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[Dusk Golem]

The mixture of games dropping so quickly in price and gamers being cheaper yet with higher standards is not a good combination for the industry, that's for sure. Eventually gamers either are going to have to lower their standard for cheaper games or raise how much they're willing to pay for higher quality games, as this is getting to a point of being unhealthy.

 

[Kareha]

The mixture of games dropping so quickly in price and gamers being cheaper yet with higher standards is not a good combination for the industry, that's for sure.

I wouldn't say its gamers getting cheaper, more like gamers realising that in this day and age of digital sales, they don't need to spend right away. At the end of the day everyone loves a bargain.

 

[oni-link]

More games is not the problem. As a matter a fact we are getting fewer retail releases this gen then we did last gen. The once popular AA games have just about completely disappeared. Sure indie games have been picking up the slack but they too are facing an uphill battle when it comes to price and sales. This holiday season has been pretty terrible when it comes to software sales, especially in the AAA space. If the trend continues next year then the industry might have a problem. The more interesting note is that by and large SP games have struggled will continue to have a tough time moving forward compared to games as a service such as Destiny where the consumer feels the need to jump in Day1 or be left behind.

Fewer retail releases doesn't give you the whole picture, and it's not even that indie games have picked up the slack

In the last 5 years we have had 4 Soulsbourne games, 3 Zelda titles (if you count the remasters) 6 Assassin's Creed games, 3 Arkham games etc

You're looking at upwards of 500 hours just to beat all of those, and most people won't have several hundred hours of gaming time a year anyway

This is ignoring online MP games entirely as well, when you throw that into the mix most people will only need to buy a few games a year

Even with fewer games releasing at retail, there is no incentive for most people to buy most of them until they drop to a price that is "too good to turn down"

 

[SmokedMeat]

Preordering games is bad!!!

People are waiting to buy their games!! This is bad!!

 

[Jailer of Hope]

It's not even viable to take advantage of B2G1 sales anymore.

 

[The Spoony Hou]

Can somebody explain to me why we don't get greatest hits/players choice $20 games anymore? I miss those

Back then, older games were seem to still have some value and reprints of said games would have the "greatest hits" moniker, or the equivalent in other platforms. I guess just to indicate that that was a well received game, now at a cheaper price.

Nowadays, games have become disposable yearly iterations that are over-printed and end up selling for bomba in a few months time. That, added to the new digital distribution means and their sales help devalue the physical copies even more.

As pointed, only Nintendo still does it, because they really try their hardest to fight this new trend, for good or not.

Well, that's my take on it, anyway .

 

[IgotElbows]

Can somebody explain to me why we don't get greatest hits/players choice $20 games anymore? I miss those

Because a year later they sell the "GOTY"/Complete edition and then it quickly goes on sale for 20$

See Battlefront http://www.bestbuy.com/site/star-wars-battlefront-ultimate-edition-playstation-4/5655115.p?skuId=5655115

 

[Crescende]

in essence, giant publishers shove millions of games into stores with the knowledge that they'll have to mark down a good portion of them. this is fine because they'll meet whatever overall profit they were aiming for, and stores can clean out their inventory in a matter of months, instead of sitting on products for a lot longer.

problem is for the small guys who find themselves subject to this structure. the option then becomes taking a big risk by having too many games in the marketplace, or reducing day one sales and exposure, and therefore lose chances on reorders due to a lack of awareness. that's why you're seeing something like exist archive on sale for a quarter of the price it launched at two months ago.

This.

Activision shoved 800 Call of Duty IW into my medium sized store. Sold 200 of them. Now they pay me for selling the game for 29 euro.

 

[barit]

If God of War was on the Wii U, at 50% off, I'd still have bought Bayonetta at full price over it.

If DriveClub was on the Wii U, at 50% off, I'd still have bought Mario Kart 8 at full price over it.

If Knack or Ratchet and Klank were on the Wii U, at 50% off, I'd still have bought Super Mario World 3D at full price over them.

