My thoughts are that any downloaded game should be considerably cheaper than a box with contents like an acceptable manual and a CD or a DVD.
If they can sell such a box and still make a profit, taking into consideration the manufacturing cost of that box itself and the contents, then the price of that downloaded game should have that extra cost deducted.
I'm not talking special edition here, just a normal purchase without any extras.
The prices of games themselves are a different issue, and I can't quite understand that a hike in price should be considered unusual, seeing that everything else is going up at more or less the same rate (except our wages).
That makes perfect sense, but unfortunately it won't happen any time soon.
As digital distribution has developed concurrently with the waning years of traditional physical distribution there are a number of reasons this could not be possible.
Firstly, retailer pressure. If a publisher offers a digital download of a game for considerably lower than the retail copy, it will kill the retail business stone dead.
Extras notwithstanding, price is everything and I can guarantee you any ideas like your proposed one will have been immediately shot down for reasons of greed and fear of upsetting physical retailers who until very recently have held the majority of the sales and power.
Now we're faced with the situation that digital downloads ARE replacing physical games, we're not far off from a day when that will be the case, but prices still won't go down.
Why?
Pure greed but also the superb convenience for publishers that that digital downloads are already priced similarly to physical media due to my previous reason. They will not be dropping the prices any time soon, regardless of the significantly lower production and distribution costs.
People are already attuned to paying full price for downloads and the companies are simply not going to stop this, likely citing inflation and increased development costs as mitigating factors.
So the retailers are destroyed, the publishers grow ever stronger and for the end consumer it will simply be business as usual in terms of pricing.
That is unless a giant like Activision or EA decide to slash profits due to lower costs and lead the industry in a price cutting revolution.
Regrettably the chances of that happening are extremely slim - there's more chance of them throwing money out the windows of their head offices.
So the ways we get games will change, the prices we pay won't.
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