Steam prices! Grey key sites! and the I love/hate developers thread - Enter if you dare!

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neoboy said:
In case of Ubisoft and EA they have in house developing teams, who mostly operate with set budgets
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How exactly do you think those "set budgets" are decided?

Do you reckon they just pluck a number out of thin air?

It'll be based on a combination of "how much can we afford?" (based on previous sales performance), and "how much will it make us?" (based on projected sales performance).

If the previous game made them less than expected, they will be a) less able to afford a bigger budget on the next game, and b) less inclined to do so as it is a less attractive investment.

If their projected sales are lower (due to people buying games at lower prices) then they will be less inclined to have a big budget on the game, due to the risk of not making back that investment.
 
Vonhelmet said:
Meh. If they don't pay out dividends then the shares themselves become more valuable. So long as the company is profitable it's pretty much win win.
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:confused:

But what about this extra revenue....it's not going to shareholders. Where is it going if it's not going to fund development?
 
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mid_gen said:
:confused:
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We can't have much of a discussion with one emoticon reply, fire away ;)

Haggisman said:
How exactly do you think those "set budgets" are decided?

Do you reckon they just pluck a number out of thin air?

It'll be based on a combination of "how much can we afford?" (based on previous sales performance), and "how much will it make us?" (based on projected sales performance).

If the previous game made them less than expected, they will be a) less able to afford a bigger budget on the next game, and b) less inclined to do so as it is a less attractive investment.

If their projected sales are lower (due to people buying games at lower prices) then they will be less inclined to have a big budget on the game, due to the risk of not making back that investment.
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Yes that is how a budgets are decided, but when you have Rockstar releasing a GTA 5 for £34.99/£39.99 which was supposedly the most expensive game ever produced with $265m and still have strong sales you have to question pricing strategy of other publishers.

Quick price check online and Ubisoft want £59.99 (£64.99 on uPlay) for a Gold Edition of The Division which is exactly the same price as the console. Price difference between standard edition with consoles appears to be £2.01. Now bear in mind that there is no royalty to pay towards a console here and zero resale value since the PC version will be tied to your account. Now also look at the example above where another company seems more than capable of releasing an expensive product for a lesser price.

Second issue here is somewhat that of the ridiculous day one DLC culture, but that is a different argument altogether. EA and their recent Battlefield series is also another example of extremely high pricing while releasing a very bare product.

EDIT: Just to be fair, prices above were compared on the rain forest website. Direct uPlay prices for the game right are £79.99 for Gold Edition on consoles and £69.99 (currently £64.99 promo). Bare game is still £39.99 and most retailers seem to have console variant at £42.99.
 
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Jono8 said:
Good.

I think myself and others just couldnt work out why you thought buying an nvidia game code from ebay was any better than buying a grey market/different region key.

By buying an Nvidia game code, you circumvented buying the game at the full uk retail price. Nvidia most certainly will not have paid the game creator the full uk price for those codes. They most probably bought a job lot for very little per code to bundle with the cards.

Also, technically selling them is against the EULA, just like buying a game with a vpn often is, so in both cases the rules have been circumvented somewhat.

In both instances though, as you say, they have got a sale. How much they made, who knows and we can only speculate, but as it is just a set of digits they will most certainly have made something, which is better than nothing.
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Thank you

You put that better than I could have ever have explained it.
 
People are still trying to argue that paying less for games through grey-market key sites is not going to impact development budgets. Some of the leaps of reasoning/derailing of debates happening to come to these conclusions are confusing me. Meh.

Anyway it's nearly beer o'clock :cool:
 
mid_gen said:
Developers are losing out.
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then stop developing ****

I have only vpn'd one game in my time and (if my memory serves me correctly) haven't bought from a grey area key site - for the most part I wait for games to come down in price if I am interested in them, but I have far too often dumped my hard earned pennies onto a game at RRP to discover that it was a mouldering pile of dung.

so with that I would have no issue buying a grey market game key that I wanted, if for whatever reason I couldn't wait until it dropped in price naturally

if EA/UBI and the rest of the AAA devs don't want people vpn'ing or grey market purchasing their games then they should do something to stop it.

just because someone in another country doesn't earn as much as me doesn't mean I should be subsiding their gaming habits - I earn substantial less in Northern Ireland than someone in say Manchester would do for the job I do, but I don't get my games at a reduced price because of my locale. (I'm not comparing my lifestyle to someone living in Bangladesh but you know what I mean)

also don't try and give it the 'oh can't have your cake and eat it' malarkey or the 'people who buy grey market keys are hypocrites if they complain about he quality of AAA releases cause the devs don't have the resources they need to release their games in a working bug free state'. that's utter BS. they release their products as they do so they can milk the life out of their customer base - tough if some of that customer base 'bites back' and buy at a reduced price from vpn/grey market sites

but lets be honest - and someone touched on this way back in the thread - genuinely how many people are buying from the grey market? I'd hazard a guess if it was as high a figure as some on here seem to think then something would have been done or EA/Ubi etc would be belly up by now.

we are on a pc enthusiast forum where for the most part folk know there way round the internet or at least have the ability to ask if they don't know. I'd happily guess the % amount of grey market sales is relatively small compared to the number of full RRP's the devs actually get.

