News - UK retail games sales the worst since records began

[HEXUS]

Let the games begin and the gaming cease!

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[GI Joel]

I sure you need to make good games for everyone to buy! Vita has been out now for ages and still has no games.

[funke_munke]

Console gaming has more-or-less gone stale and all the innovative games popping up on PC are inevitably digital.

[fadeaway]

I would buy more if they weren't £45-50. In the current market, I just play games a few months after they come out, at a reduced price, rented from lovefilm or borrowed from a trading club/preowned if the price hasn't dropped to an acceptable level by then.

It's the same concept as itunes etc. If the prices are better, people will buy more. The economic argument of cost of manufacture per item as a deterrent to low prices is irrelevant when you have downloadable games.

[Platinum]

Steam FTW, if you are a retail chain and failing badly then I have no sympathy, you cannot rely on the same business model forever.

[fadeaway]

Oh and agreed about Steam. I have been watching the prices for Batman Arkham Asylum and Batman Arkham City for a while now in my local retail shops (GAME, HMV) because I was thinking of trying them, and they're still around £20+ each for a preowned copy. I recently bought both the GOTY edition of Arkham Asylum, Arkham City AND the Harley Quinn DLC pack all together for under £13 on Steam. Wow! No competition.

[AGTDenton]

Maybe the Olympics has awoken a sleeping beast known as the evil, GettingOutMore

[brasco]

This is what happens when you inflate a bubble so far (console game prices) it's inevitably going to burst, until the next one is inflated PS4 Xbox8 etc.
It's a shame because there are a lot of people's jobs at stake, but I do also hope this will streamline the industry and we can get back to innovating.

[j1979]

£40 is far out of my price range. If they were £10 - £15 for new releases and £4 - £8 for budget releases i would consider it.

[howdee]

Funny how having a computer doing its job from a no rent room is still cheaper than having a few sales personnel on a payroll rotate in expensively rented shops, isn't it? Go figure LOL

[addz17]

Well if i was unfortunate enough to have to game on an 8 year old console i don't think i would be to enthusiastic about buying £40 games for it. Hopefully this slump will make sony and microsoft usher in the next gen consoles and with it some nice DX11 titles which of course i will buy for the PC lol. Im sick of game devs having to cater for such old systems, from one title to the next there's not much improvement.

[MrBozack]

Discs are unpractical and unreliable. All my old games just sit there gathering dust. My digital copies are "there" if I want them. Game "CD Keys" and digital rights management flourish in the retail environment too.

Digital purchases usually step around these issues; if providing "paste serial number" facility. I consider these major advantages.

Plus Steam manages friends, patches and much more.

[petercook7]

because there has been nothing to buy, plus you can't mod or create your own maps.

[Zerox]

It is pretty obvious that so called "game stores" are really ripping consumers off due to unreasonably high prices compared to their online competitors (like Steam and Amazon), so I guess that they deserve their fate, and hopefully they will just slide peacefully down into the pit of obsolescence.

Although Steam and the rest of the digital distribution platforms (including that evil one which shall not be named) will probably become dominant in the PC games market, I have to wonder what will happen to the console game market, which requires the purchase of physical media.

Will it stay on the high street, or will it too move predominantly to web-based retailers?

It doesn't matter tbh.

[Malphas]

The current generation of consoles are pretty much on their last legs, the fan backlash with the latest Modern Warfare title is indicative of players becoming bored with what this generation has to offer, for one example. Not only that, but since games are all multiformat these days people are starting to find their cheap laptops are now powerful enough to game on, which wasn't really the case five years ago. That - combined that with digital distribution services - means the PC is now a much more appealing platform for the average/casual gamer than it has been in a very long time. Smartphone/tablet games are also a factor, diminishing sales in the pre-teen/very casual market.

[directhex]

Summer, historically and famously, is a new release drought. There's nothing of interest or value released over the summer for consoles, presumably on the assumption that people are on holiday. So poor console game sales = no ****.

And what little space still exists for retail PC games has low sales, just after the Steam sales? You don't say?