By John Walker on July 16th, 2009 at 6:50 pm.
As you’ll have heard, there’s a game called Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 coming out this Christmas. A game that’s expected to be so huge that other publishers are hiding their games in cupboards until it goes away. Even publisher Activision doesn’t want to launch its own games against it. But there’s one country where consumers might be a little surprised when it comes out in November. That’s the UK, where it’s been given an RRP for £40 on PC, and a whopping £55 on 360 and PS3.
It’s the fault of the weak pound, apparently. And it doesn’t look likely to stop at Activision. According to an MCV report, “retailers have been warned that other publishers are likely to follow suit.” They go on to quote THQ’s Ian Curran who explained that a combination of factors is leading to a hike in prices.
“Exchange rates between the Euro and the pound are making it very difficult for publishers to show an acceptable operating margin in the UK. You can’t continue to trade as normal when the biggest territory in Europe has seen cost of goods increase by 30 per cent due to the strengthening of the Euro… Also, development costs for next gen software has increased at a time when the take-up on these machines is slower than expected and therefore the opportunity to sell more units is limited. The increase in cost of goods due to the weak pound has added to this burden, and therefore something has to happen to ensure publishers’ return on their investment.”
(Read the full article on MCV to get the rest of the quotes.)
The consequences of this, especially if the increases spread across all games (and think about it – if one publisher is going to raise prices by a tenner, every publisher is going to try the same), will be very interesting. It would seem reasonable to expect that the proportion of people to spend £55 on a game (or £40 on the PC version, of course) is going to be significantly lower than those willing or able to spend ten pounds less. It really is a quite extraordinary amount of money.
Things get more confusing when you consider digital distribution. The point here isn’t that it’s expensive to distribute in the UK. It’s that the money that comes in for it isn’t worth enough once exchanged into Euro. So presumably online prices will be similarly high. But is the audience going to stump up? Clearly MW2 is a massively anticipated game across all three major formats, and a big mainstream audience is gagging to get at it. But pricing like this flies wildly in the face of everything that the trends are currently suggesting. As the iPhone rockets into the stratosphere, making people rich on their 79p games, and while Steam regularly demonstrates that halving the price of a game far more than doubles the sales, is launching a AAA game into a recession-hit market at a 25 to 35% higher price than the norm going to be effective?
Of course, there’s always the perspective that game prices have only ever come down. PC games cost less today than they did 15 years ago (mid-90s RRPs were around £40 to £50 for PC games), and have stayed at £30 to £35 while everything else has gradually become more expensive. This can be somewhat countered by the, “Bloody hell, £30 is a LOT of money for a game” position. Render this in capital letters for the £40 version.
Earlier purchasers will notice that retailers are selling the games at pre-order prices that match standard game shelf prices if you order now before they’re released.
That sucks; hope it doesn’t spread to the US.
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so, games get shorter and we get to pay more for them, awesome, what could possibly go wrong ?
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Heh, I still haven’t bought Modern Warfare 1 because the price has never dropped to my satisfaction.
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I’m sure none of you Brits took joy when America was struggling with a weak dollar last year, thus i shall take no joy in your suffering now.
That said lets hope David Cameron can save UK from itself the world needs a strong US and a strong UK.
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dang. at current exchange rates that’s 65 bucks (USD) for a game. now, i believe some consoles charge 60USD for their new AAA titles (xbox or sony i think), but on pc 50 is where things have been for new releases for a long time.
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Funny how the weakening of the dollar with respect to the euro didn’t seem to have any effect on American or European prices.
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Wow, imagine what piracy figures are going to be like after this.
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Though this has no direct effect on me (being in the US) I do feel like they’d be better off trying to re-coup their money in a diffrent way. I don’t know exactly how but maybe setting up some offices and production in the UK might help?
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CoD4 was already on steam for $70 for us 3rd world Europeans back when you could pay in $, iirc.
Just another case of “let’s milk the fanboys, because we can! oh and please pirate our stuff, by the way!”
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In a Trine thread on QT3 I commented on how only the big dogs are able to try to change price points. Looks like one is about to try!
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This is an acceptable argument. Oh no wait, it’s no longer 2006 and this is not an entirely new engine.
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“It would seem reasonable to expect that the proportion of people to spend £55 on a game (or £40 on the PC version, of course) is going to be significantly lower than those willing or able to spend ten pounds less.”
And the proportion of people raising the Jolly Roger will be significantly higher too I bet …
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Eight comments in and an Australian hasn’t told me off for how crazy their prices are. Come on Australians!
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I will not be purchasing MW2, then. And if they don’t want to see soaring piracy figures, they’d better have some hardcore DRM.
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That sucks. :/
And it only adds to my suspicion that the Night Vision Goggles Edition of MW2 will be the most expensive/silly game pack ever put on shelves…
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I’m surprised no one has tried making DRM that doesn’t do anything until you try and rip the game then it calls the local police and has them come arrest you ;P
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£40? That’s still relatively cheap! Wait till publishers do what they do here and attempt to charge you £50 for most console games. Increase the price by say £10 to £20 for PC games then reduce the availability of PC games to basically 1 or 2 new domestically released titles a year (oh and only sell them in London) and top that off with zero price reductions ever.
Then arrive at the conclusion that it’s cheaper to buy via import than domestically and you’ll know what we’ve been dealing with for years. =)
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I don’t get game pricing, I really don’t
I think 50€ is a lot to pay for a game and I very rarely pay that much nowadays, but then I see people saying that they’ve pre-ordered the 150$ edition of MW2 because it comes with a pair of NVGs. One of the reasons I’m not interested in consoles is because the prices on their games are higher and they never seem to come down. I can’t understand how people are willing to pay so much
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Along with piracy, stuff like this makes used games sales that much more attractive. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
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yea, i also haven’t bought the first one since it still costs $40 at minimum… maybe that price will drop when the 2nd comes out and I can play the first one, then play the second one like 4 years later.
