Valve says games are too expensive

[Superrock]

Are games too expensive? Valve seems to think so from the data they've collected through steam. I hope developers take heed and start pricing games lower.

Article

 

[Newbian]

Well other then a special weekend like they just did for left4dead I still would rather buy box games since steams normal pricing of just a few bucks off isn't enough to warrant me paying for download games that they offer.

 

[Bateluer]

A digital download should be markedly cheaper than a boxed title. While I'm a big fan of Steam, and they've often got some great deals, some pricing makes no sense. Take Dawn of War 2, for example. its currently 50 dollars on Steam. Its sitting on a shelf at Walmart for 39. Granted, there is a convenience factor when buying the game on Steam, but I can make the 5 minute trip to Walmart, buy the game, drive back, and install it before Steam even gets close to finishing the download.

Release a quality title, and people will pay for it. A game that is fun, polished, and offers plenty for the dollar will sell more copies than a title that offers only bugs and half a day's worth of entertainment.

 

[Elcs]

Originally posted by: Bateluer
A digital download should be markedly cheaper than a boxed title. While I'm a big fan of Steam, and they've often got some great deals, some pricing makes no sense. Take Dawn of War 2, for example. its currently 50 dollars on Steam. Its sitting on a shelf at Walmart for 39. Granted, there is a convenience factor when buying the game on Steam, but I can make the 5 minute trip to Walmart, buy the game, drive back, and install it before Steam even gets close to finishing the download.

Release a quality title, and people will pay for it. A game that is fun, polished, and offers plenty for the dollar will sell more copies than a title that offers only bugs and half a day's worth of entertainment.

For reference in UK Stores (GAME), Dawn of War 2 is £35 and on UK Steam it is also £35.

 

[novasatori]

I think this is what people have been saying for awhile, but game industry says "No."

 

[lupi]

I haven't read the article yet, but here are 3 items I think are the most prevalant with the topic.

The games are seemingly overpriced across the board; when everything gets initially priced at the same price point for no other reason than it's the same as the rest that is a problem. Add to this how short many games are now in play through time. It is good to note that a few select pc titles have been released at $40 instead of $50.

Second is the portion of the market that don't like the digital/drm renting of games and shun services like steam.

Third is the trained behavior being developed to wait for titles you are interested in to go on sale.

 

[Zenoth]

I still remember when I paid $70 for my SNES games, somehow I feel alright paying $40 or $50 for my PC games. But there are things I don't like such as digitally-downloaded games being the exact same price as full retail products. The thing about digital downloads is that you don't have the DVD(s), nor the instruction manual (in which there's often very interesting presentation texts and also often related to the story or at least the game's characters and/or items), nor the box itself. And all those physical items we pay for within the price of a retail game are also being included in digital downloads, and honestly I don't get it.

However I don't have a problem with paying $50 for a retail game, especially not when it's a known one or from a good developer, but that part is entirely subjective from the consumer and it shouldn't affect the prices of actual production. If some random and "boring" game from a no-name company costs $50 then I still don't have a problem with that price, and if I don't like it there's a good chance I will return it for a refund anyway.

 

[ja1484]

Originally posted by: Bateluer
A digital download should be markedly cheaper than a boxed title. While I'm a big fan of Steam, and they've often got some great deals, some pricing makes no sense. Take Dawn of War 2, for example. its currently 50 dollars on Steam. Its sitting on a shelf at Walmart for 39. Granted, there is a convenience factor when buying the game on Steam, but I can make the 5 minute trip to Walmart, buy the game, drive back, and install it before Steam even gets close to finishing the download.

Release a quality title, and people will pay for it. A game that is fun, polished, and offers plenty for the dollar will sell more copies than a title that offers only bugs and half a day's worth of entertainment.

People have been bitching this way for a while but don't seem to get it:

Until Dig. Delivery becomes the big dog in the house, publishers will continue to control pricing on titles. Right now, most game companies NEED physical shelf space to survive, precisely because of people going "DIGITAL GAMES SHOULD BE CHEAPER! WAAAAA!".

If you REALLY want to speed along the idea of digital delivery and its lowering game prices, you need to be buying DD titles EVEN NOW. The more people switch, the less physical publishing matters, and the less say publishers have in the matter.

 

[minmaster]

i think lower price will cut down some piracy and help a lot with sales.

 

[JoshGuru7]

Steam isn't for everybody and not being able to resell games is a significant detraction for those who put importance on that. However, I disagree that games on steam are worth less than they would be otherwise for the simple reason that Steam allows you to register many of your store-bought games and apparently quite a few people take advantage of this service. Presumably they wouldn't be doing so if they didn't think that Steam actually added value.

Steam does have some strong points. Access to your library from any PC/laptop is a big plus as is not having to deal with CD checks. Having nothing physical can be seen as an advantage as there's nothing to misplace or break. Automatic updates are handy as well, along with not having to deal with additional DRM beyond Steam itself.

