Where do you draw the line? New Game Prices

[sworddude]

Oh I have been well and truly priced out this gen! Right now, I should be enjoying Final Fantasy VII Rebirth but the audacity of them charging £70 for a standard copy gets the worst of my stuborn side - Which doing a $-£ conversation makes £70 = $89! The Deluxe Edition is £100! And you don't get a whole lot with it - Tiny artbook, sample CD Soundtrack & a Steelbook. But it is my favourite series so I have caved in - But ordered online from a Questionable retailer who are selling it for £75 but I won't receive it until a week later - At least that is what happened with my previous experience buying from them with FF16.

It used to be about £40 for a Standard Edition & £50 if you wanted a minor upgrade with a Steelbook. But the greed of this industry has taken over and ruined the concept of Day One Purchases for me. And I know the industry is struggling and can justify the rise in cost but it doesn't end there does it? Day One usually had the game at a technical disadvantage and these days always requires follow up patches. Then there is DLC, so usually buying a game Day One is incomplete for anothe reason with extra content withheld and spliced back into the game at a cost of the consumer - Just look at Final Fantasy XV & even recently with XVI... What infuriates me is that once I beat a game I am done, I can't go back to DLC upon release because I am not imersed in the experience as with the initial playthrough, so DLC never works for me - Unless I am replaying the game YEARS later like with FF7 Remake & the INTERmission DLC. Then there is Complete Editions released later that give you the base game with a code, a trend that really needs to stop!

I have to schedule my gaming throughout the year a lot more due to this also, like recently 2 big hitters with Like A Dragon (Yakuza): Infinite Wealth & FF7 Rebirth. Both came out wihtin a month of each other and are BIG games. So I decided to hold off on Like A Dragon 8 & Replay FF7 Remake in prep for Rebirth - I know this will take me up until Mid-April/May. Then before LAD8, I still have the spin-off Like A Dragon title to play before diving into LAD8, so it's looking about May until I actually get around to playing LAD8, so I have put off buying it until then - Which I am hoping for a decent reduction.

I have also been looking into CEX, a UK Trade-In Store. I have a decent amount of money in In-Store Credit but the problem is they charge ridiculous prices for their Newer titles - LAD8 is £50 in Used Condition, where I have seen online deal placing LAD8 for £36! Which is really good! But I want to make use of my In-Store credit for newer games but other online retailers keep selling the game New for a considerable discount in comparision. I mostly end up buying Retro Games from them as their prices seem to be much better.

In short, there is a lot of frustration as a consumer for the industry. I want to support games I love but I can't help but feel ripped off - especially within a Day One Purchase. I don't want an all digital future but I don't believe a decent enough effort is put into making the Physical game market accessible or even practical for collectors who are buying into releases for the prospect of game preservation - years down the line, your Day One Copies won't contain the needed updates and when servers go down you'll be left with an incomplete game.

How is digital though for new sony games. ain't that just full price anyway. From what I've seen it's a bit more pricy digital than standard physical releases at lower priced retailers. which are 5 - 10 to sometimes 15$ less than MSRP at release. free shipping aswell in most cases

And that is while ignoring the occasional collectible pre order bonus for early birds which in some cases sell for close to what you paid for the base game.

[tripredacus]

I have gotten burned on buying a new game before. The last one I think was the Borderlands 3 version with the Season Pass. Then later Gearbox released a DLC that wasn't included in Season Pass even though the idea of that is all future DLC you just get. I can't really recall buying a new game in recent years that wasn't worth it (aka I played a lot of hours) except maybe Starcraft 2.

But in recent years, I stopped really caring about buying a new game for multiple reasons. I don't want to game on whether the game will work properly. I can take the time to watch some streams of a game to see if it interests me, especially nowadays with my changing tastes and particular features in a game I don't like. And the other aspect is that my backlog is so big, I don't actually need to buy anything new because it would still be years (or maybe never) that I would play it. This means I can spend less and buy stuff cheap, and buying something cheap and not playing it for awhile feels a lot better than buying something expensive.

[marvelvscapcom2]

I'd pay upwards of 80 for a game. If GTA releases this for 250 it's gonna shake the industry in a bad way. Rockstar has gotten greedy. No other way to crack that jar open. If they priced it at 60 and sold 400 million copies. Which they will. It'd make 24 billion. That is 12x profit. But nooooo.


The narrative rockstar is running with is that we pay 20 dollars or 40 for dvds and movie media. Those give us 2 hours of entertainment but video games give us 200 or more hours. So by all means charge 3 grand for a new game. It's annoying. Like comparing a prostitute to a wife. Its not even the same media format. And I could argue that movies have 356 million budgets and cost 9.99 on vudu within like 6 months of release.


I just feel gaming is going to really collapse. The only way i'd justify 150 is if they included all the dlc they'll inevitably ram down your throat and free online.

[turf]

I don’t seriously believe that R* is going to try to charge $150 for GTA 6, unless it is a version that includes all the future DLC. Then, it might happen.  They may do a $150 collectors edition. I could see that happening.
Rockstar does like to have different levels of releases. Deluxe editions, Super Deluxe editions, Super Mega Deluxe editions and the like.

Here’s my best prediction:
$80 Base Game
$90 Deluxe Edition including Base Game + Season 1 Pass + some exclusive item you can only get by buying this edition
$100 Super Mega Deluxe Edition with the Deluxe Edition and some online game money

That’s my best guess. We’ll see how it goes.


As for new game prices?  They don’t bother me much. I don’t buy many brand new games.

[alligo]

I certainly won't pay 150 euros for a game that isn't finished, which is often the case with games in recent years.
Without forgetting that some games receive updates later or charge again for features that are supposed to be there basic

I paid 70 euros for FM8, a buggy game, unfinished and which has optimization problems so I think I have given enough.
If we start paying for games at 150 or more, there is an interest in having a certain polish (no bugs), integrated DLC or substantial content.

You shouldn't overuse it either.

[wolff242]

I don’t seriously believe that R* is going to try to charge $150 for GTA 6, unless it is a version that includes all the future DLC. Then, it might happen.  They may do a $150 collectors edition. I could see that happening.
Rockstar does like to have different levels of releases. Deluxe editions, Super Deluxe editions, Super Mega Deluxe editions and the like.

Here’s my best prediction:
$80 Base Game
$90 Deluxe Edition including Base Game + Season 1 Pass + some exclusive item you can only get by buying this edition
$100 Super Mega Deluxe Edition with the Deluxe Edition and some online game money

That’s my best guess. We’ll see how it goes.


As for new game prices?  They don’t bother me much. I don’t buy many brand new games.

It's rockstar. More like

80
120
150


I won't pay these new prices. If you got a complete game...maybe. But now you are nickle and dimed to death with DLC (I like having all the content), So I'll wait for a minimum of a 50% off sale.

[sworddude]

150 seems kinda cheap for a collectors edition. It's been worse with quite some bigger titles, with such a huge game as GTA VI there's gotto be some 200+ $ collectors edition