Giving me a wider choice wouldn't have made my purchasing decisions any harder.

lol this is such a nonsense post. What in hell has DriveClub a semi-realistic racer with stunning graphics to do with Mario Kart where you shoot turtle shells at your oppenents? Or God of War with is violent greek myth revenge story for adults with the lightheart overthetop Bayonetta? I bet you would chose Mario Soccer over FIFA anyday because reasons?!

 

[xabbott]

In years past it seemed like if you waited at least 3 months you'd get a big discount depending on the publisher. Not sure if its because there were fewer big titles, or maybe fewer successful titles that everyone dropped quickly this year. I don't remember CoD dropping this fast before.

Just to see I went ahead and looked up (via camelcamelcamel) a lot of the fall titles I could recall. This is all in the US and Amazon. I left it on PS4 for multiplat just to keep it simple. It's interesting how similar the drops are, a lot went to $29.99-35.00. (Price chart gallery on imgur)

 

[IgotElbows]

In years past it seemed like if you waited at least 3 months you'd get a big discount depending on the publisher. Not sure if its because there were fewer big titles, or maybe fewer successful titles that everyone dropped quickly this year. I don't remember CoD dropping this fast before.

Just to see I went ahead and looked up (via camelcamelcamel) a lot of the fall titles I could recall. This is all in the US and Amazon. I left it on PS4 for multiplat just to keep it simple. It's interesting how similar the drops are, a lot went to $29.99-35.00. (Price chart gallery on imgur)

27$ for COD IW legacy? Damnnnn. I woulda hoped on that shit.
That's literally buying COD 4 remastered and getting COD IW for free. lol

 

[chromatic9]

I can only hope the devs and publishers are making it up with the DLC and other micro transactions. Some single player games don't have these so I worry we're heading down this games as a service online based path selling customizations and traditional single player will be down to indie and the odd flagship exclusive.

 

[daffy]

Nintendo ought to be ashamed

 

[OrbitalBeard]

I've been gaming since before the nes and bar the crash I don't think I've seen games lose thier price so quickly and so many of them, has me worried for the state of big titles going forward,

The future is full of games-as-services and microtransactions, even in single player titles. The writing's been on the wall for awhile, this was just the first holiday season we saw the traditional model really be challenged in the console space by consumers. Unless you just have to play your favorite series on day one, there's simply no reason to pay full price anymore.

 

[Devilgunman]

I must thank industry for teaching me to wait a few months to buy a game.

 

[Milly Osworth]

Just wait until the free to play model jumps from mobile to everything else.

 

[Raysod]

I rarely buy games on release day anymore. And why should I?

If you think about it whoever buys a game on day one gets a worst performing product and in the highest price.

If you train yourself to wait a while, you always get a better product (patched and with more content) in a cheaper price.

If publishers start to respect me and my money, by improving their quality assurance processes and not cutting content out to sell as dlc, cut the preorder bonus content or special editions and limited editions content, cut microtransactions, maybe I would consider paying full price for a game again.

 

[ptuck874]

Just wait until the free to play model jumps from mobile to everything else.

/Let it DIe
but yeah, I see what you are saying op, last year got burnt to hard with battlefront etc, now I wait for the inevitable discount to pick up, still waiting for plants vs zombies 2 now lol....

 

[Ninja Dom]

They probably overship physical copies.

Still, we saw some competitive black friday deals on PSN. Some were better than the retail deals, some weren't, but they were close.



Pretty crazy that NSMBU, a launch game, is still $60. I think it's been long enough for Mario Kart 8, too. Captain Toad should definitely be a $20 select title.

I'm still waiting on a good sale for Splatoon and Mario Maker, sigh.



You really cherry picked, there. PS4 also has far more titles to choose from.

Even limiting it to First Party, I wonder how many would choose those games over, say, Bloodborne...

And I'll take Persona 5 over Tokyo Mirage Sessions and The Witcher 3 over Xenoblade Chronicles. Not first party but also not on Wii U.

Wait, Captain Toad and NSMBU are definitely Nintendo Select games. NSMBU even comes with NSLU too. I'm in UK.

