PC Game Price

Are we paying too much for PC games?

PC game prices are of course comparative to most luxury items that are advertised to us. And when thinking of buying something we all put a value on what we think that something is worth.

Most of the time this is before we’ve seen the price. It’s an old advertising trick, in fact it’s one of the oldest! Lets take an imaginary product:

The Melon Shaper 5000.

Wow, I hear you say, that’s a cool name I already want one.

Actually so do I, but anyway, your attention has already been grabbed by the curious name. What does the Melon Shaper do exactly? How is it better than the Melon Shaper 4000?

What has this got to do with PC game prices? Well, see if any of this sounds familiar:

The advertiser will quickly go on to list its amazing features. These probably include the ability to reshape a melon to European Union Standards in 2 minutes rather than 5 minutes as the previous version did. It can also now do this from a distance of over 2 metres away rather than the melon having to sit inside the unit.

‘Well this just keeps getting better and better’, you think to yourself.

But wait, there’s more! The advertiser also lets you know that this Melon Shaper is lightweight and folds down to a size of 5cm by 5cm. Smaller than any other Melon Shaping device on the market.

Because they’re also feeling generous today they’ll throw in the Melon Shaper Mini, the small portable Melon Shaper, for absolutely free. That means more Melon Shaping opportunities, even when you’re not at home!

If you’ve already listened to the advertiser this far they’ll believe you to be hooked, or at least keenly interested in buying the product. This is the time they’ll list all the features once again and tell you the low, low price involved.

Okay so that’s very infomercial like and I apologise for even entertaining the notion that you might buy something off a shopping channel. Then again, most of us have, including myself! So it can’t be a bad technique.

Some of the elements of this “oversell” technique are actually used by big online game sellers. PC game prices are usually highlighted after lists of features or new game elements. Amazon for instance always lists features immediately below the stock picture.

So what’s this got to do with actual PC game prices? Well, the reason advertisers do this is because if they tell us the price first we’d be concentrating on that rather than the amazing features that no other game has. This way we’ve already decided on a value based on these features and if the advertiser has done their job well enough, the price on offer will be lower than the price we came up with in our heads!

And Voila’ a sale!

This is done through different mediums in the gaming industry, such as review sites like this, or game-play videos and trailers that will show off the new technology or cool aspects of a game months, sometimes years, before it has even been released.

There are obviously several common areas where games are scored and sold on. But perhaps one of these is the most important aspect that reels in the customers?

Perhaps it’s game length? This is an argument I see pop up a lot and it matters quite a bit to people who buy one game every month, or even less. They want to get their money’s worth out of the game, and why not? But attributing a dollar to hour value isn’t something I can really agree with.

Some say that a pc game price has to adhere to at least $1 an hour before they’ll consider buying it. Personally I think that’s a flawed method of assessing the value of a game. It could be a game that lasts over 60 hours. But if you spend only 30 hours of a game shooting and running and the other 30 cleaning out you characters latrine then what you’ve got is obvious.

30 hours of shovelling crap.

As a reviewer I often hope for shorter, higher quality games. But that’s only because I want to give them a good look over before I even type a word about them. Luckily for everyone else this hardly ever happens!

Quality of a game is hard to pin down too. Like anything it’s never about one thing. Usually something will stand out like the graphics, sound or story but everything balances out.

But here’s the real problem.

I fully believe that commercially produced PC games (eg, developers who have a publisher) price their games too highly online.

I said Online! Just before I’m bombarded with prices and figures from all directions.

I’ve got tons of my own examples (The Orange Box, Oblivion, etc…) but it would be fairly dull to list all (Anno 1404, Fallout 3, and so on…) games I knew of that cost more on steam than they do in retail outlets. These are all, of course, at the time of writing this article (June 09)

It was often advertised that online PC game prices would be far lower than retail prices due to the reduction in material and transport costs. While this happened in some cases, mostly in the early days of steam and impulse, the costs have slowly but surely risen to where they are today.

Now, if I were my brother I’d have a conspiracy theory behind all this to the tune of publishers trying to force people to buy retail rather than online because of easier piracy controls and to keep themselves in the ever diminishing loop.

However I’m not so I won’t.

Having a game through an online service such as Steam is valuable to me, as I don’t have to worry about loosing the disc or even putting it in the machine if I want to play a game. The question is, how much more value does this add? If a PC game price is £10 cheaper from a retail store than Steam I’m far more likely to get it that way.

Far be it for me to incite any kind of global buying strategy between all PC gamers (not that anyone would listen to that anyway!) but the only way to show that this is not a good strategy would be to boycott games believed to be overpriced.

This might even work if there weren’t consoles around.

Basically then we’re left with a flawed system (is there any other kind?). The only ray of hope is that Steam, Impulse and others often have highly discounted weekends. Perhaps that’s when we’ll see games for their true value.

Failing that, at least there are plenty of great independent games out there!