Today I was playing around with my mobile device, and I found this company which sells mobile games for 3 euros or so. Not the small simple arcade games, but proper games you can spend hours playing (not that you can't do that with the arcade games).
Now this made me think a while. Most games for PC or other console cost around 60 euros. This is for games which 'just came out' - it then drops to 40-something or so, then slowly goes down. But even if I pick an ages-old game to download from my favourite online game store - such as the brilliant X-COM which came out in 1993 and requires 4MB of RAM - it still costs 5 euros.
Apparently, video games also suffer from Zipfian distribution - there are some games which bring in tons of cash - and many other games which bring in very little. So is there a reason for this large cost? 60 euros for a game?
And while we're there... in the old days... we used to have game demos. Cds full of em used to be stuck in the front of magazines. Nowadays we make our game-buying decisions based on a 5 minute video, generally containing very little In Game footage.
We also see the decay of single-player games. Its quite depressing really. I don't want to pay money just to log on and get headshotted every .142 minutes by a person who plays the game all the time.
Meh. At least its not as bad as the situation browser-based games are in... (yep, next blog)
The Llama
The reason games cost 60€ is because of the enormous amount of money that is needed to produce them.
ReplyDeleteA new study out by the group M2 Research says that on average, a multiplatform game for the current console generation can be as much as $28 million, $10 if you decide to take the exclusivity route.