I do agree that games in general are overpriced. $50 is fine for a great game with some replayability, but the average game is probably worth a quarter of that to me depending on quality. $20 was a much better price IMO for L4D for all of those gamers that didn't have a regular group to play with it and thus only got some of the replayability out of it.

 

[novasatori]

Originally posted by: Zenoth
If some random and "boring" game from a no-name company costs $50 then I still don't have a problem with that price, and if I don't like it there's a good chance I will return it for a refund anyway.

You can do that in Canada?

You can't in the US, I remember when you used to be able to.

 

[AVP]

You also have to take into consideration the emotional and mental factors that accompany consumers when they purchase items that are "on sale." When prices are cut, a lot of economic and rational decisions are ignored because people are afraid to miss opportunities and think they are getting a steal. Fixated prices on "weekend deal" levels will not necessarily turn into exactly the same general volume of sales taking into account the decrease after initial offerings.

 

[Zenoth]

Originally posted by: novasatori

Originally posted by: Zenoth
If some random and "boring" game from a no-name company costs $50 then I still don't have a problem with that price, and if I don't like it there's a good chance I will return it for a refund anyway.

You can do that in Canada?

You can't in the US, I remember when you used to be able to.

Most of the time, yes, but not for games in which there's too much DRM (or any DRM I think, I'm not entirely certain). I had a LOT of problems for my local Future Shop to accept my copy of Spore when I returned it, and after meeting with two different guys I finally asked to talk to a tech-support representative, claiming that my reason for return wasn't that I thought it was "boring" but that it refused to work.

They finally accepted, and they didn't test it to make sure it was true or not. I just didn't want to get stuck with such a boring game and I wanted my money back. But that was one rare case out of a very few others I've had. I'd say that a good 8 times out of 10 if you say that your game don't work they will accept to refund it. It may also depend on the store's own return policies.

 

[SunnyD]

Repost.

 

[911paramedic]

Originally posted by: Bateluer
A digital download should be markedly cheaper than a boxed title. While I'm a big fan of Steam, and they've often got some great deals, some pricing makes no sense. Take Dawn of War 2, for example. its currently 50 dollars on Steam. Its sitting on a shelf at Walmart for 39. Granted, there is a convenience factor when buying the game on Steam, but I can make the 5 minute trip to Walmart, buy the game, drive back, and install it before Steam even gets close to finishing the download.

Release a quality title, and people will pay for it. A game that is fun, polished, and offers plenty for the dollar will sell more copies than a title that offers only bugs and half a day's worth of entertainment.

But you also have to pay for gas to and from the store, and sales tax. But sometimes I do like to have the physical disk in my hands. Just depends on what you prefer I guess.

 

[bamacre]

Crappy games are too expensive. Good games are, IMO, too cheap. I'm willing to pay more money for a game that offers better replay value, better gameplay, a more efficient and optimized engine.

PC game developers need to start thinking outside of the box, but at the same time, remember what makes PC games better than console games.

I would love to see a game come out that costs $100 and $30/month for MP, AND be worth every penny. A game so good that even people who had never played a video game before rush out to buy it, and the hardware to run it.

 

[Maximilian]

Yes, on steam they are too expensive anyway. The old brick and mortar stores... i dont even factor them in anymore, but getting a game disk delivered to you from a website often works out cheaper (usually significantly cheaper) than buying off steam. Gameplay.co.uk and play.com almost always beat steam on price.

 

[chizow]

Heh, I had a feeling the holiday sales and weekend deals were a glorified social experiment or case study. It looks like Valve learned something, hopefully they find creative ways to take advantage of that data.

Hopefully this is the start of some changes in the industry with regards to pricing models. I still prefer retail boxed copies for numerous reasons, although I never sell my games, but I'd be willing to deal with Steam's negatives if they reduced pricing and came up with more creative content/pricing models.

Still, I think the most important lesson learned here is that people will put up with restrictive DRM and actually buy games as long as you lower prices, which ultimately results in greater total revenue (and profits) despite smaller margins per sale. I think the biggest challenge will be getting Valve and other publishers to put their titles on sale while they're still relatively new and relevant.

 

[ZzZGuy]

IIRC most gaming companies have a agreement with distributes of hard copies to not compete with them on price. So quite often they have to charge slightly more for the DD version then the boxed version.

 

[SMOGZINN]

Originally posted by: ja1484

People have been bitching this way for a while but don't seem to get it:

Until Dig. Delivery becomes the big dog in the house, publishers will continue to control pricing on titles. Right now, most game companies NEED physical shelf space to survive, precisely because of people going "DIGITAL GAMES SHOULD BE CHEAPER! WAAAAA!".

