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[Chaos]

Inspired by FinalDeath in the L4D2 thread thinking anything over £20 is too much for that game..

What do you think a fair price for an average new release is?
Keep in mind that games like MW2 that sell for a LOT more than most others and most likely will stay that way..
but for the average major release (l4d2/borderlands/assassins creed 2/bioshock 2 ect) what do you think a fair price is?

Personally, I think around £15 is a fair price.. that way, more people get the game and the devs make the same amount of money (roughly).. more people buying pc games means bigger communities which will in turn, introduce more people to PC gaming which will end up in more people to try and sell games too... growth
Games are quite expensive if you think about it and the money is the reason why MOST people pirate them. so if you make games cheaper, piracy will slow (but will never end)

I could be wrong.. just my thoughts on that matter

[Power]

Yeah the problem with the prices is, that the companies don't want to "miss" the revenue they COULD have, if people bought the game at full price. Valve's experiments clearly shown, that if you reduce the price significantly, the revenue (not just the amount of sales!) goes up by a rather large number. But what a corporate moron will see on his charts is:

1. here is the revenue, when someone reduced the price
2. here is the revenue, they WOULD have if the same amount of people would buy the game at the previous price (which is OF COURSE much higher)

What the companies apparently struggle to understand is that, without the new price, they wouldn't sell the same amount of copies, but yeah.. that's the part that they have to THINK to understand, it doesn't appear on any charts.

For me a sweet price for a game that seem perfect for me and that I am really looking forward to would be around 30€. On Steam sales, the limit to instanlty buy a game, that I found interesting, without really planning to buy it otherwise, seems to be about 10€. I would pay anywhere between 30€ and 10€ for a game I wanted to buy eventually anyway if I'm not short on money. Everything OVER 30 € is a very rare exception, usually you can get pretty much every game for about 30€ if you wait as much as a month after release.

I think the only things I bought at full price was GHWT (full band pack 200€), RB2 and GH5 (50€ each). I probably also spend about 200€ on the downloadable content for those games by now, which costs 1.50 - 2 € per item.

[Magathery]

Oh there has deffinatly got to be a fair price. A Look through the bargin bin would usually highlight the game that had been relised a couple of years earlier for £40 was now availible for a fiver.

Unfortunatly there are buisnessmen. And even though the developers may be realy keen and honest and scrupulos, buisnessmen aren't.

After spending all that time "developing" the game, they are going to want it hyped up befor it's reliese and  have it sutably overpriced on the first day it hits the shelfs. That way the first nerd rush of fan-boyisum will generate a great deal of cash real quick. Then over a period of time, drop the price to keep generating money from the people who passed it over a £40 who will buy it at £30. Then at £20 and so on.

Ideal world vs real world. It never sees eye to eye

I'll just about begrudgingly pay £30 for a game that I realy want. I don't think it's a fair price. But it's the life triangle. Good, Cheap, Fast. You can have 2 out of 3.

[Ringelbeatz]

20-25€ is a fair price (from the view of a consumer).

I don't know anything about the costs of producing a game.
But I think that games like fifa/pes which come out every year shouldn't be sold for 40-50€...

The longer a developement takes the more money they have to take.

I totally agree with your arguments and maybe -if we would live in a better world- publishers/developers would think about that in the same way. But they don't.

Maybe game developers would sell their games for 20€, but first they have to take money from publishers to produce games.
I think that the publishers are the evil force behind that pricing system, which say that they have to sell the game for 50€.
Like Power/Rippy said before - it's the world of business.

[Teatime]

One-sided discussion.

