Green Scar said:
Pretty much. However, I don't think any PC game justifies a higher price, especially with general absence of licensing fees, and franchises being franchises usually allows to sell at a normal price and sell well based on the name (usually). If anything, new IPs could justify a higher price (unknown brand, very unlikely to feature re-used assets so cost-cutting is harder), but obviously new IPs need to be cheap in order to appeal to people. So yeah, pretty much no-one gets away with that price. (Especially not Call of Duty.)
You're doing it wrong. Cost to manufacturer has little bearing on perceived value to customer. It doesn't matter that Studio X spent $multimillions developing Game Y, at the end of the day it's just going to be perceived as $Z worth to customer. The reason I said that only a few PC games have the ability to justify a £35/whatever pricepoint is because they're a stupidly in-depth simulator that is leagues beyond anything elsewhere, they have content far in excess of anything pressed onto a console DVD or they're Starcraft II. That's a limited sector that is worth full asking price.
A film with a budget of $100 000 000 sells for the same price as a film with a budget of $100 000 because that is the value customers attribute to the experience of seeing a film.
I, the customer, care not for the manufacturer's licensing costs or franchise risks. I have my price ideal for games that I'm willing to pay (£20-£25 for GOTY games (Valve, basically), £15 for games I'm really excited for, £10 for everything else) and I pay it.
If a studio has a risky new IP that they want to succeed, they can find a way to make it still profitable to drop the price to make the product more attractive to me, instead of asking me to fork over £35/whatever on something I'm not sure I'm going to enjoy.
It really isn't complicated and I'm amazed the studios that have been pushing the AAA-huge risk-$60 business model for the last decade have suddenly woken up to the 'huge risk' part of it and are only just starting to vaguely realise customers stopped bothering with the '$60' part of it years ago.