If you REALLY want to speed along the idea of digital delivery and its lowering game prices, you need to be buying DD titles EVEN NOW. The more people switch, the less physical publishing matters, and the less say publishers have in the matter.

That is a bad argument. There is already DD, and it is already successful. Now what we need is for some publisher to take the risk of putting out a new major title priced around $25 to see if the lower price will drive enough volume to make it a success. If or when that happens it will change the entire industry in one fell swoop. The problem is that if that should happen it will negate a lot of the power the distributors currently hold over the industry, and they don?t want that, so they are going to make it difficult to change.

 

[TidusZ]

I'd pay $200 for Diablo 3, just the disk.

Edit: I'd actually pay more, but I wanna play hard to get and settle on less

I paid $90 something for Earthbound way back, totally worth it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQcnDx1TCNc

 

[RyanPaulShaffer]

Originally posted by: Zenoth
I still remember when I paid $70 for my SNES games, somehow I feel alright paying $40 or $50 for my PC games. But there are things I don't like such as digitally-downloaded games being the exact same price as full retail products. The thing about digital downloads is that you don't have the DVD(s), nor the instruction manual (in which there's often very interesting presentation texts and also often related to the story or at least the game's characters and/or items), nor the box itself. And all those physical items we pay for within the price of a retail game are also being included in digital downloads, and honestly I don't get it.

However I don't have a problem with paying $50 for a retail game, especially not when it's a known one or from a good developer, but that part is entirely subjective from the consumer and it shouldn't affect the prices of actual production. If some random and "boring" game from a no-name company costs $50 then I still don't have a problem with that price, and if I don't like it there's a good chance I will return it for a refund anyway.

This. I paid $80 for Super Mario 3 for the NES. The same for Final Fantasy 3 and Chrono Trigger for the SNES.

$50-$60 for a game is still way cheaper than we used to pay back in the cartridge days. Games cost a lot more to develop now as well, with all them fancy new-fangled graphics and such!

That being said, I would never buy a digital game unless it was significantly cheaper than the physical copy. I'm talking like 50% off. You're giving up too much (actually having a physical good, instruction book, no DRM, etc.) when you buy something digitally to justify anything other than a deep discount. The producer/distributor also save significant bucks with digital as well, since there is nothing physical to manufacture or distribute. I imagine they gain a large chunk of pure profit from digital sales, since they cut out a lot of the middle-men.

 

[Saga]

Originally posted by: ZenothIf some random and "boring" game from a no-name company costs $50 then I still don't have a problem with that price, and if I don't like it there's a good chance I will return it for a refund anyway.

Out of curiosity, how often do you do this, and how often does it succeed? Recently, any game I've purchased, even from the so-called no-name company's, all include CD-Keys. I have NEVER successfully returned an opened piece of software for a full refund to ANY store, with or without CD-Key. Replacement of defective product, sure - as two copies in a row of BF2014 came without a CD key printed on the manual, but I have not found a single retail store where I can buy software and return it for a refund once it's opened. Add in the fact that most use CD keys and are thus even LESS likey to accept a return and you'll have to color me confused as to how you suggest this as an option.

I've basically always been under the assumption that once I opened that shiny shrink wrap, nothing less than parting the red sea outside the store I bought it from would see me returning it for a refund.

 

[Adam8281]

STEAM games are too expensive, at any rate (IMO, obviously millions of people don't share it). When I buy a boxed game for $40, part of my value assessment is that I will resell the game when I am done with it and recoup some $$ to use towards another game. Frequently I am able to resell a game I paid $40 for around $30, after playing it for a couple months and getting tired of it/beating it. You can't do that with STEAM games, and that is why I never buy them unless they are EXTREMELY cheap (e.g. bought Bioshock when it was $4.99 over the holidays, and TF2 when it was $9.99.) I wonder if anyone feels similarly?

 

[Red Storm]

Originally posted by: Adam8281
STEAM games are too expensive, at any rate (IMO, obviously millions of people don't share it). When I buy a boxed game for $40, part of my value assessment is that I will resell the game when I am done with it and recoup some $$ to use towards another game. Frequently I am able to resell a game I paid $40 for around $30, after playing it for a couple months and getting tired of it/beating it. You can't do that with STEAM games, and that is why I never buy them unless they are EXTREMELY cheap (e.g. bought Bioshock when it was $4.99 over the holidays, and TF2 when it was $9.99.) I wonder if anyone feels similarly?

The games I buy last me years, not months, so the idea of reselling never factors in my purchasing choices.

I'm fine with DD games costing the same price as their retail box counterpart. As others have said, Steam has many advantages to it that I feel justify that equal price tag. Having a physical disk with a book manual used to be important back in the days when retail boxes were actually big enough to hold something of value, now they're just dvd-cases with ads and a short manual thrown in. I'd gladly pay the same amount for a digital download that I can take with me to any capable PC without having to worry about taking care of, and transporting disks.