Are Modern Video Game Prices Too High? | Cimmarian
Summary
The Cimmarian community is discussing the controversial topic of rising video game prices. This thread explores whether the $70 standard is justified by development costs or if it unfairly impacts gamers, particularly in regions like Canada. Members are debating the balance between game quality, subscription models, and the frustration of microtransactions in full-priced titles.
https://kotaku.com/capcom-president-game-prices-too-low-resident-evil-4-1850874279
Feel free to give your 2 cents below.
Should be higher?
Lmao, what?
I think it really depending on regional buying power. For the US, I don't think it's too tall of an ask for them to charge $70, because $60 has been more or less the standard price for like, more than 20 years? Keeping it the same for so long means that margins are lower over time, and dev costs & scale have only gone up since. Personally, I'm not really feelin' it chief since I don't buy games full price often.
Every game I want is 90$ 😦
[sad Canadian noises] 
Lmao, Now if you want a case made of tin its like 150$+ 😆
Gotta be little more specific, the PS4 ~~remake~~ remaster, the PS5 remake, or the PC port remake? The PC port was rough
Yo show me how to emulate Tekken 8
Classic Bethesda
Didn't Sony want to raise their prices and Xbox said they would stay the same.
I've only ever bought/pre-ordered a full price game like, 3 times? One of them was RE4 Remake, imho it was definitely worth paying to get the fear of god impaled into me
https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2020/11/sony_considered_raising_ps5_game_prices_beyond_usd70_says_new_report
Capcom's chief financial officer, Kenkichi Nomura, adds: "We believe game software’s price should be determined by how much money consumers are willing to pay for the quality, not by how much money we spend to make that game."
Surprise surprise
I think I would be willing to pay a higher price than to have to deal with a subscription model, some freemiums games are really pushing it
I just hate how fighting games and JRPGs are all 90+$ in Canada. Sales are only like 20% off most of the time.
Imagine full-priced games like DbD with multiple MTX and battle passes. Thank god for retail pricing.
y-yeah, full priced games with microtransactions slapped onto it. fun
Capcom's take is a bit bad, and annoying to look at. I get "adult gamer that doesn't have the time to deal with anything but the main story line" vibes
Discord sent us an expired image link.
Not sure who would actually pay for this?
Imagine is war thunder was 60$ on release.
https://tenor.com/view/money-trump-russia-putin-gop-gif-12542181
Oh that's just a thing with retro gaming in general, it's gross how egregiously overpriced N64 games can be for example.
Wait, was DbD a full priced game??
Yes
With ZERO MTX and battle passes. Just DLC
Then they added all that and kept changing for DLC even used the "uneven" currency trick on things like skins.
They didn't like steam taking a cut of their cosmetics market. So they made the MTX system to cut steam out.
Their excuse "Developmental costs" surprise surprise
Fighting games drive me up the wall the most. might know.
Oh, I couldn't remember how I got DbD, but looking at my purchase history, the only thing that shows up is the Silent Hill Chapter DLC.
I tried to get some people into GGS and boom. They upped the prices of the base game by 20% and the DLC by 90%
I guess I've only ever spent $7.57 on DbD
It is a Co-op game which requires players else you can't play so it was common practice to buy it for others. They made millions but waited till 2023 to add bots and other quality of life features. 🙂
Personally I think DbD should have gone F2P back in 2019. When they added the battle pass.
They praised it because 70% of their consumers bought it.
yeah... the price for a base game going up, I kinda get it. But if they're going to charge more, it's totally fair that they should be put under far more scrutiny about quality, balance, MTX practices, etc
game dev work takes a lot of time, and a lot of money, reminds me how people have said that Baldur's Gate 3 is the exception, and shouldn't be that new standard. I'm just trying to find a middle ground.
https://www.xfire.com/guilty-gear-strive-more-expensive-steam/
Japanese devs are all pushing to make games no less than 90$ by 2024. At least the triple A ones.
I guess execs just want to see "green line go up"
Imagine the cries and lawsuits we are gonna hear about the resurfacing (pun intended) of pirates.
https://tenor.com/view/pirates-of-the-caribbean-johnny-gif-25961889
fwiw, movie and show streaming is going through the same thing these days. Piracy is slowly becoming more convenient again
The DLC Characters is a tough one since making characters is expensive and if you only want one 5-10$ seems reasonable. Once it's 20+$ it's ridicules.
Pallete DLC can fuck off though.
I am not paying you money for some pallete swaps.
I'd sooner mod
"This color pack unlocks 2 new colors for the 24 characters up to Season 2."
Literally costs 9.99 Canadian
Hard pass
Probably... I have not looked since I only had the first one that came with the pre-order.
Yes, my season pass comes with the additional colours of the first season characters.
The good news is after tax on their new expensive bundle it costs 200$ 🤤
I agree with that since physical copies aren't really physical copies anymore that it should lower the price. At least there should be a difference between physical and digital copies in my opinion.
At the same time it's understandable to increase the prices a little bit. The production costs have increased exponentially when compared to the past, however there's also a lot more people playing games than when I was in high school and micro transactions are a thing as well so the question is, what's the ratio at the moment?
Regardless of how much the prices will change (I feel like 70 would be fine for a new game with all regular content included) if they keep releasing games with all those micro transactions and what's more important in an unfinished state it's reasonable to hold them much more accountable for it with refunds etc. no questions asked.
As a business if you're selling a product and want to increase the prices there has to be an incentive to the customer. A quid pro quo so to speak. Unfinished games or games that require you to periodically pay more than the original costs for minor content updates or fixes that should have been in the game from the start aren't really convincing.
A fun fact about digital copies EA were the original advocators to make games digital to cut out the production costs and middle man like Nintendo etc. EA being EA once they did get things rolling towards digital with other companies like Bethesda etc. They released their "digital" money saving games at full retail price.
As far as I can learn it's called Retail Parity which Paradoxically keeps digital and physical games the same price. TL;DR If a retail store sells a game at 70$ Digital store fronts are not allowed to make it lower than the physical retail market.
Yay, Marketing
Distinct from these two types of clauses, however, are price-parity clauses (PPCs). A PPC is an agreement between a platform and an independent seller under which the seller agrees to offer their goods on the platform for their lowest advertised price.
This is why Ubisoft, Ea etc. All wanted their own DRMs
This means they can agree to sell it for 70-80$ on Steam but 60$ on their platform on release. The reasoning was that Steam took a cut but not when the store is their own.
That is about as deep as my knowledge goes on the matter.
That's interesting. I never heard about that before but I guess it makes sense from a marketing perspective
It will be interesting to see how things change in the upcoming months and years
It was EU that made it apparently, They felt the digital markets were going to destroy physcial markets so they created these Parity clauses. (Sell in EU, One must sell the same Physical and Digital)
NA didn't give two shits, They just wanted the cheapest prices 😄
xD
Not surprised at all
AMURIKA = If two chinese working kids means I get my Nintendo for 100$ I want working chinese kids!
I think you posted this in the wrong channel?
Oops. Yeah
