Kotick: I would raise game prices even further

I just twatted the following tweet:

“#buymw2used #activision Very unimpressed with recent pricing strategies. So I’m going to wait for MW2 second hand thankyou Mr Kotick.”

If we can get some retweets or just disgruntled posts using the same hashtags then who knows? Maybe it’ll take off. maybe it’ll be a damp squib though.

my Twitter = @BeardyBrave

in all seriousness game prices are due a rise, since sony set the standard for disc based releases in 1994(about £40-£45) we’ve had 15 years of inflation, 10-20 fold rise in development cost, the rise in crippling high street used game trading, online rentals/swapping. If we dont want to quality taking a nosedive prices must rise a little, theres too much pressure on developers at the moment to produce multi million sellers or face doom

@bugmenot yeah, thats complete baloney.
Glad you buy into it, you can pay the higher prices, while the rest of us wait for used copies.
If they kill the used market with digital distro and use higher prices, watch the industry take a nose dive.
Look at the apple store, 99 c titles sell like crazy while the more expensive titles do ok. I truly believe that for publishers to kill the used market, the need to offer titles at lower prices. In my little gamer survey i have found that gamers will buy on impulse a title up to $24.99, anything from $29.99 and up seems like a major purchase.
If publishers want to charge higher prices fine, but they better drop them later to much lower prices for them to sell at all. All higher prices will do is make our purchases more selective, so games like singularity and Borderlands will die as everyone will only buy COD and Halo, and thats happening right now at the current price, but it will be much worse if they raise them.

I Agree with Fearmonkey. They want to raise the prices as they do that my Gamefly list gets bigger

What’s interesting is that not many realized that Genesis, NES, SNES games were at $40-$50 already for new copies and this is about 10-20 years ago.

So, all that BS talk about development costs is just trying to sway the consumer mind thinking they deserve it. If that’s the case, they should keep Mirror’s Edge at $60, but after time, it dictated it wasn’t selling, so it’s reached a price point of $20 now.

They will make enough money from quantity sold cheaper, but what to skin us alive in prices. To be fair though, a HUGE majority doesn’t care because they WANT their game NOW. If not, they’ll die or something.

I don’t doubt they’ll raise the price, probably stick the term, “Limited Collector’s Prestrige Ultimate Finally Edition” and everyone will flock to it. Some to resell at a higher point and some to just purchase.

Bytemap, so are you saying that costs haven’t increased substantially? That games prices should stay the same?
And games selling at $20 will, probably, be making a loss. But it’s better to make a loss at $20 than a loss at $0.

Quantity sold cheaper doesn’t quite qork either.

Games sold on Apple Store for 1/40th of the price of an RRP highstreet game (£1 comparred to £40) do not cost 1/40th the price to make, nor do they sell 40 times as many.

@Lutz: Wow, I don’t know if you joking or if you are serious, but I’ll address the questions you mentioned. Oh, and so that everyone knows, I’m just trying to inform as many people as to how some businesses do their thing, because they don’t care about us (at least most of them, not all). They just want our money.

Now onto the questions.

1) Yes, game prices from before weren’t substantially cheaper. If you want proof, see if you could ask a video game collector about the old game prices were when they were sold as new.

2) Game prices shouldn’t stay the same as they are now, but should be cheaper. I say it should be 50-65% off what it is now, but that’s me.

3) Companies are all about the numbers. The more they sell, the quickest, the happier they are with their IP. So if they have to discount the game, to make a not so stellar selling period, they will. That high price gives them enough room to still make a NICE profit.

4) I’m glad you brought up the Apple Store. You just prove the point further. I mean I thought we were only talking about PS3/360, but this is great as well. If you produced a game or app for a small mobile, then Yes the production cost of it will not equal the price it’s being sold. But are we just counting ONE unit? I don’t believe most developers/publishers just think ONE unit is being sold.

No, they know thousands upon thousands, if not MILLIONS are being sold. So for little development costs on the iPhone, they make more in the SHEER quantity of purchases. It would be absurd to ask for a HIGH price for that medium, just because Apple wants your business as quickly as they can with no hesitations.

If you still believe that the prices should stay the same, that everything is fine with any more price increases to “cover development costs” ***COUGHbsCOUGH***( it will happen LOL), and that the way business is done is for OUR benefit, then my hats off to you, my friend. More power to you.