Let's talk about the price of new games!

[icycalm]

So Katamari 1 was $20. With a full-color manual. I'm figuring the new one to be slightly more than that. Say $40-50. More likely $50, right? And I bring this up because it's really the only game I think I will buy for $50 this year. (and I'm including Romance X which just recently came out) The GBA NES releases are $20 each. Go figure what the Revolution will cost (hopefully, per-game). The PSP titles are $50. The DS are $30-35. Same as the GBA. PS2 and Xbox are $50.

BUT WHY???? A disc costs pennies to make, and carts a bit more. Packaging is a dollar, tops. Publishing rights, then the rest is profit for the companies and retailers. KD was $20 mostly because they had already covered production costs in Japan and probably thought they were going to sell maybe 10k copies. A lot of people probably thought KD was going to be another Ico. A great Japanese wacky gimmick of a title. Only it went on to do more. And now the sequel is listed as a GARGANTUAN $29.95!!!!! FOR FUCK'S SAKE, NAMCO WE'RE NOT BILLIONAIRES.

So what's the deal? Is asking $50 for a new sports game every year a bit much? Or is this one of thoses demand things? Or is Namco just being stupid and possibly lying to us? Is this the fault of Gamestop/EB and their trafficing of ILLEGAL used games?

Post your wild speculation here!

PS- Katamari 2 comes out October 4th-ish.

[Elixir]

Why oh why do production companies stay in business?

[PFG 9000]

Games have always been priced well above their realistic production costs, as have movies and music and all other media. In addition to the costs you listed, the game's designers, the publisher's marketing team, and all other employees involved in getting the games to us need to be paid a regular salary for their work. And yes, there is certainly a profit to be considered for each company involved, as well as the retailers.

But I think we have it fairly good these days. Super Mario 3 retailed at $50 in my area when it came out some twenty-five years ago. Final Fantasy III/VI and Chrono Trigger were $70. Some Jaguar games like Alien Vs. Predator, Doom, and Rayman were $70 - $90 at first, and Neo Geo games were too expensive to be measured by modern means. The most recent of these examples are at least a decade old. When you consider inflation costs and the leaps and bounds technology has made since then, not to mention the number of employees involved in bringing one title from the mind of the producer to the salesfloor, it's really a wonder that games are as "cheap" as they are these days.

Not that I'm not stingy.

[marcus12024]

I tend to only buy new games when I know that the game probably won't sell very well, and I want to see more games from that company. For example, I recently picked up Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana for full price ($60 CDN + tax) and am happy with it - I think it's a great game, I love the artwork, and I'd be very happy to see the sequel get translated and released in North America.

For most other games, though, I'm more than happy to wait for a cheap used copy. I'm in no hurry to play most games (I still haven't played Disgaea - and I picked it up in the first week it was out) and have so many on the backburner that I don't need to play the newest ones right away.

I don't find new prices to be too high, but I also don't buy very many new games. I think the average price I've paid for each GC, XBox, and PS2 game I own is around $10 CDN. That's pretty good.

[Vexorg]

I seem to recall seeing that when the NeoGeo first came out, the system went for $600, and the games (early AES carts like Baseball Stars and Top Players Golf) went for $200 apiece. I get the impression that AES stuff isn't much cheaper than that now.

[icycalm]

I think that sooner or later games will cost about as much as a movie DVD.

$9.99 or so.

This will happen when the market for games grows to about 10 times what it is now, and mediocre games start selling around 10 million copies each. When that happens, game designers will be able to make games that last about as long as a movie. A couple hours.

About 2 years before Ninja Gaiden came out, Edge magazine published an interview with Itagaki. They asked how long would the game be. He said that if he could have his way the game would be 2 or 3 hours long.

I seriously can't wait for this to happen.

(I am in no way implying that there will be no games that require 100 hours to master. The majority of the mainstream games, however, will follow the above rule. In my very humble pie opinion.)

[D]

music cd's and video games prices are ridiculous.
They make no sense.

Now one kid has in his lifetime saved enough money for to buy three games. I'm sure that if games were half the price that kid would have more than six games.

I think that most people/kids have about three games, because they are so expensive.

I'm old and got money, no problem for me, but what about the children?

[sethsez]

BUT WHY???? A disc costs pennies to make, and carts a bit more. Packaging is a dollar, tops. Publishing rights, then the rest is profit for the companies and retailers.

Why do people forget that the costs of making a game extend beyond just getting a physical product on the shelves?