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CoD4′s campaign lasted about five hours… if this one is as short… well… I imagine more than a few people would be a little unhappy about paying £55 for 5 hours of gameplay. (yes, I realise people don’t like reducing a game to a simple measurement of its duration, and that multiplayer is a factor as well, but still… eek)
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Wait a second, let me get this straight. If you buy the 150 $ version you get REAL night vision goggles? How much does a similiar pair of NVGs cost without the game?
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don’t forget about the very probable DLCs, probably doubling or tripling the price
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aw boo hoo for the UK
Prices raised by 10 bucks over a year ago across the board in Canada for all games due to a weak dollar, it sucks but thems the breaks.
by the way don’t expect the prices to ever go back down, when our dollar got strong again the inflation stayed.
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If anyone really needs this as soon as it comes out, GAME and Amazon have each got it at a tenner off RRP, at £29.99:
http://www.game.co.uk/PC/Action/FirstPersonShooter/~r339836/Modern-Warfare-2/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0021AETOU/ref=asc_df_B0021AETOU386249?smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&tag=googlecouk06-21&linkCode=asn&creative=7974&creativeASIN=B0021AETOU
Me, I’ll wait.
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I’m going to pirate the hell out of this. But I suspect it’s because I don’t expect much replay value from it (I know the multiplayer’s going to be awesome but I’m still not going there) and £40 for something which will last me a weekend or so strikes me as a tiny bit too dear. Unless they have a brilliant zombie mode. Then I’ll buy it.
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hah! I won’t be buying it til it’s £20ish, so that they want to retail it for much higher is irrelevant to me. Still, call of duty has been getting shorter, and shorter, and shorter, so consider me cynical as to their motives, and concrete in my desire to not financially reward them for it.
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@Hardtarget- but aren’t your dollars worth about 50p?
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so I just did some conversion
$70CDN (which is what we now pay for games) = 38 pounds. So basically now you’re paying the same as us. oh on, the horror!
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Can’t they at least pretend that the contents of the box justify the price?
Like throw in a pity ‘extras’ dvd or something damnit!
SF4 squeezed people out of £60 for the abysmal ‘collectors’ 360 edition; which comprised of two 3 inch figurines [left over from an e3 goody bag?] and a strategy guide which…well it was more a strategy pamphlet.
I had more reading material from the pizza delivery menu that came with the same mail.
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That seems strange, talking about weakening currency, as our US dollar has been weakening for quite awhile (at least 50 years). Still, games will cost $50 for us, which is somewhere around 30 of yonder pounds. Can’t imagine why you guys would be seeing a 10 pound increase, based solely on the value of Euros, especially since our dollar is laughable compared to the value of a pound, let alone a Euro. Not fair in my opinion.
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At a 100 bucks for their AWESOME night vision goggles they should market them with “ze goggles! zey do nothing!”. Sounds like a scam, like 95% of all bundles, ever.
I’d LOVE to see a review by some guy who knows his stuff about ze goggles comparing their quality and price to other, “serious” goggles.
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As the first game wasn’t actually that great and the online was just a grenade dodging simulator I think I can safely say that Activision can stuff their £40 price tag up their collectively over priced arse.
Charging £40 for a game will only catch on if mugs pay it.
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Wait what’s this about a $150 version with nvgs?
The fuck?
Have people lost their minds?!?
*pre orders from amazon*
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I assume this strategy will actually work on the consoles, especially for this genre. I think a lot of people play mostly the multiplayer part with a group. It only takes one or two of the group who don’t care about price to pretty much force the whole group to join. You don’t want to be the lone dork still playing COD4, do you?
On PC, I think the audience is different. And by different I mean smarter. If PC games starting retailing for $75 bucks in the US, I just wouldn’t buy them. I don’t buy them at the normal $50 price point anyway. The big MP games are heavily moddable, so there is not such a strong need to move onto something else. The PC also has a gigantic collection of easy to secure (digitally) games that can be played until prices drop. I actually own like 3 games right now that I haven’t even played.
Regardless of the actual piracy (which will increase to a degree), if there is a huge gap between console and PC players paying up it will definitely be sited as proof of a piracy problem. Luckily England would never try to pass crazy 3 strikes laws like France right? Hahahahahaha…..
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Yeah, I’m not paying that. £30 is too much as it is and the £35 they’ve been trying to bump their prices up to for a while now is unacceptable. £25 is the max I’ll ever pay for any game.
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I’m somewhat unimpressed by this, games are supposed to be moving closer to prices that would result in massive impulse buys, to higher sales, not further away from it.
I cannot support being charged more for my games, it’s the business model that is broken, not the retail model.
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Yeah, I also never spend more than £25 on games these days, me thinks it will be a while before I bother picking this up. Considering World of War is only just coming down to that sort of price range now I fear it will be a while! Call of Duty games seem to stick to their original pricing for a lot longer than other games.
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Hello, I’m (not) a representive of activision. As such i would like to explain to price point as only a person in my position can.
A dog can lick its balls, some theorise thats why it does it, but i want to push a theory of my own. The dog benefits from licking its balls, probably even likes it. (T)Here at activision we(read as they) like money, call of duty is a dope cash cow, activision benefit from milk, activision might even like milk.
Also money.
