over 80,000 people donated to that game, and at least twice that amount expressed interest in buying the game, which makes your "1,000 people will play it

No I didnt really research my numbers, I didnt have too once you said kickstarter i knew id be close plus or minus a couple of ten thousand lol, well not the minus unless its negative sales or something.

So the game isnt out yet correct, theres potintialy 80000 people going to buy fine, but thats still nothin to brag about. (sorry dont mean to offend indi game lovers)

I know beth started on computer games, they wernt doing very well from what I understand till Morrowind, and if even before steam if no body bought their games at full price they prolly wouldnt be doing very well, this is just simple logic that maybe one day you will understand.

You still got it wrong. 80,000 people already OWN the game, and at least twice that amount stated they would buy the game as soon as it was released. While that may not be awe-inspiring, it does prove my point, that customer loyalty still exists as long as the developer is deserving of it. And as far as I know, gamesas was doing just fine money wise, considering they had the money to take over the, at the time, defunct Fallout franchise, which is where they started their decline/descent into consoles and catering to the masses. They were doing so well at the time of morrowind, that a few years after it's release, they released Arena and Daggerfall for free as downloads on their site. So your point is moot. And really, the argument about "if people won't pay full price for games, they won't do very well" doesn't hold much water, because if the games were worth buying at full price, more people would do so. It goes back to crap releases because of idiotic publishers and money hungry CEOs, nothing to do with gamers at all.

Why do people keep saying a price increase will result in them not playing games anymore? Just wait until their cheaper. Is there some kind of stigma about not playing a game as soon as it comes out that I'm not aware of?

For ppl saying $70 isn't that much more, I look at it like this:

When I buy a new game for $60, I have roughly $40 left over which can give me a full tank of gas in my current car. If I go and buy a $70 game the almost $30 isn't going to do that.

With no used game market(which is the other rumor that is going alongside this one), price decreases will happen much more slowly(or less likely to happen at all), since they will have no incentive to lower the price(which they do now in order to compete with the Used games). And lots of people don't have internet that is capable of downloading entire games off of steam, or the equivalent that might be on next-gen consoles. Data caps, or slower then optimal speeds are major contributing factors to that.

Oh coarse not its all good as long as enough people buy it at release. Release sales are real important to game companies thats why we always hear about release sales numbers, I think they get there mother load in sales during that time.

Stigma? No. Human impatience and desire for what they want as soon as they can get it? Sure.
Did all the people who bought Skyrim counting the hours to release day have to have it on that day? Nope. Did they all want it because they were very eager to start playing (and sharing their experiences on the internet, heh)? You betcha. And that's for single-player games. Multiplayer/MMO games are even worse at times, because some players don't want to miss out on the initial burst of potential people to play with.

But I think more people tend to wait at least a few months for most games, for patches and opinions to trickle in. Everyone just has their special games they "can't" wait for.

I have no idea how long console "release date" prices remain at that level right now (not including used ones). Anyone care to fill me in? From what I've observed, with PC games, the top titles typically take at least 5-6 months, depending on the game/popularity/publisher blah blah. Some games closer to a year or more. Steam/digital distribution has made earlier sales more common but it doesn't always happen to every title.

Yeah, I don't think Mojang or Paradox are going to suffer from the death of the big publishers.

...which, adjusted for inflation, will still be the same or cheaper than games from the "good old days". I'm amazed that people think games staying $50 over 6+ years was a normal way for things to work. Everything else out there is getting more expensive (either by the price going up, or by the quantity in the container going down), why shouldn't games?

In an era of $5 hamburgers, $4 coffee, $5-6 packs of cigarettes, and $15+ movie tickets, why should video games be some special unique snowflake that never has price adjustments?

Games in the "Good Old days" were more expensive because of how new/fresh the technology was, and the inadequacy of how it was brought to market. If we had had access to todays technology back then, games would have started out a much smaller price point.

