I wouldn't pay a cent extra to get a product that should do what it's intended to do right from the start. Games companies have massive profit margins as it is, and comparitively protectionist consumer laws compared to other products.

While a significant proportion of the gaming community is prepared to accept the current state of things, nothing will change. Until the community says 'enough is enough', and a few of us actually become consumer advocates and lobby governments and companies to redress the situation, we, the gamers, will continue to see buggy games releases and DRM systems come onto the market.

@Gungho1

I have to agree with you on some level. Video games are complicated though...

Under what grounds could a case be made about a buggy game?

I dunno.

Many of you are missing one of the main points in that the costs of games haven't kept up with inflation. They're getting cheaper and cheaper every year, relatively speaking, though the average consumer doesn't see it because of having that fixed number stuck in memory. Due to this, costs have to be cut somewhere for publishers to assure themselves a targeted profit margin. Given many of the attitudes towards price increases it's easy to see that releasing a buggy game and later patching it is a more suitable option than trying to recoup cost by way of increase price and the inevitable backlash it would cause. Games have always had bugs, but with the advent of DLC on consoles and more feasible patch distribution they've become more common place and more and more game affecting (even breaking sometimes).

So we're essentially asking (or demanding as some are) for the same quality we've had in the past for what is rapidly becoming less and less of the price. If you're so staunchly against price increases to keep up with current pricing across markets then you can't really complain because in the end, you are getting what you paid for -- less than what you did years ago.

You DO realize, we are talking technology here, right?
How many GB of RAM does your computer have? How much does that cost? Do you know how much 1GB of RAM cost 10 years ago and how fast it was?

Very well said! :tops:
I can't speak for the PC, but the the price of console (I'm on the PS3) games has risen with each successive generation.
I think that an average cost of $59.99 USD is more than enough to ensure that the product I buy is stable and generally bug free.

I don't necessarily require the games I buy to be perfect; as I realist, I expect some bugs and glitches in a game as complex as NV.
However, in my opinion, NV was released too early and the (very real) stability problems are inexcusable. I've said my piece in other threads, so I won't belabor the point here.

Suffice it to say, I wouldn't pay one single cap extra for a company to meet the reasonable standard of releasing a stable, workable product.


Off topic:







You guys are http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ_pKqiB5Rg.
:rofl:

:tongue:

This. Because it made me lol. :teehee:

Terrible anology which draws absolutely no parallel.

I happen to like then bloody.

What if you asked for a bloody steak and the waiter served you a vegetarian spinach and feta parcel?

Well I'm glad I made someone's day

I have to agree with a few of the other people on this thread...I'll now think twice about buying a Beth. game, and will probably avoid buying them at release or for a few months after. The buzz simply isn't worth the grief if the game turns out toxic.

I finally finished the download early last night, plugged in, played about 20 minutes and found that the lever-action bug seemed fixed, saw that VATS wasn't, then had a crash....spent the rest of the night playing STALKER:CoP.

I'll pay whatever the price is which this time around was forty nine bucks or so if memory serves me correctly. FALLOUT NEW VEGAS was fine with some non-annoying bugs out of the box then the first patch came and i got crashes untill i turned off HDR and used BLOOM instead in the video settings. I assume its a codec issue or something i missed when reinstalling WinXp a few weeks ago. Now with the final 1.2 patch everything is playing great with no crashes or odd npc behaviour unless its meant to be odd which is rather obvious when one sees some of the crazy circus acts OBSIDIAN created in the wasteland. A reguler side show of freaky freaks

Am surprised am not paying eighty dollars for a game considering its almost the same price i've been paying for computer games since 1989. Most other things have gone up in price like comic books and music. Kind of interesting how movies seem to actually have gotten cheaper. I still remember vhs costing seventy two dollars back in the 1980s from those mail order movie clubs. Now you can get the same movie looking better then the original theatrical version with tons of extra for twenty dollars or less on dvd.

It's called mass production, 10.000 sold back then, vs. 100.000 sold today.

1) The anology with the restaraunt and what you order and what you get served was a good 1. But sir you paid up front on entrance.
2) The point about games being cheaper is partially true as software house sub out to lower cost areas (China and India).
3) Why the hell didn't Beth quality check this game. You see issues present right at the start but you can ignore them as they are not major. My point was that Christmas was fast approaching and they went for it.
4) Like any business they know the faults but don;t fix unless they get major complaints. Take the 360 DLC fault I have. Probably not enough people saw it to warrant the investment in a fix straight away. Perhpas the PC version is the development platform and once this is right they can transfer to 360 update?