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I’ve been paying 40 quid and more (at the current exchange rate) for PC games for years.
I am not Australian, but that’ll have to do for now. ;)
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Wow… I’m out too, £40 is too much. Big shame, as I was looking forward to this. Like a previous poster, the fact that they still haven’t brought down the price of the first Modern Warfare game, has kept me from purchasing.
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About the NVGs
“Real” NVGs cost reeaaally much and they’re really sensitive pieces of equipment. If they’re exposed to daylight they break, and the ones they were showing off here didn’t have anything covering the lens. I doubt they work very well
Besides, the reason they’re there is because the profit margin on them is much bigger than on the game. The whole point of them is to be a bad deal because that’s how they make money, just like with the plastic guitars and whatnot
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Btw, I don’t have any issues with pirating Activision games because they’re so damn anti consumer. I waited more than a full year for them to drop the price or at least give a good weekend deal on CoD4, but nope. So I downloaded it and was fairly disappointed with it, but I don’t feel bad about doing that. I don’t have a problem with buying games from people I like supporting or from people who make an effort to try to sell you something.
It’s not Activision’s fault that I pirated it, clearly it was my own choice, but it’s their own fault that I never bought it.
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Well I was wondering which of the holiday glut games I was going to pass up on until next year. Guess that call has been made for me.
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I think I paid more than that for the original ‘Modern Warfare’ over STEAM. Oh and shouldn’t this have a ‘piracy’ tag for completionists sake?
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wtf is a quid and how do they relate to pounds? I’ve been confused on this ever since I saw Shawn of the Dead but I’ve kept my mouth shut until now. Maybe I look at WikiUK to see the difference.
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The full, official name, pound sterling, (plural: pounds sterling) is used mainly in formal contexts and also when it is necessary to distinguish the United Kingdom currency from other currencies with the same name. Otherwise the term pound is normally used. The currency name is sometimes abbreviated to just sterling, particularly in the wholesale financial markets, but not when referring to specific amounts; for example, “Payment is accepted in sterling” but never “These cost five sterling”.[5][6] The abbreviations “ster.” or “stg.” are sometimes used. The term British pound is commonly used in less formal contexts, although it is not an official name of the currency. A common slang term is quid (singular and plural) which is thought to derive from the Latin phrase “quid pro quo”.
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not a big concern for me, will be buying the game anyway.
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Ahaha…no, not buying.
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^ Waiting for that UK John guy or whatever his name is to show up and say this is another example that shows PC Gaming is dieing in the west and will be replaced totally by console games.
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You gents should really use pounds and dollars when discussing this sort of thing. Many (most?) of your readers are in the Grand Old US of A.
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This is just activision trying to make a few extra bucks on a property they know they can sell for pretty much any price
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I’d support 25% price increases for an absolute guarantee that quality increased by 25%.
No, I don’t think so either.
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Well, this was to be expected given the foreign exchange situation.
It seemed like only yesterday that we were screaming about that other $10 price hike that brought console gaming prices to where they are today.
The good news in all of this just means that we the indies who develop niche games for a smaller group of people, get to hick up our prices too. Wot? We gotta eat too you know. :)
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There’s a world out there waiting for you to explore it. I don’t see why a UK website should have to pander to Americans – there are many fine American websites out there if you can’t handle foreign lingo
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You failed!
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Well, no Modern Warfare 2 for me then, at least until the price drops significantly. Like others have said, £25 is the top amount I am willing to pay and that has to be something I really want or bundled with expansions. For most games it is <£20, which considering the sameyness of CoD (I love the games but they are quite similar) is the price point I would be wanting. Having said that, if CoD4 is anything to go by that price will probably be hanging around for quite awhile, so I doubt I will be interested by the time the price drops. Lost sale Activision and I doubt I will be the only one.
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@A-Scale
Speaking as an American it would never even occur to me to request that. It’s a British site, using their own currency just makes sense. It’s not like it’s hard to find the exchange rate, or if multiplication is beyond you you can always put the price into google thusly: X pounds -> dollars
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It doesn’t really work when the game costs £55 on console Serondal.
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Well in that case Yarr! Although i wont be yarring this as i have no interest in it and tbh i will still pay for games i like despite the price tag as a: pc gaming needs as much pound sterling poured into it as possible and b: i like to support those i consider to make good games.
So in conclusion thats outrageous but what ya gonna do?
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Sorry for double post, but this is a UK site written by people known for their work in the British gaming press. UK slant is inevitable. Their are plenty of sites catered for yanks, lot us Brits have somewhere too.
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“Everything is worth what it’s purchaser will pay for it.” – from Civ IV (that I got for a glorious £10 on Steam)
Also I really hate the reasoning that when a publisher does something that you don’t like it gives you the right to pirate it. These threads always seem to fill up with that toxic notion. If you think it’s too expensive don’t buy it. It’s a more powerful statement to ignore a game.
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I bought CoD 4 when it cost 20 pounds.
I will buy CoD 6 when it costs 20 pounds.
Problem solved.
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@William
Really? I’d have thought that, say, the mass piracy of Spore sent EA a stronger message than lower sales alone would.
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I’m not seeing anything about this on the American side (fingers crossed), but it is truly a rare title for which I will pay more than $50. There are only a few developers who can get me to pay that price for a game, and in my mind, InfinityWard hasn’t earned that privilege yet.
That plateau is reserved for Blizzard, Valve and Bioware.
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A-Scale – this is a story about British prices rising, in Britain only, on a British website. We firmly believe in our readers’ ability to Google. When stories are international, I make an effort to include US prices.