 

[PrivateRyan]

They've been training us to wait for years now

Buying Day 1 is just bad for the consumer at this point

You play it before they patch it into an acceptable state and you pay a premium for doing so

Everyone has a backlog these days, so it's almost always better to wait

100% this.

For the past several years I've been buying games I've wanted a couple of months after its release date. I've been really excited about Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, for example, but I've been saving it for my Christmas break game.

Besides pre-order incentives and being part of the initial conversation (and perhaps a healthy online community for niche titles with a MP component), there's literally zero need to buy games day 1.

 

[Hoho for breakfast]

They may as well just sell games for an absurd amount the first week or so as an early access "deal" then drop it to the normal $60 for a couple weeks then down to $40 after that.

 

[Kill3r7]

Fewer retail releases doesn't give you the whole picture, and it's not even that indie games have picked up the slack

In the last 5 years we have had 4 Soulsbourne games, 3 Zelda titles (if you count the remasters) 6 Assassin's Creed games, 3 Arkham games etc

You're looking at upwards of 500 hours just to beat all of those, and most people won't have several hundred hours of gaming time a year anyway

This is ignoring online MP games entirely as well, when you throw that into the mix most people will only need to buy a few games a year

Even with fewer games releasing at retail, there is no incentive for most people to buy most of them until they drop to a price that is "too good to turn down"

I don't think length of games matters, per se. There were plenty of long games prior to 2011 releasing in a busy holiday schedule. A couple of things to consider. At the start of last gen game publishers/retailers tried to incentivize Day 1 purchases by offering $20 GC for pre-orders. This is the equivalent of a day 1 sale. This practice is still somewhat common today, although BB only offers $10GCs now for a handful of games. The second thing to consider is that undeniably a large portion of the market left with the Wii and many others are experiencing franchise fatigue. AC is a good example of a franchise seeing significant drops in number of units sold. Also Ubi for about a decade now has been a big culprit of the price drop practice. Essentially just about every Ubi title released in the last 10 years has gone on sale 2-3 weeks after release. The chickens are finally coming home to roost as other publishers follow the same strategy. Ironically enough this year Watchdogs 2 did not go on sale until last week.

 

[yuraya]

The consumer decides the direction of the market. The bottom line is being late to the party has never been more convenient than it is now. Things like patches, dlc, expansions and goty editions tell consumers to wait. And its only going to get worse for certain companies with all this talk of games becoming a service, endless support, hardware revisions, online only future etc.

 

[Celine]

What's weird about what he said?

Nintendo isn't competing in price with anyone else on their console except for their own games. They simply have no incentive to drop the price... you skip one $60 game, what are you going to buy? Their other $60 game? 3rd party junk?

Just the way I've always seen it.

What he said is half right.
Owning their ecosystem partially shield them from outside trends however a big part of why Nintendo has a good chunk of evergreen titles is that they have franchises which are king of their own genre/subgenre with virtually no competition anywhere.
Do you want to play to a high caliber 3D platform game? you will likely buy the latest Super Mario.
The same concept apply to many Nintendo franchises like Mario Kart, Animal Crossing, Pokemon, Smash Bros and so on.
So it's not just they have little competition on their own systems but they also have little competition from other publishers because almost all of them focus on other kind of games.

 

[MattXIII]

I was always there day 1... until this year.

 

[ThatStupidLion]

Its horrible what they are turning this industry into. I imagine they are doing it to prepare us for the games as a service model.

Its also due to market saturation though i think

 

[EmiPrime]

They've been training us to wait for years now

Buying Day 1 is just bad for the consumer at this point

You play it before they patch it into an acceptable state and you pay a premium for doing so

Everyone has a backlog these days, so it's almost always better to wait

This. Word for word.

I will be able to buy Final Fantasy 15 a few months from now for £15 and it will have the Pro 60fps patch and the story patch. I get to play the finished game and I will pay a third of what people who bought on launch paid.

 

[Rafus]

I, like you, was going to buy DR4 on launch day, but seeing the price-drops even at games like Battlefield 1, I decided to wait.
(A shame on the other hand because the game seems super fun to play on Christmas)

 

[Intel_89]

Except Nintendo, but yeah

Not worth buying day one

Even Nintendo prices are starting to drop faster than they used to.

