong market force and thereby strangling the video game industry into slow and agonizing death? I doubt it.

One could look at the quarterly balance sheets of the big companies like EA, 2K, Activision who are stock listed and provide such information and calculate profits per invested capital and then compare it with the economy wide standard. At least they should be doing fine. However the business is volatile with much being dependent on the success of single titles. I wouldn't want to invest into them. Too risky for me.

As for Indie developers. I am willing to pay a premium for a good idea from a small publisher because I have sympathy with them. However there is a limit.

Yeah, length is a tricky thing.

I think length matters to the extent that it translates into original content that engrosses the user (sure, users will tend to prefer 100 hours game over 10 hours game, provided that the 100 hours doesn't loop into a lot of repetition in which case most users will prefer the 10 hours game).

However, since the amount of engrossing original content someone can create in the real world is finite, content creators should limit the length of the experience they provide for their user to that rather than try to artificially prolong it.

And obviously, length metrics apply differently depending on the type of entertainment. 24 hours of gameplay for a game is fine, but I think most people would find a 24 hours movie off-putting to say the least ;).

It's not overpriced if you enjoy the game. It might be overpriced for them if they just want to check the game out or if they had the game in the past. Frankly, $10 is pretty cheap for hours of amusement compared to going to the movies or having a meal. Although I would definitely wait for a sale before I buy anything. :)

The "other option" you're talking about, is the Bioware way... And I'm not sure if I like it.

Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2 aren't that expensive anymore. But the DLC still is. And the DLC is part of the story, so you "have to" buy it... Oh, and please, don't wait for GotY editions. Not releasing complete games, is an important part of the Bioware way!

They realised that there are too many games to buy them all immediately after release. And they found their way to deal with this. You can wait for cheaper games, but you'll pay enough for DLC ;)

I wonder if the story really depends crucially on the DLC? How much percentage of story is in the DLCs for ME2 or DA2? Is there any surprising change contained or just addition of not so relevant stuff that can be easily summed up in a plot synopsis. Because then I would say, you actually do not really need the DLCs. My advice would be to skip them and save time and money. They aren't worth it.

Offering overpriced DLC seems like a good way to make sure the smallest number of people benefit from your efforts.

Another aspect of this that noone has mentioned is the risk of what is known as "brain drain" ie. that all the smart people in the gaming industry (indies) will simply leave the industry if there is a very small/no profit to be had there and move on to greener pastures (other industries like movies or TV). This is why prices of games and indies most be fair and balanced. If not then we consumers may win short term but we will loose long term (5-10 years from now) because only EA and Activision will be left to make games and that would be very sad indeed!

No, it's not. The other option is for people to decide not to get into the business and for those that are in the business to collect into a smaller number of businesses or close down.

DLC is definitely not what I was getting at, DLC is just a continuation of the current problem. Release unfinished and buggy games in a market that's already glutted with games.
I'm not sure that anybody's come out and said that outright, that is one of the things I was implying though. The fact is that people who are that talented are often able to do other things as well. And this is always a problem when these things come up.

Sort of, Deus Ex HR was 10 USD by Christmas time (launched in Sept. iirc) and Batman AC was half off by Christmas time (launched in late October). You're right, RAGE and shittier games went down faster but this is by no means limited to only lackluster games.

Other than that point I agree completely with your post. Preach it!
I don't know that you have to worry any more about this now than you ever have. Boring software has been paying a lot more (often times double!) what game development does for well over a decade now. Game development isn't much sexier than boring software during the day to day grind and you stand a much, much higher chance of having to constantly choose between massive, uncompensated overtime and quitting your job. Yes, the cachet is there, though you probably lack the legion of fans because you're a nobody in the gaming industry. You may feel good about what you do, but you'll be working more and taking home less for it.

It's always been this way, I wouldn't worry too much about brain drain. There's rampant age discrimination in software as a whole so it's not like anyone is having their senior guys quit any faster than they're trying to make them quit (or laying them off).

The difference is that boring software is often times still useful software and with proper marketing will find an audience. Even good games regularly get missed by customers because they're unfortunate enough to be released during an unusually good year for gaming.

I haven't observed that to ever be an issue with other types of software. Most of the time there's a small enough number of competitors that if it's a decent product there will be enough customers to support the development.

I know some developers live on rice until they release their program, but that's not a sustainable way of doing business, and certainly not going to work if you have a family.