You guys should move here

The problem here is the price of games was over inflated to begin with. And on top of that most people today are dealing with a lot less disposable income. 10+ years ago I made 3 times the money I make now and I could afford to buy what ever I wanted. This can be said for many famlies, husband or wife lost their good paying job or both and now they are forced to work for less pay. Expecting people to pay more for something they hardly can afford now is just insanity,

Greg

P.S. I can asure you if they go through with these rumors and take away used game sales and charge $70 for new games. Only the big name developers are going to sell their games. The rest of the developers will be folding up left and right.

I would also like to add that even though these developers are crying that used games are killing the market. Used games is what drives new game sales. I can not even count the amount of times where I didn't have enough money to buy a new game outright so I traded in a used game or two and I was able to buy the new game. ANd I can assure you I am not the only one doing this or their wouldnt be a used game market. Developers are going to sell a whole lot less new games once the used game market is gone and they drive prices up to $70. And they are only going to have them selves to blame!

Greg

I was just there last month. Way too many people...and that's coming from a "city person."

I'm more interested in why they think they're a special unique snowflake that should be untroubled by the second-hand market.

On the one hand, I like used games - they're cheap. (and, in the case of old games, frequently the only way you can find them)

On the other hand, I can totally understand the game publishers looking at Gamestop and thinking "They're making $20+ profit off each sale of a recently-released game, and we're not seeing a penny of it" and wanting to bang their heads against the wall. Yeah, some fraction of people buying used wouldn't have bought it at full. But you've got to believe that a decent % (especially among people buying released-this-month games used for $5 or $10 off) are honestly lost sales. It's completely reasonable that the companies would want to try to do something to grab back a share of that.


(Personally, if a used game is only 5 or 10 less than new, I grab the new copy. You get a fresh set of any material - manual, registration cards, whatever - that might be in there, you get a disc with no scratches, and the publisher gets their cut. To me, that's a valid tradeoff for the minimal discount. It's only stuff that's much cheaper and/or so old that there aren't any new copies on the shelf, that I buy used.)

Look at the over all quilty of video games in the recent years. For example Bethesda put way more time, thought, and effort into Oblivion then they did with Skyrim. Yet they wanted $60 for both ganes at release, and this happens with every developer. They are making less quailty games and demanding the same full price. Its no wonder why people buy and sell used games!

Greg

*Spits water out of mouth in a fit of laughter* I'm sorry, I've agreed with a lot of what you've had to say in this and the other thread, but this one, I just can't, not even a little bit. Oblivion was a nightmare compared to Skyrim. It was hands down the worst TES Experience ever. Skyrim may have had a few more things removed, which svcks, but the world they crafted, and the stories told, were far and away superior to anything Oblivion contained. Not to mention, Oblivion was just as much of a buggy mess, and still does contain quite a few bugs that require downloading unofficial patches made by fans, because they stopped caring just a few months after the damn game came out. Skyrim is still being patched, and they have said time and again they plan on keeping up with the patches for quite a while to come. Skyrim is one of those very VERY few Triple AAA titles that I can understand rushing out and plunking down $60 bucks for on release day, especially when you compare it to most alternatives.

Not only did they remove things but the Oblivion world felt more alive and had way more quests to do. It takes me around 320hrs to complete a full playthrough in Oblivion and I can complete Skyrim in 50+hrs. So yes Bethesda put way more time, thought, and effort into Oblivion.

Greg

P.S. but that dosent mean Skyrim is a bad game, they just put less work into it.

That's a difficult case to make since it's largely an opinion. Video game development budgets have been steadily increasing. Bethesda doesn't release budget information to the public, so there's no way to tell which game in your example cost more to make. From a business perspective the cost of making the game and sales data will probably do more to determine how it's priced than the perceived "quality" level of an undetermined number of gamers.


There's no way to know that. The amount of time it takes you to finish the game doesn't tell us anything about the amount of manhours that BGS put into development.

In Iceland Skyrim is already 63$ on PC and 86$ on consoles. I myself paid 235$ on my copy of Skyrim (collectors) so I won't say I wouldn't spend 70$ on a game, but sure wouldn't spend 70$ on just any game. It can really depend a lot on the quality game (and how much of a blatant fan-boy I am of the company) if I will buy a game for a lot or not. For example there are some games I consider worth 100$ because they are simply an amazing experience, and there are some games I wouldn't spend 10$ on. When it comes to average games I'd say I'm ready to spend maybe 20$ which is why I mostly buy really old titles or bundles of titles that bring the total price down for each game to under 20$.