5) The point from a 360 user (I have a good gaming PC as well with a top line graphics card but hate keyboard/mouse driven games) is FO3 was great and worked for me. FONV is a bag of spanners. I ignored the disappearing weapons on screen and such issues casue the game itself was FO3 but elsewhere and fun. To boot up and want to continue after 10 hours from the start with the last save and find you can;t cause an item that was only avalialbe in DLC has been removed and have the load fail and then the game reset itself to the title screen is f***ing unbelievable. I can't get those hours back. I tried doing what BETH said and went back to an earlier save but got the same result once I got to the same point in the game. I will not be buying anymore BETH games in the future, like somelse said until 6 monmths after launch so they have time to fix their stuff.

6) FONV does not have the same depth of musical score althought black mountain radio is funny but not enough of it. BETH go visit Rockstar and get some tips.

This. I have very few problems and have no problems waiting for a patch.

I only read page 1 and 4 so if this was mentioned already my apologies, but people are lucky (despite the economy) that games aren't more expensive. Someone mentioned that they used to only sell 10,000 copies vs 100,000 copies of a game now... that's simply not true at all. Super Mario Bros 3 cost $50 US at launch, it sold 18 million copies. The best selling Xbox 360 game ever is Halo, less than 9 million copies. Halo also cost $50 (not counting special editions, that's not the game you're paying for, that's a bunch of collectible swag). According to this inflation calculator (http://www.westegg.com/inflation/), If you paid $50 for a video game in 1988, you could/should be paying nearly $90 for it now. Fact is, video games have been untouched by inflation and I'm not saying it should be an excuse, but the credits in video games are certainly a lot longer these days, there's a lot more costs involved in making a video game, they're going to cut corners to turn a profit and that may include cutting back on testing. Basically, you can't get mad when a dollar store can-opener breaks.

There are a lot of things you are leaving out and not considering... you are just taking a linear approach with the CPI, which doesn't tell the whole story. Not all consumer goods follow the CPI consistently. Just to give you a small example, 15 years ago a stick of 128MB of RAM cost around $200.00, and today, for $200.00 you can get 12GB of RAM.

Mario Brothers 3 indeed sold 18 million copies, but it surely did not sell those 18 million copies in one year, or 2, not even 3. It took almost a decade for Mario Brothers 3 to sell that many copies in a market in which Nintendo, early on, had almost no competition. It is highly unlikely that a game would sell that many copies today, or that it would sell consistently in such a long time span, given the current level of competition for gamer dollars and technological advances.

The costs of making a video game may be higher these days... you really can't base such a statement on the number of names you see rolling on the screen, though. Then again, with so many people's names rolling down on the credits, you'd hope that a few of those do quality control. There are many places a company can cut costs, such as no free sodas or movie Fridays, or nor paying $200,000 to some actor to voice 5 minutes of character dialog, rather than cut costs on one of the most crucial parts in the production line. Then again, as I said before, the gaming industry customer is rare in that not only he/she accepts sub-par goods, but thanks the producer of such sub-par goods.

The RAM anology, again, falls flat on its face and doesn't fit at all. It is a means to an end, the end being the entertainment media (surfing, gaming, etc) or production efficiency (work usage). It is the same as comparing an old projector unit to a DVD player, yet they're not the same product in any way other than they both were the means to the same end (movies in this case). The difference between tech and media is that a game or movie's entertainment value doesn't depreciate but technological efficiency does, and quickly. So when that old stick of RAM is now obsolete due to its relative effectiveness in being the means towards an enjoyable experience the old game is still as relatively entertaining as its newer counterparts. That, and technology is created to replace older versions of itself but entertainment media are completely standalone products able to coexist -- you can still enjoy Fallout 1 and New Vegas at the same time, you can't do that with the old 128 stick of RAM and the 2 GB as well.

