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Let the games begin and the gaming cease!
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Let the games begin and the gaming cease!
I sure you need to make good games for everyone to buy! Vita has been out now for ages and still has no games.
Console gaming has more-or-less gone stale and all the innovative games popping up on PC are inevitably digital.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe the Olympics has awoken a sleeping beast known as the evil, GettingOutMore
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.
£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.
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
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.
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.
because there has been nothing to buy, plus you can't mod or create your own maps.
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.
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.
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?
I think you may need to look at the publishers rather than the retail stores. Activision for example have been raising prices each COD release for a while, stores can't absorb that money.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zerox
Steam pretty much sticks with RRPs as they take a cut when a game is brand new and offer sales on items that are usually pretty old and probably discounted/second hand in the retail stores by then.
Actually I see Steam becoming just like the brick and motar stores of today for rip off prices, if the retail go away that isn't going to help the prices down at all. If Steam is the only one left standing then it's going to get a lot worse for high prices, not to mention the debatable convenience with download times/weird patching steam seems to do(Oh patch needs me to download all of Skyrim again yay!)/all your hard brought games stuck on that account if something bad happens)
I still prefer to buy Game discs rather than digital as you can often find it cheaper via online retailers because you can always sell it when you get fed up with it & also because my internet connection is so slow it can take all night to download a full game.
I will buy games via steam but only if they are at a really good special offer price. I will never buy games feom steam at full RRP as all digital downloads should be at least 25% cheaper due to reduced production costs.
I only recently switched from high street shops to Steam for my games. I wanted to get Mount and Blade Warband Napoleonic Wars, and it was only available as DLC. I bought it in the Steam sale, along with a few other games. I've decided that I'll only buy from Steam if a game has at least 75% off, and £5 is the most I'll pay for any one game. I still like the occasional browse in my local GAME, but whether or not I'll ever buy anything from them again is another matter.
re. Trading in boxed PC games. Could you still trade in a used game that activates with a Steam code (eg Shogun 2)? I wouldn't have thought anyone would accept that. I agree that installing from discs can be useful, especially when a game takes up 35GB (Max Payne 3), though. Hopefully download speeds will continue to improve.
My games purchases have been severely curtailed for three reasons:
1. GAME closed my local store - although the Gamestation is still filled with the helpful folks that I like;
2. Precious little to fire my enthusiasm - sorry Sega/EA/etc but sports titles don't float my boat - I prefer to watch real sports. At the moment I'm entertaining myself with really old "back catalogue" titles and stuff on phone/tablet;
3. Impending loss of job means that even the "essential" titles I'd figured on buying (this years CoD, the latest Medal Of Honor, Assassin's Creed 3) in autumn will probably not happen either. Of course, if my employer changes their corporate minds and keeps sending me a paycheck, then perhaps Activision et al will get that extra sale from me! ;)
Hmm, that sounds like a deal that I'd be very interested in - have to fire up the gaming PC and see if it's still available. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by fadeaway
That said, everyone seems very gung-ho about Steam, Origin, etc. Me I'm a little more reserved, still being suspicious that an unscrupulous publisher could - at some future point - reach in and disable your purchases if it saw fit. Remember folks saying that having eBooks on a Kindle was just the same as having a real book - right up until the point that Amazon deleted those two George Orwell titles?
I think you'll find lots of people are very sceptical about these kinds of things.Quote:
Originally Posted by crossy
The recent EU court ruling that suggests a license to use software for a lifetime is legally the same as ownership should be cause for some reassurance.
i very rarely buy new games now, i usually trade games in for games that are pre-owned. Having 2 kids with only me earning money is too much a strain. Before the kids, my wife and I would buy a few games a month.
They are just too expensive now, infact everything is too expensive now.
Budget gaming for me.
As long as you clearly state the activation code has been used then you can sell a used game that activates with a Steam code (eg Shogun 2) via Ebay because some people like to have the discs for backup & also like me prefer to have a printed instruction manual to look at if needed when playing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zoom
That has always been my main worry but it is good to hear about the EU courts ruling as I had not seen that.Quote:
Originally Posted by kalniel
Definitely not. Steam's sales tend to be quite ephemeral affairs. The above price was during the summer sale, specifically when the games were on a daily or flash sale (not the general level of saleness that goes on during the twice-yearly major Steam sales). - current price for all the Batmans is £53.43.Quote:
Originally Posted by crossy
I don't think their contract with Valve allows them to do this. They can withdraw a game from sale, but not revoke existing licenses - for example I'd like to pick up a copy of Sid Meier's Railroads for the wife, but it's no longer on sale.Quote:
suspicious that an unscrupulous publisher could - at some future point - reach in and disable your purchases if it saw fit.
Yes I can see it now: "Fancy throwing a javelin like Jessica Ennis? Diablo 3 is just right for you!!"Quote:
Originally Posted by p2pcamera
Just proved that digital of the future. Everyone knew this already.