You can't discuss "fair pricing" without taking into consideration the costs involved into producing the game, including the various production phases, like developing ideas, creating the story, collecting and creating source materials (textures, sounds, etc), developing and refining tools and engine(s).
I'm sure a developer can easily spend a 5 figured amount of money before being into the actual production phase.
Then the game has to be created, tested, refined, voice actors have to be hired.
Sometimes the developer discover the concept simply doesn't work and they have to head back into the planning phase. Or the concept grows beyond the capabilities of the engine and the engine has to be refined, revised or completely exchanged.
And in the end phase the product has to be playtested and also tested on as many different hardware combinations as possible.
All that may take a couple of years in which employees have to be paid, equipment be bought or leased, repaired, upgraded, possibly additional equipment rented. Office rent may have to be paid.
All that without having a single source of income (unless the developer has profits from previous products which he can draw from *hint hint*)
Perhaps the developer has to take a loan to bridge the time.

So let's say a developer has spent a few million dollars into developing a game, what would be the fair price for that product? And how much time should the developer be willing to wait for his costs to be covered before he's making profit. And how much profit do we think is "fair" for a developer.

All this disregards the role of publishers, of course, which - I agree - is a rather big one these days.
  
PS: This also disregards any question about quality control. If a developer might be forced to save money because of lower expected revenues ask yourself where that saving will take place.

[Power]

All true Teatime and of course it's a one sided discussion, because we aren't developers. For us as customers, it doesn't matter if the developers had to download all of the internet to make this game. It's simple: if you develop a product and set a specific price because of whatever factors you encountered in your developement, if the price is too high for your standard customer, you won't sell shit.

Set your price accordingly to DEMAND (it's demand sets the price in the end, not the other way around, except if your price is too fucking high, which kills any demand on the spot) and if you cannot make your product profitable with that price, then you probably spent a bit too much money producing it. I don't deny that there are games in production now that cost millions to make, my question would be, "why do they cost millions to make?" and in some cases "why are they still shit?".

And as was said before. Selling a product to a lower price (within the limits of getting some revenue from it, of course) will actually bring back MORE revenue, due to a much higher amount of sold units - the numbers of free weekends (procentual, which is not telling much) and of the recent World of Goo experiment (which took it all a bit to the extreme) clearly show, that at some point even people who never meant to buy a product will buy it if the price is tempting.

[Brahms]

My fair price depends on the game:

Something like Cod4, tf2, battlefield, I'm happy to pay £25 for, knowing that I will play the game for HOURS. I mean, 260 hours of tf2... I think I paid £10, that's good value.

Something with less replay value I will pay less for, a lot of singleplayer games I just don't bother getting till the price is way down and my hardware can run it very well. So I'm not buying Arkham Asylum, Dragon Age, Fallout 3, resident evil 5 until the price is down to about £10, £15.

The thing I think needs to be considered at the moment, is the wonkiness of digital distribution. Music seems to have got this OK, but games and books are still a bit off. ESPECIALLY books.

[Power]

Books? What the hell is that?

[Hzza]

Books? What the hell is that?

Remember when you bought games back in the day they came in a box with a filmsy material with strange and arcane squiggles on them? Thats books.

[Power]

Oh! Thanks mate! I thought those were newspapers, actually.

[Guilt is a rope... etc]

I feel same as Brahms, If you think of it in £ per hour of entertainment lots of games are good value.
I think the £30-35 mark for new games is fair, its just about in impulse buy territory.
Although general presure on prices is downwards, the one thing that bothers me is Special editions with extra content, Dragon age etc. £10 extra for a magic ring is stupid, however I can see in the future more vital content being added as special edition features such as multiplayer.

[Junta]

I've been used to the £29.99 mark for most games as "reasonable".. I also seem to remember that PC games (for me) have been around this mark for a while....

I would make the odd exception, but the game itself would have to be pretty special

Console prices for games seem a much bigger rip off I feel....

[discordance]

well thats the joy of closed systems. The hardware is always sold at a loss so they can rape you on software. Just think of it as a mainstream tax. Or replace mainstream with whatever you like to call console knobjockeys.

[Zarf]

If new "premium" games were released on Steam at £10-£15, i'd buy them.

[Junta]

console knobjockeys.