The $60 deilemma


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Stroll into a GameStop in Manhattan and ask for a copy of Wet on the Xbox 360. How much? $59.99.

Or drop by your local Best Buy in Tempe, Ariz. for the Nintendo Wii version of The Beatles: Rock Band. $59.99.

Need for Speed SHIFT on the PlayStation 3 at Game Crazy in Bend, Ore.? $59.99.

Batman: Arkham Asylum on the 360 at Play N Trade in Naples, Fla.? Sadly, they are out of stock right now. But when it comes back in, $59.99.

Coast to coast, across different retailers, consoles and games, when asked, "How much," the routine reply is: 60 bucks.

The next time you are standing at the counter of your local game emporium, stop talking about how awesome Muramasa: The Demon Blade was in the original Japanese, and mess with him a little bit:

"So, game-store guy, why do all of these games cost $60?"

If he shrugs his shoulders and goes back to sorting his Pok?mon cards, he's just being honest. Because easy answers don't come with a topic that dives immediately into conversations about the law and economic price theory.

And no, games don't cost $60 because they are worth it.

"Some games offer a lifespan into the hundreds of hours -- especially games like Call of Duty, Final Fantasy, Madden and Halo -- while other games may offer a modest 20 to 30 hours of play, with the bottom end offering as high as 10 hours of gameplay," explains Jesse Divnich, director of analyst services at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research.

"A consumer will pay $60 for a Call of Duty game, log in 100 hours of play (at about 60 cents an hour), and at the same time pay $60 for the first BioShock and only log in about 20 hours of gameplay (or $3 per hour of entertainment). That is a 400-percent difference in value."

When it comes to game pricing, and the peculiarly common price tag of $59.99, someone needs to ask, "How did this happen?"

It helps to understand how that $60 pie gets sliced up among the many hungry mouths trying to feed their businesses. Divnich figures the typical breakdown works something like this:

?$12 go to the retailer.

?$5 go toward discounts, game returns and retail cross-marketing. (You didn't think those cardboard standees were free, did you?)

?$10 go toward cost of goods sold, which includes manufacturing the game disc, shipping the games to the store, and anything else directly related to production and delivery of the game package.

"It is generally accepted that most publishers receive $30 to $35 per game sold before they run into overhead, development and marketing costs."

But while this helps us understand just where the money goes, and explains why developers can sell 100,000 games and still end up in the red when development budgets run into the millions, it doesn't say much about why the pie ended up at $60 in the first place. It's not like 60 bucks is a magic number, when you look at what you can buy:

?A barrel of crude oil on a good day.

?An Elle Macpherson La Mere Maternity Bra.

?A three-star hotel in Chicago on a discount Web site.

?A copy of Gears of War 2. Which is to say, nothing is inherently worth $60.

"Arriving at new price points, generally, is something of an enigma," admits Hal Halpin, president and founder of the Entertainment Consumers Association.

But whether through blind luck, dark magic or something more insidious, videogame console prices have stayed relatively lockstep generation after generation. While gamers once paid $40 for a top game in past generations, now $60 remains the ironclad rule of game pricing. It makes sense to wonder: Why $60, and not some other random number?

The answers fall into three broad categories: sensible greed, consumer stupidity or evil conspiracy. Which explanation fits the fact? That depends on how you look aGreed is goodeed is good

"Back when I ran the Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association (IEMA), I was actually a big proponent of the 10-dollar price hike -- even predicting it by a few years at one point," notes Halpin. "From a logical perspective, it makes a lot of sense, as the cost of game development was and is on the rise, and there hadn't been a proportionate price increase in quite a while -- especially compared with parallel media."

In this view, game prices keep going up because game quality keeps going up.

More: http://www.crispygamer.com/features/2009-0...ck-dilemma.aspx

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the increasingly popular trend among my circle of friends/coworkers is 360 and multiplatform games get dl'ed for the 360 and money is only spent on the really good ps3 exclusive games...