Cigol – not at all. I like to imagine all those who justify their piracy decisions based on price will be mailing Activision the £30 they’d otherwise have willingly paid.
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Publisher: We’re gonna start charging brits the same as the rest of the world.
Brit1: I won’t buy it then.
Brit2: I’ll just steal it then.
Rest of World: Meh.
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@Anticipation
Umm, find yourself a conversion chart (or use google as described earlier). This is NOT the same as the rest of the world.
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Dead Fish: The Prestige edition is reported to be $150. So that’ll be £150.
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Oh, I see, so amazon lists it as 59,00€ in germany because the british pound is so weak ? Quite a convenient excuse.
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If they were charging the same as the rest of the world, I wouldn’t be able to rip off quite so many digital distribution sites by hiding behind a US proxy and paying in dollars ….
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Too expensive for me. I’ll just play it on my roommate’s 360 when he gets it and stick to COD4′s multiplayer.
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Cripes mate. You’re all a bunch of screaming galahs. Here in Oz we pay $400USD for a game since the Aussie dollar is
worth less than a dingo in a gum tree…etc. – Alf G
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Bah Euro’s enjoy it while it lasts! the Anglo Saxon model will prove mighty whereas the Continet are yet to fully appreciate the massive problems recent EU joiners are having with their finances and how much they will need to bailed out by.
Wait what? A computer game site? oh…
erm BG2 is the best game ever or something. Also is Modern Warfare any good? never played it
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BUT AMERICA IS TEH BESTEST GUYZ U GUYZ GOTSTA DO WUT WE SAYS OR WE’LL BLOW U UP ALL NUKE-LIKE AND SHIT!!!!!!
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“Really? I’d have thought that, say, the mass piracy of Spore sent EA a stronger message than lower sales alone would.”
Luckily EA wised up, but in general, low sales and high piracy sends the message “we really like your game, it’s really popular, but obviously your anti-piracy techniques aren’t strong enough” to most executives. And sends the message “any time you try to create something, people will shit all over it” to the developers.
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@FunkyLlama: the only message publishers got is that they should follow the MS approach and feed their customers with even worse DRM (coming soon: full online activation, aka must-be-online-all-the-time), its just that they needed to call it by a better name, with slogans like “anticheating” or “advantage” or “better comunication features”, with the big plus of having the customer at hands reach all the time and being able to sell premium services and DLC by clicking a button.
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Sooo another game i won’t be buying until it drops in price, this is great, by the time you’re all playing modern warfare 3:ultimate beatdown of terrorist nations, i’ll have just got this from a bargain bin.
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It only smells like another incentive for PC piracy….
when will they learn ?
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Yes, please don’t pander to us Americans. I actually prefer to be abused, if possible.
(Except for Vandelay’s comments. Sorry, I didn’t know we were somehow taking RPS away from you. Besides being only British, it is also the only site that prints the kind of excellent PC articles we all love, regardless of country of origin.)
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Oh, I see, so amazon lists it as 59,00€ in germany because the british pound is so weak ? Quite a convenient excuse.
Yeah, you’re right. That’s 51 GBP.
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@ Thrawny ahh Tie Fighter, were you the best game ever? ps can someone email me a joystick when it appears on steam?
On topic: i thought we were moving away from ridiculous DRM style IP protection! When will “they” realise that a product is worth what the largest amount of people will pay for it! Start high by all means but watch your slaes like a hawk and reduce if necessary…
(apologies for the exclamation marks!)
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Oh we are not making enough money due to poor sales, do we A: Reduce the price to increase sales so we make more money or B: Increase the price so we get even less sales.
Twats.
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There may be a disparity between British and Euro prices, but your PC price for CoD:MW2 is pretty close to being in line with the American price. This hasn’t received much remark so far, but Activision is merrily leading US-based PC gamers into inflation-land by charging $60 (roughly £35), a hike of 20% over standard retail PC prices to date.
From what I can tell, the real highway robbery is the UK console versions at £55, which converts to over $20 US more than the PC version’s price point. Pricing for the PC version in the UK, otoh, is only about $5 US more than in the US.
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@Archonsod You trust a web proxy with your credit card info?
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Hm, £40 is roughly 510SEK (Swedish Crowns), while most new “AAA” games on Steam costs around 50€, which gets turned into 550SEK.
Sucks to have a weak currency, eh? You’re still better off than we are at the moment ;)
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I can’t see anything good coming of this. Sorry guys. I hate you have to pay for deservedly weakening faith in our fiat based currency system.
This + EA’s DRM reversal again with C&C 4 bruhaha (and also claiming the game is thusly free of DRM since it requires an always on internet connection for SinglePlayer – learn anything from Spore guys?) makes me wonder just where this will stop. I’m guessing this will continue until the final solidifying of the concept of games as a service and pay full price to rent it out and, if you are lucky, we will let you play what you paid for, assuming everything on everyone’s side is up and running. Glad I have enough of a game collection saved up right now that I could be in games until I’m 500 and still not see everything in them.
Pity, really. I wanted to see what the newest bumpshadingmapping4000atron could push out in a decade…
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Firstly, the idea that iphone is a goldmine is mostly spin. I have several friends with popular iphone games who still earn very little. Very few make the big bucks with $1 games.
Secondly, take a step back and look how much entertainment a GOOD game gives you. Someone claiming COD4 was 5 hours of fun are having a laugh. I clocked up easily 200+ hours on it with the excellent multiplayer. Even if that had cost me £50 its still laughably cheaper than any other form of entertainment.