 

[wapplew]

I can only hope the devs and publishers are making it up with the DLC and other micro transactions. Some single player games don't have these so I worry we're heading down this games as a service online based path selling customizations and traditional single player will be down to indie and the odd flagship exclusive.

We already at that point long time ago.

 

[Yagharek]

A little bit of self control (I have none) usually gets you a self proclaimed goty version of a game for a third of the price at launch with all the dlc included.

Unless you have to play online when the game is the new shiny flavour of the week, it's so much cheaper to wait when it comes to AAA big budget stuff. Sometimes the games are even in a working state in the goty edition! (excludes bethesda, tell tale and techland titles).

 

[peanutbutterlatte]

Oh well. I just picked up Uncharted 4 for £20. It was at least £30 everywhere else at launch. It wasn't worth it to me at that.

There's no way in hell I'd pay what the industry considers reasonable for a launch price. They need to lower that if they don't want to be left behind.

 

[Auto-Reply]

I'm not willing to buy triple A games at 60 any longer, I used to make exceptions for games I really really wanted to play (Bayonetta 2 was the last I think).

If that sentiment is the end of triple A production quality, so be it!

 

[Zojirushi]

This is something the industry alone brought on themselves.

From a customer point of view I refuse to think about that as my problem.

Don't preorder, wait for patches, wait for price drops, wait for "complete" editions. Let them figure their shit out first.

 

[OrbitalBeard]

They may as well just sell games for an absurd amount the first week or so as an early access "deal" then drop it to the normal $60 for a couple weeks then down to $40 after that.

Some publishers like EA and MS already do this.

 

[0ptimusPayne]

Yup this is exactly why I didn't invest in the buy2get1 "deal" at Best Buy this holiday season. I wanted to get WD2/FF15/and Battlefront Ultimate edition on the last day of the sale..I was looking at about $102.70 with GCU stacked to walk out with the 3 games, but something just told me no and to wait for a price drop. Sure enough not even a freaking week later, WD2 was a deal of the day for $32 new with my GCU, and I just picked up Battlefront UE for $16 new this past weekend at BB this past weekend from its deal. I could buy FF15 right now and already beat the OG $102 I was going to be spending during the sale, but I'll wait for a price drop on that and the true Pro update. Like others have said the market is saturated with titles, especially during the holidays. It's not really worth paying full price, unless it's an absolute need to play this title asap kind of game. It's best to just wait, especially with these monster backlogs.

 

[StrongBlackVine]

I get new releases for 20 percent off with no sales tax so I'm still alright going day one for games I really want. That being said I only bought 4 games day one this year.

 

[SeeNoWeevil]

The worst scenario is when you charge more to get the game early, and also release a shit port ala FH3. That game was not only much better after a month or so of release AND it dropped in price during sales considerably. I mean, how much more do you need to convince players to avoid your game on day one?

See also; GoTY additions that are almost as cheap as buying the DLC separately for existing owners. Looking at you, TW3.

 

[Shiggy]

In this thread, people just keep the myth that Nintendo games don't crash in games. In the meantime, I buy their titles at heavy discounts at retail.

 

[HotHamBoy]

Wait, Captain Toad and NSMBU are definitely Nintendo Select games. NSMBU even comes with NSLU too. I'm in UK.

Neither are Selects in the U.S.

You can check the NA website, they aren't there.

http://www.nintendo.com/nintendo-selects#wiiu

In this thread, people just keep the myth that Nintendo games don't crash in games. In the meantime, I buy their titles at heavy discounts at retail.

Retail Nintenso games definitely go on sale but the MSRP rarely drops.

The eShop rarely puts them on sale and when they do the discount is 30%, at best.

 

[Mr. Poolman]

Are games worth $60 or more?

I remain faithful to the rule "never pay more than $20 for a computer game".

 

[*Splinter]

Oh come the fuck on with that shit.

