Price of games is stupidly expensive

Baldbloke

Baldbloke

Baldbloke

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sixty quid for a game? get lost.

I don't game much. Bit of sim racing and a wee bit Call of Duty campaign (Well, it has actually been many years since I played COD but I'll try to get back in to it).

I recently bought Call of Duty Modern Warfare (not v2, just the first one) for £16-ish quid on steam sale. Fair enough. Bit dear for my liking but what the heck, go for it I thought to myself.

Then, when I booted up the the game for the first time I was slapped in the face with offers of more expensive upgrades, download content and other stuff for some ridiculous sum of money. Eff off, I thought.

Ok, it's a business. I get that. I think it is ethically dislikable but the world is what it is. I am a 62 year old man who has a good idea of when to call a halt on stupid purchases. What about the young kids who are going to their parents and asking for more money to get the latest fancy dangling carrot? Must be a chuffing nightmare.

Rant ended (But not over:). Your turn.
 
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I've been gaming, on and off, since Pong. And it's a very long time since I bought a game at full release price... or anything close. I don't play online, so don't need a community around a new game (to me). So I wait, I play things at a price point I like, I let people subsidize my gaming with their full priced releases if they want.

I apply the same reasoning to PC hardware... though these days it's cheaper to buy a laptop than play the hardware game. We live in strange times. Lots of people have lots of money to waste. Lots of people have less money to waste. Fortunately games aren't important and we don't need to buy them at all.
 
Just dropped £90 on Diablo 4. By far the most I have ever spent on a game before. As long as I get the same amount of time out of it as D3, I will be happy (even if it was a poor game when compared to D2). If i get the same amount of enjoyment and time as Diablo 2, well I am looking at pence per hour of enjoyment, so will be worth it.
 
Andrew_McP said:
I've been gaming, on and off, since Pong. And it's a very long time since I bought a game at full release price... or anything close. I don't play online, so don't need a community around a new game (to me). So I wait, I play things at a price point I like, I let people subsidize my gaming with their full priced releases if they want.

I apply the same reasoning to PC hardware... though these days it's cheaper to buy a laptop than play the hardware game. We live in strange times. Lots of people have lots of money to waste. Lots of people have less money to waste. Fortunately games aren't important and we don't need to buy them at all.
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Ah, good old pong. I actually built the game from components back in 1976. Etched my own pcb for it too. It worked after three or four troubleshoots and heartaches. Main component was the eprom. Cost me just as much to build it back then as it was to buy a ready made one. The experience of building it was invaluable though.
 
xaldub said:
As a form of entertainment, gaming represents good value for money, even at £60-70 per game. The real issue is game developers/publishers releasing unfinished or buggy products and then charging the consumer extra through DLC or MTX to fix it.
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This really.

When the game is done properly, £60 is still very good value for money. I operate on the £ per hour system for judging value for money and there is virtually no other form of entertainment that I can get 60+ hours of entertainment for £60. Thats not even taking into account titles like the Civilization or Anno games where I get hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of hours of entertainment out of. Lets take the upcoming Diablo 4 game, I've paid £70 for that but I got something like 300-400 hours of gaming out of Diablo 3 and expect at least the same from Diablo 4...

So if we work that out, lets say 300 hours, 300 hours into £70 works out as 23p per hour. What other form of entertainment can I get for 23p an hour !?

The issue isnt the price, its when, as Xaldub says the quality isnt there and frankly at that point it doesnt matter whether the game cost £60, or £40, or £20. A bad game is a bad game.
 
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I think I paid around £25 for Cyberpunk a few weeks back but having played it I would have had no issues paying pull price in it's current state, worth every penny.

Compared to other forms of entertainment I don't think gaming is bad value, especially if you're willing to wait for prices to drop. It is a shame so many games are released in such a bad state though.
 
Games are only expensive if you 'must have' them at launch, which generally applies to time sensitive games e.g. those god awful annual releases or some online only RPG's with a race to the end content.

There is such a huge back catalogue for newer gamers that just delaying the purchase for a while could save you 50-90% of the cost, or you end up with a version that isn't half finished, or missing the now accepted DLC downloads tacked on a few months later with yet another cost attached. For those of us who have been around forever playing anything and everything then it's harder to ignore new releases, but I always seem to find something I've missed.
 
I think inflation isn't being considered.