**please note: the above rant was not aimed at you personal mid_gen more the AAA devs scene**
 
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I think the OP has actually done a fabulous job of proving there is a lot of people that don't care much for dev loyalty nor where the cd key comes from as long as it's cheap!
 
Did anyone see the "Weird economics of PC Game prices on PC Gamer" a while ago? I think in essence it was saying publishers charge what people are willing to pay to maximise profit (i.e. optimising the ratio of "number of sales : item price" for maximum income), and the UK is willing to pay more as we have more disposable income. In effect the UK (and others) are subsidising the gaming habits of poorer countries.

Is that fair? It's not as if gaming is essential to life.

Most people are keen to save money where possible- food shopping, petrol, shopping for goods from online stores rather than the Purple Shirt Brigade etc. Why is it viewed as OK to 'screw' the supermarket/ oil company / a struggling tech chain by shopping around, but when buying a CD key from CDkeys is viewed as screwing a developer? Why is their job more valuable than Steam/developer/publisher? We need food and oil just as much as we need games (no really I checked :eek: )
 
Authorised, cheap resellers are still almost full price on release and a fair bit after. When you're buying a digital game it should be cheaper as you cant just sell the game on to recoup most of your money like you can on console. You're stuck with a full priced game on your account forever, reminding you how much you wasted every time you look at your games library :(.

The price of Tomb Raider from CD keys at release was like £26. IMO that should be the going rate and I'm sure that was the going rate for new releases a while back. I remember paying £10 for Quake 4 in Game not long after release.
 
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If game devs were only interested in profits they wouldn't develop AAA titles at all and would move massive resources to mobile games and app development. Those games are making millions with a fraction of the development costs.

There is a tonne of passion in the gaming community to push hardware/software to the limits and engage in new technology (VR)

Problem is these games are very similar to huge Hollywood movie budgets and need to make a ridiculous amount of sales just to break even.

I think if we all purchase our games from India/Russia/Brazil we will be harming the developers but I also agree games need to be good value for money. More attention to shipping games without day 1 game breaking bugs etc. There is a definitely a middle ground to be found :)
 
I care about the Developers, but I also care about getting ripped off.

There are games that I would have never bought had it not been for cdkeys or G2A.

Some of my money is better than none surely?

If you took CD keys and G2A out of the equation and just charged people RRP for the game I gaurantee they would make less money in total because of it.
 
infernox said:
I care about the Developers, but I also care about getting ripped off.

There are games that I would have never bought had it not been for cdkeys or G2A.

Some of my money is better than none surely?

If you took CD keys and G2A out of the equation and just charged people RRP for the game I gaurantee they would make less money in total because of it.
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Definitely. PC sales would drop considerably.
 
When games still came in boxes I didn't mind spending £25-£30 on a game because when I completed it, even if it was a fairly bad game, I could still sell it on and recoup some of that cost. But with pretty much 100% of my gaming purchases in the last 8 - 9 years being digital and tied to Steam/Origin/uPlay, this is no longer possible so if a game turns out to be rubbish or broken then I am stuck with it. This is somewhat alleviated now by possibility of refund from Steam etc. but it doesn't help in all situations.

More and more games these days seem to come with a higher purchase price than even just a few years ago and start carving up the game so they can release dlc and season passes. We're getting games being released with day 1 dlc not to mention day 1 serious bugs (I have a rant about betas too these days but that's for another day).

I didn't like games that were released in parts but I've grown to like them with games from Telltale etc. as they've really hooked me and made me look forward to the next part, so I don't mind paying the price for those. What annoyed me though was the release of things like Battlefield, CoD etc. which always seemed to be much the same and started moving away from SP and more to the MP.

At the end of the day I think it's human nature to always want to seek out a bargain and if there is enough demand for it then someone is going to provide a supply.
 
I buy a lot more games because of key sites, I have got over 20 games in the last 12 months. If I had to pay full price I would only get games I really wanted and that’s only one or two a year.
 
FredFlint said:
I buy a lot more games because of key sites, I have got over 20 games in the last 12 months. If I had to pay full price I would only get games I really wanted and that’s only one or two a year.
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I feel the same. By being able to buy games a lot cheaper I'm more likely to take a chance on something I might not have bought otherwise.
 
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