People these days are keen to rubbish a game and call it crap if it doesnt have HDR lighting, lasts 60 hours, have 5 gigs of voiceovers and near ILM-quality FMV, and yet we aren’t prepared to pay the cost of a few trips to the movies to buy it.
You get what you pay for. It’s a free market. People enter the PC gaming market when high profits are made and leave when they are not. There are lots of stories of people abandoming PC gaming and few new (big) entrants.
Also, in the long run, pirating rather than playing will mean less one-payment games like COD, and more games like Evony. Is that really what PC gamers want?
It sucks when things go up in price. But compare pc game costs (and quality) with house prices (even now) over the last 20 years in the UK, and tell me with a straight face that gaming has got too expensive.
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In the US all the retailers are reporting it for $60 on the PC, so I don’t know if this is isolated to the UK.
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/MW2priceboycott
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Wait…the special edition of MW2 comes with night vision goggles?
Fucking hell. It’s like they’re asking for another school shooting to be linked to video games.
That said, I hope Mechwarrior 5 includes a mech.
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I will *NOT* be purchasing your game on 360 BECAUSE of this ridiculous price. Plus I am certain many others also won’t, for the same reasons. Strength of the £ – utter bollocks. Attempted money grabbing off the back of hype – absolutely.
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I dont think you can seriously claim that exchange rates do not affect game developers. Speaking as someone whose pay is in dollars and whose rent is in pounds, I can assure you it is very much a factor.
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Sound like an extremely valid reason. I pay for my lovely EVE sub in Euros and have seen how much the exchange rate has changed. I wouldnt be overly surprised if they still dont make as much as they used to on new games in the UK.
I doubt they would lose alot of sales by bumping the price up that amount though. I suspect *most* people who could have paid £35 for it to be able to pay the extra fiver for a game at Christmas.
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“Secondly, take a step back and look how much entertainment a GOOD game gives you. Someone claiming COD4 was 5 hours of fun are having a laugh. I clocked up easily 200+ hours on it with the excellent multiplayer. Even if that had cost me £50 its still laughably cheaper than any other form of entertainment.”
I hate that argument. I don’t think how long I spend with any entertainment product has anything to do with how much it’s worth. I’ve played thousands upon thousands of hours of CS but I don’t think it’s worth more money than any other game.
“People these days are keen to rubbish a game and call it crap if it doesnt have HDR lighting, lasts 60 hours, have 5 gigs of voiceovers and near ILM-quality FMV, and yet we aren’t prepared to pay the cost of a few trips to the movies to buy it.”
People? What people? I would love for talented developers to make ‘real’ games but with lower budgets if that means they charged less for them.
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I’ll probably buy it anyway. I played CoD4 regularly for almost a year. After a being disapointed by World at War I’m ready to return to the trenches even at this higher price.
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I think we can chalk this up to ‘Activision have gone stark raving bonkers’ more than anything.
Again, I point to the Brutal Legend lawsuit, where they dropped the game and Double Fine from their list of published games/studios because it didn’t look profitable enough. EA immediately snap the game up because it looks VERY profitable, and Activision sue because… well, apparently their legal argument is ‘I saw them first! Mitts off!’
They haven’t made much sense lately.
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On one hand it pleases me that you guys have to pay a little closer to what I have to pay for new games. It’s only fair.
On the other, it annoys me because I import most of my games from you guys. Because your games are so cheap.
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Well, the point is that they’re not cheap for them
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@jon_hill987 It’s quite the opposite actually. CoD4 sold by the container load, and still does.
It’s a case of: we have something to sell which we know people really want, and think pushing the price up will not reduce sales as much as it increases profit. Pure economics at work.
The people at Activision are not stupid, they have slightly more experience in how to make a profit from a computer game than your average enraged gamer. I won’t be buying it at that price myself, but I’m sure many will.
As for the general cost of games going up to match it, I’m sure others will try, and possibly succeed, but don’t buy games at the prices you don’t want to pay for them and hopefully things will correct.
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@JonFitt
Indeed. This is how the free market should work, and it should work for EVERYONEs benefit, especially the consumer. Company makes awesome product. Company is rewarded by high sales, and boost to reputation that ensures premium price for future products. Thats a GOOD thing.
I want Infinity Ward to be driving porsches and paying off mortgages. They deserve it, they are awesome developers, and more importantly, it’s a signal to the rest of the market to make games as good as COD. If the free market works well, they WILL make piles of money, more people will emulate them, and we get better games. As more people produce games as good as COD, the supply rises, and the price should equalise.
Plus… games suffer from inflation like everything does. because of the price points, they tend to go up in jumps, rather than go up 3% a year. We are probably due for a jump about now.
And games are luxury products. If you don’t like the price, don’t buy it. Buy a cheaper game instead. Like mine or Dereks :D
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There’s always someone ready to apologise for crap like this, it’s pathetic.
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I tend to weigh gaming purchases based on a movie theater scale rounded out. $10 for a 3 hour movie, so if I can squeeze 15 hours out of a game, I’ll usually deem it worthy of the $50 requirement (pc games, post-ps2 console games tend to be way too short for a $60 price tag) and even then most games I purchase are playable beyond those 15 hours.
$150 for a game, a metal case that serves no purpose unless you have a game room and feel the need to decorate it with boxart, some artwork that I could probably see online a day after its release, and a pair of NVG’s that lets face it, are probably the equivalent of cardboard 3d glasses (Seriously, tailor the game to it and release a TrackIR bundle. NVG’s? Gamers going outside?) is absolutely crazy.
You can argue that the multiplayer will support the cost over time, but for someone that isn’t sure they’ll like it, and ends up not liking it, its a hard price tag to swallow.