You're leaving out the relatively small factor of the cost to actually develop the game. If all you want is a disc, then by all means, go to Best Buy and buy fifty blank discs at less than a dollar each. If you actually want something on that disc that'll play in your PS2... well, that costs money to create. And let's not get into things like marketing.

And yes, companies want to make profit. That's why they make the games. They're not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts to bring you joy.

The same thing goes for music and movies. Recording time in a studio is NOT cheap for a band, and the bigger the label they're on, the more people have to be paid per album. A cheap movie still costs millions to make these days, once again ignoring the cost of marketing (which can be huge).

You're not paying for the physical object when you buy a CD or DVD. You're paying for the content on it, and that content is almost never cheap to produce.

[Marc]

Fuck, N64 Turok was £70.00 here on release, that's what, $110.00? SFII Turbo SNES was £60, as was DKC, most N64 were a good £50.00... games have always been a rip.
I personally don't think it's all that bad at the minute, wait long enough and any new title can be had for £30.00 which isn't bad compared to the above, although I think the piss talking is going to start again with the next gen.

[roushimsx]

Both Katamari titles are reduced cost titles in Japan to begin with. Not budget titles ($10-$20), but still not full priced. They're pretty much the equivellent of $30 titles from the get go (about 4800yen vs 6800yen for your average new game). It selling awesomely in Japan and the US was a total surprise to everyone.

$30 for the sequel is a fucking steal and a half. Just started playing the sequel last night and oh. my. god. it's everything you loved about the first game taken to 11. Encoding up a batch of videos right now... the worlds retain the simplistic look but they feel so much more alive and the layouts are much more varied. The new environments are jaw-dropping (one of the videos I'm encoding is Stage 3, the Underwater Stage), and the new cinemas make the Cosmos Girl from Katamari Damacy look tame in comparison.

The King is such a badassmotherfucker.

[D]

Fuck, N64 Turok was £70.00 here on release, that's what, $110.00? SFII Turbo SNES was £60, as was DKC, most N64 were a good £50.00... games have always been a rip.
I personally don't think it's all that bad at the minute, wait long enough and any new title can be had for £30.00 which isn't bad compared to the above, although I think the piss talking is going to start again with the next gen.

Game wise the britts have it rough.
I used to allways buy Brittish mags and the prices of games in advertisments of gameshops are ridiculous. even the prices of Brittish online gaming shops. Something to do with heavy tax on imports or something???

[CMoon]

Let's not be silly whining about the costs of games. Hate to tell you, but in the golden days of Atari and Intellivision, games still cost just as much as they do now, meaning that with inflating taken into account, they actually cost less.

Comparing games to the price of dvds and cds is absurd. For one, movies first rake in the cash with a theatrical run (one family going to see one movie is often $50 or so anyway, so by the time you're dropping $20 for the DVD, it has probably already made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Music isn't quite the same, but music has much lower production costs and unlike video games, people are still buying music from 20, 30 or even hundreds of years ago.

The market for video games is still smaller than you think, where games that took a staff of dozens has its innitial run then begins clogging up used bins where it no longer makes the people who made the game any money.

Basically it comes down to this--it costs a lot to make a game, and the game only really makes money through a very short window of time and then no one wants it anymore.

I think $50 for a game is very reasonable when you consider all the variables.

[llabnip]

Games have always cost this much... my new games for the Atari 2600 (I still have some boxes with prices) were $31.95 to $34.95. That's in 1979 dollars... with inflation, that's more like $60 in 2005 dollars. Games have not gone up in price... and with inflation have actually decreased - in theory you're getting more (er... bigger?) game for less money.

A disc costs pennies to make, and carts a bit more

You're paying for guys like me to write software. And guys to market it and test it and distribute it and the gas it costs to truck it and the store clerks who sell it and...

[PaCrappa]

I voted "what". I used to buy everything that looked good but of course there's no time to play. So now I always play things first and afterward I search for used deals. If I don't find one and feel that I really need the game, I pony up.

Are new gaems worth $50? Yes. That's what they've been sold at since the Atari 2600 was on shelves at Montgomery Ward. Pac Man being my specific example. Historically home console games have been worth $50 from pretty much day one. Do I think new sports games with slightly altered player rosters are worth $50 every year? FUCK NO! I can't believe that people are such big fans of the same shit that they'll do that every year. Same goes for trashass King of Fighters. One good thing about online content is that perhaps these weakass updates will be offered for download super cheaply if you've already spent the $50. I don't care about sports or KoF but I sure wouldn't hold my breath if I did.

