Comments on: Modern Warfare 2 and game pricing

By: Julian

Julian — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 20:45:02 +0000

i consider myself hardcore, but with the price of cod:mw2 at $150 NZ, i am not going near it.

i’ve played team fortress 2 and cod4 to death. now i’m trying out halo 3 on xbox, with no mouse i find it annoying.

mw2 is too expensive.

By: Ola

Ola — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:39:49 +0000

The PC game publishers are missing a trick here. Despite the depredations of piracy, they could definitely establish a strong 2nd stream of income via budget/classic releases. For many more casual gamers the first run release of games is too expensive, and their PCs can’t handle the graphics requirements anyway. Yet they would buy 2-3 years later when they’ve upgraded. They still like to have the actual discs in order to install when they feel like.

I don’t think there would be much cannibalisation of the hardcore purchasers. With a litle canniness a steady market could be built up, and budget releases awaited by the legions of cheap-ass gamers with almost as much anticipation as the first-run release.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:42:09 +0000

Agree, with your comments Bruce. As a gamer I am happy to pay a higher price for quality games and for me that’s the distinction. Just look at the price of a football match or a music gig, a video game is great value for money, especially where Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is concerned. I have also noticed that some e-tailers have begun to discount the game to £45.99. Do you think we will see some of the top high street retailers do this in order to compete?

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 14:07:35 +0000

Before they were killed off by piracy publishers used to do all sorts of creative things with boxed PC games.
On consoles you are very much limited by what the platform holder will let you do as they control the market for games on their machine. And they have to be paid their license fee on every game which somewhat removes room to manoevre.
More here: http://www.bruceongames.com/2007/11/13/nintendo-sony-and-microsoft-are-evil/

By: Saveed Saeed

Saveed Saeed — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 10:07:55 +0000

Hi Bruce,
what is the reason publishers have never re-released games in the form of boxsets for example – i..e trilogies for lara croft etc? Also re-selling games at budget prices under ‘classics’ labels – has this ever generated enough return?
Interested to know….

By: Bruce

Bruce — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:00:05 +0000

Chris Deering agrees with me: http://www.mcvuk.com/news/35209/Publishers-need-70-games-pricetag-says-Deering

“Before there can be as many successful blockbuster games as there were in the past, games have to be produced in a more efficient fashion.”……….

………“The cost of development is ten times what it was for PS2, and more like 20 to 50 times more than on PSOne. Yet there are lots of things you can get for less than the relative value of paying 50p an hour for a very high end game.”