The moral of the story is that we've become accustom to a certain price point and are greedy enough to demand that publishers not only stay within that range but also produce the same solid products for what is becoming less and less money relative to the inflation of currency. This is akin to going to Coca-Cola with a nickle and demanding a bottle of Coke and complaining if it weren't the same top of the line soda taste you've always had. Our demand for the $50-60 price point is the reason publishers have to cut cost in either cookie-cutter games, rush jobs or buggy release only to be patched after the recoup some costs from early release date sales.

Blame ourselves.

Actually, I think that people will pay whatever price is on the game, within reason, regardless. We can discuss the why's and wherefor's continually, but none of us know the actual strategy or concept behind the development or marketting of games.

At the cost of seeming facetious, I will state the often overlooked obvious: If people are prepared to fanatically argue over whether a game is 'broken' or not, or to argue about who is to 'blame', then they will be prepared to pay what they can afford. And you will still have arguments: "The game is too expensive for what I got" vs "No it's not, I could afford it easily".

There is one thing I know for certain, and that is that no company will advertise a game as 'Costing a lot because we beta tested it and got most of the bugs out!'

Really?
Let me explain it to you, but pay attention. It may get complicated.

This is the statement the other poster made, basing his statement on the CPI and inflation patterns:
"If you paid $50 for a video game in 1988, you could/should be paying nearly $90 for it now."

To which I responded, not all consumer goods follow the same pattern. Then I offered an example of a consumer good (i.e. RAM) to counter the poster's statement. See? If we were to substitute "video game" with"128mb of RAM" in the poster's statement:
"if you paid $200.00 for 128mb of RAM in 1988, you could/should be paying nearly $350 for it now".
Obviously this last statement is not true. Correct?

Do you get it now?

They COULD not pay a celebrity voice actor to voice 5 minutes of character dialog, but that is one of the reasons games cost more these days... every single time Nintendo makes the decision to not include voice acting in their games, reviewers and other people think that's unacceptable ("it's the year 20__ Nintendo, get with the times!","What is this the dark ages?",etc...), and then voice actors weren't good enough, you have to have celebrities (I don't think Danny Trejo only cost a sandwich and a coke to get him in the game, or Wayne Newton for that matter). These are now things gamers expect, along with graphics that are more realistic than what's outside their window. I don't think that's a "maybe" or a point of debate, there's no way the cost of making video games compares to the 1980's, when games like Missile Command were made by one or two people doing all the work, and Fallout New Vegas was made by teams upon teams of people. I mean, if they figured out a way to spend a million dollars in the general development (we're not talking marketing) of Super Mario Bros 3, well... that'd be amazing to me.

With RAM though, you're right that some technology/electronics items have gone down, but that's because cost of producing those parts has gone down because of mass production and more efficiencies/corners cut in creating it (you can bet not as many people were buying RAM in 1988 as they were in 2008 for example, even in the early 90's no one really had a computer in their house, now everyone has at LEAST one, I have three working machines in my apartment). The difference is that's a manufactured item that's probably put together by machines (I have no idea how RAM is produced and could care less), a video game's development is becoming the same as a movie now, and movies have DEFINITELY been effected by inflation ($4-5 to go see a movie in the 80's vs $11 - $15 to see one now). I'm not saying video games now cost more to develop now just because there's more names in the credits now, though the reason there's more names in the credits is because video games cost more to develop now. I would bet QA is one of the first things to get chopped out of the budget in any industry, we just don't know about it. It takes a long time, you need to have the right people doing it (in this case, preferably people with a development background and not just some yokel that likes playing video games for 10 hours a day), and these days you have too many shareholders that are counting on you delivering what you said you would when you said you would, delays mean a dip in stock which means less money for the top dogs, and they'd be PISSED if they found out they're going to have to wait two months to buy their new Benz because someone was working on a bug that is triggered because someone wanted to do a quest out of order.

I understood what you were trying to say, but it is still woefully incorrect. Here's a quick summary of your argument:

If you paid $200 for an old piece of hardware, you should pay nearly $350 for the same piece of hardware now.

Again, it draws absolutely no parallels. You're comparing a single piece of hardware at two different times but comparing two entirely different games at different times. It's poor logic.

The part you can't seem to grasp is that we don't pay more for the same game, we should be paying more for new games in comparison to the prices of games in years past. Games drop in price over time, just as hardware does only at a slower rate due to games not becoming "obsolete" they can still serve their primary function -- entertainment. And RAM prices have been affected by inflation, so why shouldn't games?