Katamari Damacy 2 will be well worth the moderate $29.99 asking price. You might as well get over that.

Pa

[FatCobra]

Would I have paid $50 for Earthbound? HELL YES!! (Actually, I did, lol)

Would I pay $50 for the yearly Madden update or GT4? HELL NO!!

Videogames have always been about $50 when they are brand new (this also includes some of those crappy SNES movie games), so is this old news. The fact that we are seeing budget releases at low prices is something new. But, I find it hard to eagerly blow $50 on a new game anymore. Maybe it's my preference for old-school stuff, or that I feel the magic is gone, or I just simply can't afford it, or whatever. I don't feel like wasting too much money on videogames anymore. Hell, I'm probably not going to buy a next-gen machine when they come out. I feel like I'm giving up on this silly hobby called videogames.

[Stormwatch]

Recording time in a studio is NOT cheap for a band, and the bigger the label they're on, the more people have to be paid per album.

Yes, it takes more people to make the artificial teen pop idol du jour not sound like total crap.

[Cthulhu]

The physical production costs of games are nothing compared to the cost of developing them. There's a reason so many game companies dissapear even though their games cost like $50 - because they're still not making money at that price. Most Japanese games cost a little bit more than US games do, but most companies still fail to stick around for more than a couple of release because they just can't make money.

$50 or 5000 yen is -nothing-. Most games still fail to turn much of a profit at that price. I get annoyed when I have to shell out 6800 yen for a game, sure, and even more annoyed when I'm asked for over 8000 yen (like with Sakura Taisen), but this is still cheaper than games were back in the 16 bit days. Phantasy Star II cost over $100 in the US, and many Super Famicom and Mega Drive games were well over 10000 yen. The original Tales game (Phantasia, was it?) was somewhere around 13000 yen.

[icycalm]

People keep saying that MD and SFC games in the US used to be around the $100 mark.

Do you mean the official US versions or the Jap imports?

Please clarify.

[PFG 9000]

I don't remember seeing any SNES or Genesis games for over $100 in the US, but then, that doesn't mean there weren't any.

[TWITCHDOCTOR]

$50.00 was pretty much always the general price point of video games...even back with the Atari VCS/2600, as well as the ColecoVision.

So, it might cost only penny's to make a CD, but don't forget about the development team, musicians who create original music(Katamari!) and play testers...all those involved are earning a paycheck from this.

Nothing in this world is free!

[Elixir]

America went on the whole "Genesis" scene. Megadrive would be considerably easier to find since their games are either japanese, or european.

Somehow in my travels I've bought a japanese Mario Kart, box and manual included. A little worn and used around the edges, but this would be pretty rare.

Do you mean the official US versions or the Jap imports?

Obviously, there aren't "US" versions of Super Famicom games.

[SheSaidDutch]

Most of my MD game purchases were priced between £40-50

I'm not sure on the SNES side of the pond but my cousin only had 5 games to his name

[neorichieb1971]

I agree games should be shorter. I would rather play something like God of war for 5-10 hours tops. I also don't think that games should be hard on default settings. I have no time for busting veins over games anymore.


At $25 that would be better for me.


Seldom do I pay $50 for a game, I will pay $40 for quite a few though.

If you think about it there are so many quality games out you could buy all the games at discount prices. I still haven't played Silent hill 3 and 4, Onimusha 3, DMC 2/3 and Siren and they are all my favourite genre. So when most of those are $30 why should I pay $50 for something that just came out?

Its absolutely bonkers

[Cthulhu]

People keep saying that MD and SFC games in the US used to be around the $100 mark.

Do you mean the official US versions or the Jap imports?

Please clarify.

I'm speaking about the prices of the Japanese games. The offical retail prices for many late-generation SFC and MD games were over 10000 yen, and the while the majority of the games that went that high were RPGs, there were a few exceptions. 8000-9000 yen wasn't unusal at all for action games in the final days of those systems either.

Apparently people just got sick of paying it and prices plummeted in the 32 bit era. They rose again near the end of the 32 bit days too, but they never got anywhere near what 16 bit games cost.

On the topic of $100 plus US games, I'm only aware of a few that actually cost that much by name. Phantasy Star II and IV both retailed at $100, and Sword of Vermillion was up there too. Not all stores actually charged that much, but some places did. A few of the big name SNES RPGs came out for considerably more than other games, but none of them acutally reached $100 as far as I know.

[sethsez]

Virtua Racing for the Genesis was another $100 game, and there were a few early Saturn titles that went for around $80 as well (Mystaria is the first one that comes to mind).