Gaming exec calls for videogame price hike
£70 per blockbuster title?
Sony’s former European President thinks the average cost of a blockbuster videogame should rise to £70 ($115/€82).
Only a price jump would ensure a continued supply of groundbreaking games, according to Chris Deering, who noted the huge increase in development costs in recent years.
“In order to price these games at a level where they would support an industry [as strongly as] they did ten years ago, they’d have to be sold at £70”, Deering told MCV, a games trade website.
He was speaking to the games trade website in response to this month's decision by Activision to raise the recommended retail price of Modern Warfare 2 from £45 to £55. The publisher blamed a weak pound as well as record development costs.
But getting UK gamers to pay higher price tags for blockbuster titles will be very difficult: a psychological glass ceiling dictates how much consumers are willing to pay for top-ranking titles, Deering says.
“The cost of development is ten times what it was for PS2. Yet there are lots of things you can get for less than the relative value of paying 50p an hour for a very high end game." ®
COMMENTS
games developers are going to be looking for new jobs then..
if they want to charge £70 for a game they are going to be out of work within a few months.
the banks will forclose on there loans and stripe them down to the clothes on there backs.
give it a year or two and you will be seeing graphic artists sitting on the promade of the shopping mall offering portraits for a £1.. and begging for food to feed there familys..
i generally wait 2-4 months after release to purchase a new game so that the bug fixes are released and before i spend my hard earned cash, this generally means i also benefit from £5-£10 off the price as well.
Out of touch
In an alternate random universe this clueless game executive would be cleaning toilets.
Don't do it.
I won't pay over £40 for COD 6. I'd rather wait then, as feel, be ripped off.
Stop producing crap
Trying to put into words how I feel about the current games industry but kept falling into the potty mouth trap.
I have yet to see anything worth buying this year. And most of the ones released are just re-hashes of the same crap released last year, maybe with a slightly updated look.
how to kill a market in one move
If you follow his logic, we would all be paying £50,000 for a new car, because the development cost and technology inside has increased considerably. Seriously, does this guy understand anything about economics? If you want to make sure you only sell 100k copies of a game, hike the price to £75. or drop the price to 1/3 (£25) and sell 1 million copies. One brings a revenue of £7.5 million, the other £25 million. Which would you prefer? The movie industry tried that with Bluray, and look where it got them.