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the increasingly popular trend among my circle of friends/coworkers is 360 and multiplatform games get dl'ed for the 360 and money is only spent on the really good ps3 exclusive games...

dl'ed meaning pirated? So you only buy ps3 games?

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If they charged by how many hours of gameplay the game offers, then every developer would just extend the storyline which would more often than not just create extremly boring and repetitive elements in the game. Its much better that some games only offer 20 hours of game play but they are 20 good hours, rather than 40 mediocore hours.

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i barely have enough money to live, let alone game, and this is because i got laid off - until six months ago i used to buy 2-3 games a month. heck nov-dec was more like 5-6 a month. and while it's hard not being able to buy and even feeling very guilty about renting, i've come to accept it. no one's forcing me to be a gamer, if i can't afford it it's my problem. they can charge whatever they want, even if i disagree with the regular next gen tax increases. of course 60 plus tax is too much for most of us, a fair price would be 40 bucks, but they're businesses unfortunately, not charities.

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i barely have enough money to live, let alone game, and this is because i got laid off - until six months ago i used to buy 2-3 games a month. heck nov-dec was more like 5-6 a month. and while it's hard not being able to buy and even feeling very guilty about renting, i've come to accept it. no one's forcing me to be a gamer, if i can't afford it it's my problem. they can charge whatever they want, even if i disagree with the regular next gen tax increases. of course 60 plus tax is too much for most of us, a fair price would be 40 bucks, but they're businesses unfortunately, not charities.

That's the exact reason I rent. No way I could afford to play all the games I want to. I buy the ones that I KNOW I will keep playing for a while, or replay, then rent the rest of the crap that I just wanna trophy ######. Even if I really like a game I rent, I can buy it for less than $30 if I want to.

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renting is a necessity, it never feels the same as when you buy them. but it gets the job done, if you can get the games when they come out. but to make it clear i'd go back to buying in a jiffy.

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"A consumer will pay $60 for a Call of Duty game, log in 100 hours of play (at about 60 cents an hour), and at the same time pay $60 for the first BioShock and only log in about 20 hours of gameplay (or $3 per hour of entertainment). That is a 400-percent difference in value."

Firstly, I have never managed to make any of the CoD series give me 100 hours of gameplay in the single player campaigns, and secondly comparing a Multiplayer game with a single player only game is stupid. Not to mention, of course, that Bioshock's single player campaign is awesome :D

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they're just looking at total usage time, doesn't matter SP or MP. the article wasn't all that accurate, some of the prices they compared to games aren't very realistic.

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I hate paying full price for a game that only going to play for 10-20 hours. I don't have any problem paying $60 for a Final Fantasy or an RPG game. I usually spend 100+ hours with them.

I cant keep spending $60 on every new game that is coming out. That is why I'm going to pay full price for like two games this fall/winter, Uncharted 2 and GoW Collection. I'm going to wait until they are cheaper to get the other games I want.

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for the most part with very few exceptions i am more than willing to pay up the required amount to purchase a Brand new video game. For games i want to play that i do not find worth that amount i will simply wait for it to become cheaper before making my purchase. However as stated there are certain games in which i cannot find any reason to pay what the cost of the game is and i will either rent/ borrow these releases so that i may try them out.

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"A consumer will pay $60 for a Call of Duty game, log in 100 hours of play (at about 60 cents an hour), and at the same time pay $60 for the first BioShock and only log in about 20 hours of gameplay (or $3 per hour of entertainment). That is a 400-percent difference in value."

man...

i wonder what my dollar to play time ratio is for WoW

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Am I the only one who remembers paying close to $100 for SNES games?

Yeah I remember Chrono Trigger was $100+ here and Final Fantasy III around $90.

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wouldn't be fair to reduce the prices of games since the consoles are down to almost half the prices from when they started?

Games usually do go down in value as they get older (NFL09 doesn't cost the same as NFL10), but new games usually all start at around the same price point

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of course they can sell a new game at $40 and still make a profit, but they're greedy. that's why they're guys in suits and i'm unemployed. unfortunately i love games, they got a hold on me. but they're not forcing us.

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