NEWS: $90 video games?

RITOS · **Joined:** Wed Feb 11, 2009 3:57 pm **Posts:** 209

This brought my piss to a boil:

qj.ps3.net wrote:

Activision's decision to raise the suggested retail price of Modern Warfare 2 (Xbox 360, PS3, and PC) in the UK to UK£ 54.99 (almost US$ 90) has raised a furor among gamers in the region. Former SCEE president Chris Deering recognizes that a conundrum exists: prices for blockbuster titles should be even higher in order to support the industry, but people "just don't have that kind of money."

Deering, who is the current chairman of the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, says that if publishers want their games to support the games industry as much as it did ten years ago, they would have to raise the prices of their blockbuster releases to a whopping UK£ 70 (around US$ 115).

Here's what he told MCV earlier this week:

Before there can be as many successful blockbuster games as there were in the past, games have to be produced in a more efficient fashion.

In order to price these games at a level where they would support an industry [as strongly as] they did ten years ago, they’d have to be sold at £70. But people just don’t have that kind of money, there’s a psychological glass ceiling.

Consumers won’t spend more, but to write the game, publishers are having to spend more than ever before. That’s the key problem.

Great way for a game developer to commit suicide...

As long as I can remember video games have been about $50-70 each. While perhaps the earlier games (Snes, Genesis, etc) may have been easier to code by today's standards, the format (the RAM cartridges) were expensive. Lucklily digital disks (CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays) make publishing video games much less expensive and it's primarily the reason why games prices have stayed pretty level these last 20 or so years. Meanwhile, programming has become much more complex for the most part.

Luckily now there are other nice little tools that keeps production costs down: Dev tools and Pre-developed game engines (ex: Unreal Engine, CryEngine, etc). Games don't need to be programmed form the ground up, so most of the work isn't raw C++ code. (That would be HELL)

In fact, Modern Warfare 2 is using the IW Engine, which is present in all of the new and recent CoD games and is licensed out to other game developers. So what Activision is really saying is: "We want to double-dip by charging more to the consumer for our work, as well as licensing our work to other companies for a profit."

Sorry, I just don't see how $90-110 games can POSSIBLY be justified, especially in the current world economy where people aren't throwing away money like they used to do. I imagine that if you started selling games for 50% MORE than they cost right now, then 50% of the market will give you the middle finger.

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