That's the issue, if you're having to spend a ton of time and money on marketing in order to shout over the top of the other competitors, that's not something that's particularly conducive to innovative gaming. And certainly not going to be a good situation for people that could be making more reliable paychecks elsewhere.

That's sort of the point, programming games has always sucked total ass in comparison to just about any other kind of software development. There's only a very few types of software development that anyone good at software development isn't generally going to be able to do (some really math heavy software really requires some specialized knowledge, for example). So the fact that it's even hard to fund game development, even if you're good at it, is just one more reason why ye old dull-ass software is usually more pleasant to work on.

But I'm not really sure any of this is new, seems to me it's been that way since I started quite some time ago (people back then told me "if you want to develop games, don't do this any longer, you'll never quit and go do games").

I totally agree with you that people avoiding the industry is a problem, I'm only asserting that I don't think it's a new problem.

It's a matter of magnitude, during some periods it's a bigger problem than in other periods. What you really don't want is to have another crash like they had in the early '80s where the industry spends time just about dead because nobody trusts the industry.

Of course it's always there in the background, which isn't usually a problem as there's usually too many programmers for the jobs available, but go back to another early '80s style crash and it could be a while before things recover.

Yeah, boring software works if you can stand it without wanting to put a bullet in your brain after 15 years.

Anyways, nobody goes into Computer Sciences thinking cool, sexy or famous (outside of geek circles anyways).

For crying out loud, the female to male ratio is like 0.1.

There were more girls in my classroom when I was pursuing my math major and that's saying a lot.

There's discrimination at either end of the spectrum.

New entrants get discriminated on because they don't have a lot of experience.

Senior guys get discriminated on not because of their age, but because of their salary.

I think the best place to be is probably in the middle.

Yeah, the family bit is an issue, but otherwise, I see nothing wrong with it.

It builds character.

Obviously, it would help if people could graduate faster, that way they could start their projects long before thoughts of children even enter the picture.

Let's be honest with ourselves: The school system is retarded.

I knew I wanted to go in computer sciences in the middle of high school.

We didn't do any programming in high school.

After high school, we had to do 2 years of natural science (physics, chemistry, biology, etc) in college to get into university.

Once in university, we were exposed to a gamut of computer science topics, some of which are only useful to a minority of specialists.

And the credit system... don't get me started on the credit system.

I did my 90 credits in computer sciences, but I had been in the coop program so I knew just how crappy the marketplace had become so I thought to myself "Hey, I'm good at maths and I like it... education is really cheap over here, so let's do a math major to get myself an edge".

Now, here's the kicker... The math major is 45 credits, but there were already 30 overlapping credits from my computer science degree (15 from the regular computer science curriculum which just overlap and 15 extra because I had taken all my electives in applied maths).

So in practice, 15 extra credits would have sufficed to cover the difference, but they were real stickers for those 45 credits I tell you.

So, in addition to the 15 extra credits of applied maths, I took 30 extra credits of statistics which meant taking stat classes all the way to the graduate level (I had exhausted the available applied maths classes and analysis classes aren't as applicable I find) to get those 45 credits total.

So then, I go to the student office and they drop a bomb on me (and that's after giving me the okay a year and a half before): They didn't have a standard format for students in my situation and the only thing I could do to get those extra math credits recognized was to take an additional math degree which would entail taking an additional 45 credits of whatever (couldn't be math classes though, it had to be another discipline, but the discipline did not matter), because a degree is always 90 credit.

So anyways, long story short, I had to fight tooth and nail to get that extra "Math Major" appended at the bottom of my degree title.

It's bureaucratic hell at it's finest.

The US system is different. It has it's issues, but most people in the US shouldn't be going into computer science or computer engineering if they just want to program. Both entail quite a bit more work and things you probably don't need to know if you just want to code. I took some computer engineering programming classes and they were definitely valuable, but for many people the information was more than what they care about.

A professional certificate is probably what you'd be looking for and it's a legitimate path to getting a job. But, in the current economy, I suspect that they're looking for people with more education because they can.

Looking over the whole thread the most likely explanation for the apparent effect of dropped prices for video games is that sales have gone up (either customers buy more games or more customers buy games or both). Since production costs are almost independent from the number of sold units, prices go down therefore. A volume scaling effect. Of course plattforms with high marketing power (amazon, steam, gog, ...) will profit most.

The competing explanation is that customers are on strike and refuse to buy games of perceived bad quality at high prices, therefore strangling the industry, especially small players to death.