Some games I don't buy at all if I do not agree with the DRM used, there is only one game I have bought where I did not like the DRM and that was Skyrim (after actually playing the game and it not really meeting my expectations I will not be buying TES:VI if it has the same DRM), but aside from that I've never bought a game that had a DRM that I didn't agree with.

70$ Is way too much for games with bad DRM and low quality story or game-play and so is 60$ and even 50$ which is why I quite rarely actually buy games when they are new and fresh at the store, but I can understand it for certain titles. Also you can't compare games to movies, movies are at the most a time investment of 4 hours with the current format we use for movies, but games can range into the hundreds of hours of quality entertainment, yet they can be as short as a movie as well in some cases. You can say "but even movies sometimes range from 90 minutes to 240 minutes" but that's just not comparable in any way or manner, and movies as they are today are also too expensive. The most fairly priced product of entertainment or art that I can think of would have to be books, or novels to be exact. A good novel can rack up hours of entertainment and it can be greatly moving or entertaining yet only cost 10$. Books don't take a fraction of the manpower that a movie takes, and they are not as visually pleasing but they also tend to have more niché audiences and I'm still talking about printed books here, so there is quite a bit spent on printing too. Digital books (granted I've never even bought or read a digital book, just prefer the old style paper ones ) can cost a ton less than paper books.

The digital era=the slow loss of the illusion of privacy and the slow loss of the illusion of "ownership" of intellectual property (unless laws drastically alter).

I just hope it won't come down to where you can't buy physical copies of games/music at all, because then the companies will have a stranglehold on how they decide to market/distribute their digital-data product. Imagine that you pay $60 for a digital download game ...but the right to play it only lasts a year. Then you have to renew it for another $60 if you want to be able to play it again next year - even single-player games. Yes yes, there'd be the constant company vs hacker battle I'm sure, but that's not the point.

Re: who's at fault for rising game prices - Why can't it be a combo of things? I don't think it's an either/or, or even a majority thing. There's the issue of costs and that not all of the $60-70 falls directly into the publisher's pocket, the issues of people who complain but still buy buy buy, piracy concerns (real or inflated), a changing and increasing size of the player demographic, and so on.

I couldn't disagree more. I found Skyrim to be very badly lacking in anything that held my attention compared to Oblivion and Morrowind, or even FO3 for that matter. I've had over 1,000 hours of enjoyable gameplay from Oblivion; I've had perhaps a tenth of that from Skyrim, and much of that felt like a chore. I can see myself going back to Oblivion and Morrowind again, but Skyrim's more likely to collect dust, and I do feel rather put out that I handed over the exorbitant asking price for the CE. Oblivion certainly had its faults but most were salvageable thanks to the work of modders; I'm not so sure about Skyrim but I guess the telling thing is that I'm not even that interested in finding out. Whether measuring it in absolute terms such as hours spent more more subjectively like how much I enjoyed it, I felt that Skyrim was really rather poor value for money in comparison.

Re used games and publishers wanting a slice of the action, there are probably better ways of doing it than trying to stiff buyers with online passes and such. I recently bought my second-hand Ford car from a Ford garage, so although they "missed out" on a new sale (which I wouldn't have done anyway) they got a nice chunk of the profits from the used car regardless. I didn't feel ripped off. If I buy a used game and then have to pay the "EA tax" in order to install it, I will feel ripped off.

Inflation is a fact of the new world economy. Even $70 bucks is still going to seem extremely cheap in the coming years.

Food/fuel, you will see skyrocketing first. Followed by other tradeable durable goods. Entertainment tends to be the last thing to go up, because it is usually what people will discard when the wallets are thin. Still, its going to seem like a bargain compared to what everything else in the world is going to cost. It actually amazes me that games have remained so unaffected by inflation to this point.