That’s like 7 lap dances, or 3 private lap dances, or better yet, that’s like 2 happy finishes on Tuesdays. All three of which would be a far better use of the money.
*Goes back to playing Spellforce, 60 hours into it and its expansions, coupled with Europa 1400 for $13. <3 GOG*
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This is a frankly ludicrous amount to pay for a game that, going by the current trend, will be about 2 hours shorter than the previous CoD, and have only minor graphical improvements, simply because 360 and PS3 owners will complain if PC owners’ versions are too shiny. I appreciate that “it’s all about the multiplayer”, but how different do people really think MW2′s multiplayer will be to the original? This is hardly a CoD3 to Modern Warfare-esque leap in style, after all. I won’t pirate it, because no company deserves to have their product stolen, but I will be waiting until I see the inevitable horde of pre-owned copies popping up once people realise it’s not going to be a huge leap forward from the first MW.
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It’s funny how when Infinity Ward broke away from 2015 after Medal of Honor Allied Assault to go make their own World War II game that a few short years later they and their publisher would be doing exactly what EA and 2015 were doing to the Medal of Honor franchise.
And by that I mean shamelessly milking the franchise and turning it into a “one man army”, American-action-movie-esque-FPS. Which is doubly funny considering Call of Duty was sold as “No one fights alone”. I guess someone will need to tell Soap MacTavish that.
Oh well, it’s not like Activision or IW give a shit, Call of Duty practically prints money, and despite how lame their games have been since Call of Duty 2 it wont stop the “reviewers” from throwing perfect scores and editors choice at another rehash, and it certainly wont stop the throngs of mouth breathers who gobble this type of repetitive filth up every other year.
PS: As for the price raise, enjoy getting shafted.
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Didn’t I read elsewhere that Activision were experimenting with pricing on MW2 by releasing the game for $25USD?
Oh, and we pay crazy-stupid prices for games here in NZ. I will be sourcing my copy from Hong Kong thankyouverymuchly.
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Am I the only one who disliked COD4′s multiplayer? I was mostly annoyed by the game at large, and to this day don’t understand the hype.
I hold it in a similar light to Halo, in which the claims of great story (?!?) and ‘genre defining [x]‘ (!) are just bizarre to me. I don’t expect great story out of COD4, but I can’t think of a single thing about the game that made me go ‘wow.’ Stalker? Yes. Deus Ex? Totally. Fallout 3? Sure, a bit. Mass Effect? Yes.
But COD4 is still a mystery to me.
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It is kind of silly to get all up in arms because a price is raised. The cost of game (like this) has almost nothing to do with production costs, inflation, or anything else but one thing: what will people pay. It is almost morally wrong for a company not to charge the most they can, especially on something completely non-essential.
@cliffski: Inflation has nothing to do with it. Music and movies keep getting cheaper to buy, especially after digital distribution kicked in. I used to pay $10 on sale for a CD, and now I pay less than $5 for the MP3s. I agree that Infinity Ward\Activision simply think they can make tons of money, and there is nothing wrong with that.
All we can do is shame the consumers who buy it at this price. I plan on doing my best to stop my little brother for overpaying for the XBOX version. I’m pretty sure I will fail, but maybe I can at least make him feel bad. If the consumers bend over, then the prices will stay high.
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I love how they jump at the chance to *raise* prices because of changes in exchange rates, but wouldn’t dream of lowering them for the same reason.
Anyway, I think they’re missing one vital little piece of information:
Just because the pound is weaker doesn’t necessarily mean their UK customers are willing to pay 33% more.
Eh, or they’ll blame it on piracy. ;)
As already mentioned by others, there’s roughly 0% chance that the price gets lowered again, no matter sales count, and no matter relative exchange rates.
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£40 for a PC game? No.
£55 for a 360 game? Fuck no
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well price vs. value has never really existed for video games
and it has never been price vs. production cost either (except for really really cheap to produce games)
video game rentals are really an excellent balancing factor. unfortunately, digital distributors and publishers haven’t taken enough of an initiative to get this going for PCs.
and then activision wonders why people pirate call of duty so much…
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I refuse on principle to pay more than £29.99 for any game ever again. God bless you Steam half price weekends.
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Hmm.
Activision. That’ll be US publisher Activision. Based in the US. And right now 1 UK Pound buys you more dollars than 1 Euro does. The pound is doing alright against the dollar these days.
Yes, it sucks against the Euro, but they’re a US publisher. So it shouldn’t matter.
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Don’t worry guys, it’s actually going to be awesome: Check this out. PC version: £30. Console versions: £45
YEAH-HA-HA, WHO’S YOUR DADDY NOW, BITCH?!
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There’s always someone ready to apologise for crap like this, it’s pathetic.
How is there even anything to “apologize”? It’s offer and demand, and they’re trying to maximize their profit, that’s how basic it is. There’s no evil conspiracy, and they owe you bugger all. It’s an entertainment product. You can choose to buy it at that price, or you can choose not to buy it. If the majority doesn’t agree with the price, they’ll learn their lesson. If it does, bad luck for those left behind.
Fair enough to disagree with that policy, but no reason to turn it into a drama.
Unless you mean people using it as an excuse for piracy, which is indeed pathetic.