Nintendo games maintain their price because they keep SELLING through the life of the system they are on. When there aren't 3 Mario karts on 3ds, the first one remains evergreen. Another large reason is that they very rarely overship a game. Sales and drops happen when there is excess stock that the wholesale or retailer wants to move. It's rarely the publisher rebating those, and Nintendo is super conservative when it comes to manufactoring and warehousing.

Sounds like you agree with him?

 

[Jarnet87]

Nintendo ought to be ashamed

At least their resale value remains high.

 

[Kill3r7]

The worst scenario is when you charge more to get the game early, and also release a shit port ala FH3. That game was not only much better after a month or so of release AND it dropped in price during sales considerably. I mean, how much more do you need to convince players to avoid your game on day one?

See also; GoTY additions that are almost as cheap as buying the DLC separately for existing owners. Looking at you, TW3.

The DLC potion is a byproduct of this gen. Last gen every Xmas sale would always include season pass sales 33%-50%off. This gen we are only seeing the GOTY Or Game+season pass editions going on sale.

 

[HotHamBoy]

Are games worth $60 or more?

I remain faithful to the rule "never pay more than $20 for a computer game".

SNES and N64 games used to run about $65-85, depending on the game.

Games are really cheap these days when you consider how much they cost to make, their scope and the various price points. Then add inflation to that.

I don't mind paying more than $20 for a game if I want to support the creation of good, creative stuff.

At least their resale value remains high.

Rarely, tbh. Higher than average but not that high.

 

[Kthulhu]

Everything big budget is targeting the First/Third person shooter audience. What's not a shooter is generally an open world ubisoft-like nowadays. Or it's a shooter that is an open-world ubisoft-like. There's a couple of exceptions, of course, but they're rare.

Which is to say, they're all cannibalizing each other. If individual AAA game publishers were concerned with the health of the overall market, they'd make a better variety of games with all sorts of budgets. But the shooter market is the biggest so companies are gonna aim at it individually because that has the highest chance from their perspective to maximize profits.

It's a shame that the AAA space is to scared to take risks like back in the 6th generation. Last gen we had a bunch of AA games, but those are obviously too expensive to make now.

These days you're either indie or AAA, but I'd still say that the industry is still better off for the most part.

Tons of great AAA and indie games are coming out, and price drops just mean they'll get in more people's hands.

If AAA publishers are so concerned about launch windows, they shouldn't all try and release during the fall.

 

[Shiggy]

Retail Nintenso games definitely go on sale but the MSRP rarely drops.

The eShop rarely puts them on sale and when they do the discount is 30%, at best.

In Europe, we don't have retail RRPs for Nintendo's retail titles, though we can use the eShop prices for that. eShop in Europe is a huge ripoff for Nintendo games, even with eShop sales, you are better off just buying the retail version.

And then you can always combine it with retail-specific deals, e.g. 15 EUR coupons or B2G3 offers, and then you get games pretty cheap.

 

[old manatee]

Buying games in the first 6 months is for suckers. You pay twice as much, get half the content, and what is there is usually broken.

 

[CyanideFuse]

I am done with buying games anywhere near to day one more for the numerous fixes most games seem to require than for the inevitable price drops. There seems less than a zero reason to buy at launch as you are nothing more than a beta tester. Some high-profile PC releases have completely cemented this for me due to the problems at launch.

It was crazy to see Steep drop to £24.99 (not sure if it is still that) but I am not surprised. I cannot see that the game has sold a great many copies.

 

[dragonyeuw]

I just picked up Rise of Tomb Raider Ps4 off PSN last night for $23.99( was dropped from $59.99 to $29.99, plus the 20% coupon on top). Yeah, the game in general is a year old, but for PS4 it's a newish release and to get it for that price so soon? Crazy. I haven't bought a $59.99 title in years, and frankly the only games I buy at or near full price now are Nintendo's first party ones, since 1) Commercially successful ones rarely go below $50 unless Nintendo releases it as a select title years after release and 2) as a byproduct of 1 they retain value and often increase. Most of Sony and MS's games are in the bargain bin at the end of their respective console generation. It also makes it easier for me to buy those titles on sale digitally because resale value is pretty much shit on them anyways.