£35 in 2003 is the same as £60 in 2023.

Half Life 2 was £35 in 1998 (£72 in 2023)
Gears of War 2 was £40 in 2008 (£60 in 2023)
Diablo 2 was £35 in 2000 (£62 in 2023)

So the reality is....it's kinda how it's always been. You're all just showing your age*... "Back in my day" etc.
*note I'm 42 so I shouldn't joke about it.
 
Journey said:
Games are only expensive if you 'must have' them at launch, which generally applies to time sensitive games e.g. those god awful annual releases or some online only RPG's with a race to the end content.

There is such a huge back catalogue for newer gamers that just delaying the purchase for a while could save you 50-90% of the cost, or you end up with a version that isn't half finished, or missing the now accepted DLC downloads tacked on a few months later with yet another cost attached. For those of us who have been around forever playing anything and everything then it's harder to ignore new releases, but I always seem to find something I've missed.
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This

People have tended to get used to the fact that for a long time games were 30-40 new, basically for 20+ years, and forget that going back to the 90's ~30 was common, and unless as you way yoiu want a top tier game on launch you don't have to pay £50, if you wait a few months it'll usually drop a lot in price, I very rarely pay full RRP or buy games on launch but rather get them in sales etc as I know i'm likely to not play them for a while :)

The thing that does annoy me a lot though is DLC that should have been part of the base game, I've no issue with say an entire expansion 6-12 months down the road, but day one DLC with what feels like a good portion of what should have been in the initial game always feels like a kick in the teeth, especially when the main game is quite short.
However for cosmetic DLC I'm not too fussed although it's scary how much cosmetic DLC some games have, I've got a couple of games in my collection that I could spend a couple of hundred pounds on purely cosmetic stuff if I was so inclined (basically it doesn't affect gameplay so it's not an issue imo).

If I was to get my cane out and start to shake it around I could for example point to some of the Snes games that were around 50 or 60*, or that there have been £50 disc based games for at least 30 years for some "premium" titles.

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If anything games now are about as cheap as they've ever been given you can buy a full game that was AAA rated and is maybe a couple of years old for under a fiver new, i remember back in the 90's physical games never really dropped that low unless second hand or the store was trying to clear out their stockroom and shelves (anyone remember the old games boxes that were the size of a large hardback book and usually had a hefty manual, often a map or keyboard overlay etc?:))


*The most expensive one I can remember was an import copy of Street Fight 2 Turbo, IIRC it was a Japanese copy about a week after it's release and my local indie game store had it for around £120ish (basically the same as a Snes solus console).
 
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My main gripe is that console games have a huge cut for Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony, often 15-20% of the cost so anything up to £15 per copy goes straight to them. PC games have no such licensing costs and previously PC versions would be £10-£15 cheaper due to this. This is no longer the case with PC games costing the same as console versions. It’s just corporate greed wanting that extra £10 or £15 in their pockets.
 
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In the majority of cases I'm happy to wait for the inevitable sale 6-12 months after release, by which point whatever game I'm interested in has received a few patches and is actually in a playable state.

There's the odd thing I'll buy day one, but it's exceedingly rare at this point. In fact the only title on the horizon I'll be picking up straight away is FF7R2 on PS5, the game will be sold once I'm finished for most of its value and I'll wait for a discounted PC release before playing it again.
 
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Matmulder said:
I think inflation isn't being considered.

£35 in 2003 is the same as £60 in 2023.

Half Life 2 was £35 in 1998 (£72 in 2023)
Gears of War 2 was £40 in 2008 (£60 in 2023)
Diablo 2 was £35 in 2000 (£62 in 2023)

So the reality is....it's kinda how it's always been. You're all just showing your age*... "Back in my day" etc.
*note I'm 42 so I shouldn't joke about it.
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I preordered Anno 2070 collectors edition direct from Ubisoft, came in a card box, audio CDs, poster, art book bigger than A5 but smaller than A4, and the game - £20. That was in 2011. :p
 
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I don’t really buy the whole “gaming is one of the cheapest forms of entertainment” ethos that people keep throwing around recently. You really need to be factoring in the cost of hardware and peripherals in to the gaming experience when you’re claiming your “£ per hour” figure. It’s a bit like saying ‘nice Mercedes, how much did it cost you?’ - “oh just 45mpg” :p
 
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