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@ cliffski
wot he said. Saved me having to type up the same thing. So I figured I’d just plagiarize it. :D
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I think we can talk about how much the price enrages us, or say important phrases like, “I will NEVER buy this game.” The truth is, tons of units will be flying off the shelves, more so than MW1, then in 3 or 4 months, the price will reduce, and a bunch more units will fly off the shelves, and so on, until the game has reached that 25 pound / 30 USD price point, and then I guarantee everyone on this site will own the game :)
While I wouldn’t be willing to drop 65 bucks on it, others will, and when it hits a price point I’m comfortable with, I’ll most definitely pick it up. Business thrives by selling to everyone a product at the highest price they are willing to pay. Why sell 50 million copies at $40, when they can sell 30 million at $60, 20 at $50, and 40 at $40?
The funny thing is, they’ve got us tricked into thinking that we got the better of them.
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@Cliffski: I do agree with you that economically the price of AAA PC games hasn’t risen as quickly as other commodities. Way I see it though, it only matters if it rises relative to the disposable income consumers are willing to spend on those games. If it does, they become “too expensive”.
Better value:
http://www.atncorp.com/units/nightvision/nightvisiongogglesandbinoculars/atnps15_4
A bargain at $10,495.
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Half of my tuition.
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I see, and when the pound hit a high of around $2 did anything happen to the prices of games? Not that I remember.
The truth is that the screwed up the business model, drove themselves into an operating loss and instead of trying to fix the business model, they’ve decided to extort money from the parents of youngsters for their one guaraunteed game purchase of the year. I’m not even sure if it’s justified, yet alone if it’s right.
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I will definitely be pirating this game.
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I could point out how £30 is very cheap compared to the €50 they ask over here… But since I buy most my games from play.com that probably means I’ll have to pay more too, meh.
And I’ve mentioned before how much I hate the lock ins. Why can’t I buy a game through US steam for dollars? Just convert your price to the euro/pound rate of the day and I’ll be happy.
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I will laugh, then sigh when Activision gets pissed because everyone pirated their game.
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It’s simple really, if you don’t like CoD:MW and don’t think the sequel will be worth the money, don’t buy it – or wait for it to get cheaper.
That’s how these things work.
Frankly all this venom is just juvenile and idiotic, CoD4 was a great game, yes the single player may have been short, but it was an excellent narrative, with some utterly brilliant moments, good solid game play and some of the best gaming set pieces ever to grace a game not made by Valve.
Even if such games are not your thing, dismissing it as rubbish only makes you look foolish – anyone with even the most remote level of objectivity should be able to recognise the quality of the product IW put out.
I liken it too the Godfather movies, personally they bored me to death (I’m a Goodfellas man), but I’d not for a moment call them rubbish – objectively I can see what other people see in them.
Only a idiot would claim that the Godfather was a bad film, and even though I didn’t enjoy it, I’d like to think I’m not an idiot.
Entertainment is in the eye of the beholder and so the value of entertainment is a fluid thing. What is worth £100 to one man is worth £10 to another.
So the only way for Devs and publishers to exploit that (and they SHOULD exploit it, any smart businessman would) is to start with the price high, and keep it there until no one is willing to buy it any more.
Personally, I’d happily pay £40 for MW2 (if the game lives up to it’s predecessor) and still think it value for money, because I know I’ll get many, many hours of enjoyment from it over the following months.
Hell if I was infinity ward what I’d do is charge £20 for the game, and then slap a monthly subscription on the multiplayer, of say £2-3 a month to play online.
Maybe something like free for basic online play, £3 for Gold service.
Basic lets you play online, but you don’t get the full range of guns, equipment or perks, and you would not get to play on IW official servers.
Too justify that Gold Subscription I’d also set up online leagues, ladders, and tournaments, with actual cash prizes. I’d provide player statistics, and records. I’d bring the anti-cheat in house (rather than use punkbuster – named because it only catches script kiddie punks who download their hacks from google) and a whole host of other services. Then I’d provide free and regular DLC in the form of maps and guns, and such.
That is just what I’d do, and I bet a LOT of people would pay it. Those that don’t want to play online in leagues, ladders and tournaments, don’t care about the additional perks and guns and don’t want to play on official servers – they don’t have too, or they can stick with MW1.
Hell it’s the future of PC gaming like it or not – DLC, micro transactions and mini-subscriptions.
Offer the basics to those who only care for the basics, and for those willing to pay more for the better experience, those who see the value in what they’ll get for it, charger a fair price.
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It’s a ballsy move by Activision. They certainly are greedy fuckers aren’t they?
I wonder if it will be region locked on the 360? Previous COD games have not been, and there will be plenty of international retailers who will ship it to the UK for less than £40.
Other things to remember – If you care about price that much, wait a bit after release. I am pretty certain that it will be available for much more reasonable prices not too long after release. Most games do (although COD4 was an exception to this…).
They can charge whatever the hell they want, it’s their game after all, but I think they are just skimming the market, which is economic-speak for “pissing all over your fanbase”. They know enough people will buy it at £55/40 that it is worth doing so, even if it ends up at £40/30ish soon after launch, they will have made enough for it to be worthwhile.
A good trick for getting it cheap at launch could be using PC world’s pricematch. I bet PC world will sell it for the full RRP, and either Asda, Tesco, Gamestation or GAME will offer some discount. Then you can get 10% of the difference off the lower price (ie, if asda sell it for £32, and PC World sell it for £40, you can get it for £31.20 at PC World). I’ll be scouring all retailers for the best prices for it on all formats.
I’ll certainly not be paying that much for it. In recent memory, the last games I have paid more than £20 for have been RE4 (GC) and Twilight Princess (Wii), and I didn’t like COD4 enough for them to change my mind.
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+1 to not having gotten CoD4 because the price refuses to drop.
I’m still waiting for it to hit the 10$ range. Maybe it’ll drop after CoD6 comes out.
