How do *you* judge value?

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
41

No, that’s not quite it. €50 or €60 is a scandalous amount to pay for a game, and nobody is “happy” to pay that for a videogame. It’s just a vastly overinflated price to rip people off, and has no justification at all. In the past, many excuses have been used by the games industry for their products being more expensive than all competing media, including
[LIST]
[]“carts are expensive to produce” - this was removed with the change to CDs
[]“the size of the audience is just too small”, this was removed with the growing market
[]“piracy is killing our industry”, this was greatly reduced when more and more technology was used in consoles and PCs
[]“production costs have spiralled”, although they have increased, this is proved false when you consider that $50-100 million is the most expensive game ever produced, while a very large number of films easily have a budget way above this
[/LIST]
As the recent article said, production costs, although high, pale in comparison to any big-budget movie, and I can buy ANY film I want on Blu-ray for €30.

Although “value” or “lifespan” or whatever is important, it can be seen as an added bonus. I couldn’t bring myself to spend €60 for an obviously low-budget game. I would only spend a large sum of money on a game with very high production values. I guess maybe that way I can kid myself that it’s justified or something. I bought both SFIV and SSFIV on their day or release, and although I didn’t want to spend full price, I did because I wanted to. I bought SSFIITHDR at it’s budget price point, primarily because the only costs involved were a group of artists, so I consider that this would have to be a cheaper game. I would NOT have bought it for the same price as SFIV, even though IMO the game is just as good

In fact, returning to my earlier argument, I could buy almost any album ever made for something like €10, regardless of production costs. The album will likely be a more important part of my life, and occupy me for more hours than a game, but albums are hardly ever sold at a price that reflects their recording budget. Same thing for books, etc. Why are games different?

42

It’s funny when a game(hyperdimension neptunia) indirectly talks about the current game industry as whole and talk about it’s problems and issues(things that are hurting the industry and all). Sure it’s reading between the lines but it’s ironic all the same.

like what has been said in the thread talking about how $60 games are dying, how we value games are different now as well, because certain key developers are changing this and since they are popular and are seen as the whole market, the facade of what is the value of a game has changed. Basically what im telling you is, developers now(EA, THQ, etc) are showing you smoke and mirrors. Not everyone sees the truth, it’s obvious when I had explained this in the used game thread, however trying to find the truth these days is harder then before because Publishers are lying to the consumers. It’s worse when consumers don’t even know the difference between the publisher and the developer, and this happens all too often, people reading stuff in this very thread don’t know the difference. anyway i’ll start to get to my point.

Publishers(EA, Sony, Capcom) are trying to change and control the gaming market, they may not have integrated the $60 MSRP for new games but they have power and can regulate the prices in which their games are sold, we see it all the time. brand new games for $40, but why? and why are certain games being sold for less then others and how do certain publishers justify the price. Usually it’s due to their short-long term marketing plans and it’s way out of this conversations hands so i’ll skip that, but to put it simply, usually the normal GOTY edition or re-release of a title is usually anywhere from 10-50% off the initial price of the first release, but their are exceptions.

so what does this all mean to value? it means that developers are trying to emulate a value scale on what games are worth, it’s as simple as that. why couldn’t i say that from the beginning? you wouldn’t have understood otherwise unless you knew already…but I want to finish what i was explaining earlier though so…

Developers(Team Ninja, Project soul) don’t have alot of freedom when it comes to how a game is sold or how they market the game, in fact…alot of the time, publishers tell the developers to lock away content to make it DLC as this is now a common day practice. Developers “usually” lose most if not all interlectural rights they had to the title once they get the funding from the publisher or whenever the publisher deems it necessary. Now…it seems like im painting publishers out to being the devil…but in truth thats not my intent, thats just how it is.

the value of games we used to know is changing, and it’s harder to tell whether or not it’s even worth spending X amount of money on a game anymore. anyways, my rant is done.

43

Heh, incidentally, the australian dollar has been at parity with the US dollar for a while now, but our games are often sold at $100+ at retail.

Apparently, “it costs lots of money to ship the games here and its a smaller market” :wink:

Luckily we can just import, and there are some stores selling games at prices that take into account the exchange rate. (although that still means $60+)

44

Replayability and memorability.

You would be surprised how many games we have bought and have forgotten the moment we have beaten them. Those games are not worth any money at all.

45

The game has to be fun.

Not that hard of a concept.