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The price of music has come down partly because you can now buy for £100 in software the sort of recording studio capabilities that would be 6 or even 7 figrues back when I was a teenager.
Conversely games have got exponentially more expensive to make. Compare the amount of texture art that used to ship on a floppy disk (1.44MB) with the texture art on a 5 GIG DVD.
It’s fine to assume games should cost what they did back then. Anyone for 16 bit color and 320×240 res and MIDI sound?
But I’m sure I’m just a shill for teh evil greedy capitalist scum who produced one of the most highly regarded and popular games of the last few years.
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Considering that on average you’ll still be paying less than mainland Europe does, just a little bit less rather than a lot less.
(the pound has been sitting pretty at €1,16 for a while now, so 40 pounds = €46,40, a game here is either €49,95 or €55. The €55 isn’t as common, but EA and MS tend to use it quite often.)
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Hang on a sec cliffski.
The problem with your argument is that COD4 sold over 10 million units. Yes the games themselves are a lot bigger today than the were 10/20 years ago, but they (at least big successful blockbusters like COD) sell a lot more too.
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@Cliffski: over here the price of music has been going up steadily rather than down. Mostly claims of piracy I assume.
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@cliffski + LewieP
Lewie does point out the other factor in the equation, games are a lot more popular now than when I entered what was a tiny niche hobby, but that is only a counter-action to the cost of making games which has also drastically increased.
I can quite believe that the number of gamers has plateaued in the AAA fps audience recently. The PS2 and Xbox brought FPS games to the console audience and the PS3 and 360 have grown that audience, but that’s got to have levelled out. Who’s not playing games nowadays?
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@LewieP
Goldeneye sold 8 million copies on a single platform. I am supposed to be impressed with COD?
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Activision’s excuse for this is laughable. Aren’t Activision-Blizzard a US-based company? Aren’t they listed on NASDAQ, their stock traded in USD and their profits listed in USD? So how does the EUR:GBP equivalence affect their profits? The only exchange rates they need to worry about are EUR:USD and GBP:USD, and prices are rising because the dollar’s stronger against both of these two currencies than it was, say, a year ago, not because of anything to do with the equivalence between those two. Last year if you bought a game for £30, uncle Scrooge McWarcraft’s could write it up as an intake of $60ish, whereas this year it’s only worth about 50ish to him. Faced with a 16% drop in revenue, they decided to raise prices instead.
I’m not saying they didn’t have a legitimate reason to raise prices, just that the talking head who spouted that quote was talking bollocks, and managed to piss off a lot of his UK customer base because of his stupid comments. His claim that UK consumers are paying less than Eurozone consumers is an outiright lie, and he misleadingly suggested that this has somehing to do with the rising EUR when in fact the real culprit is the rising USD.
Having said that, if other e-tailers follow Amazon’s lead and sell for £10 off RRP (ie. £30), then this should have a smaller effect than the “stealth hike” earlier this year when the typical new release on play.com increased from £18 to £25. In fact, at the time I assumed that THAT price hike was due to the rise of the USD against the GBP and EUR, and I thought it was quite reasonable considering the GBP had lost like 30% of its value against the USD in 6 months.
What makes a new price hike now a little unpalatable is that the GBP has rallied significantly against the dollar, although it’s obviously not back at last year’s levels.
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Eh, I’ll just but it for the inevitable 25-29 quid (its slang for pound.. like buck/s..) it’ll sell for on Play.
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Moves like this will only increase the attraction of indie games that come in at much lower price points. People will also begin to notice that games like Cliffskis are JUST as much fun to play if not more so .I have to be honest and I say I’ve had more fun playing Indie games in the recent years than any block buster titles. Also have had a LOAD of fun playing Eastern European titles Like Men of War and the witcher
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What else did you expect from shitty Activision?. Just look at SC2′s LAN issue, FFS!.
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ALL the gaming sites I’ve price checked since pre-orders for MW:2 were available, have had far higher prices than any other big release 360 game I personally recall in the last 12-18 months. I immediately assumed this was based on the sheer amount of hype, and the fact it was likely to be an extraordinary game.
I don’t believe this further price hike is based on anything more. Maybe I’m a paranoid cynic, but I just suspect a few big-wigs have said, “Hmm, how can we get a few more dollarpounds outa this one?”.
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What Serondal said.
Frankly, they can charge whatever they want, but as a primarily SP gamer the idea of playing $60-something dollars for a 6 hour single player experience just strikes me as staggeringly idiotic. It’d have to be the best SP I’d ever played by a factor of 3, and I know full well it’s not.
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I’m still amused at the number of people who think the equivalent of ~46€ is an extortionate price to pay.
Yeah, it sucks to suddenly see a big price increase, but a part of me thinks you’re all a little spoiled ;)
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BTW about comments above where people stated “go to US site if you don’t like it here for X reason” I’d like to point out that A)There is no US site that equals RPS, either blog or game dedicated website B)There are no other websites /peroid/ that equal RPS in th English language.
I do agree that for such quaity and perfection as we get from this website Americans should be willing to put up with British slang and to be honest I enjoy it. There are some slang terms and words I don’t know every now and again and some inside jokes I don’t get off the bat but I still love the webpage. Same goes for british humor on Tv ect, there are some things Monty Python say that get huge laughs from the studio audience and I’m just like “what?” But it is worth putting up with moments like that because for the most part the humor and quality does translate well. In the case of the website there is no studio audience so for the most part inside jokes fly straight over my head and I never know I missed them ;P
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@Misnomer
Sure, but Goldeneye was also an incredible game, and the N64′s lineup was pretty anaemic for a long time. I imagine that figure was over the entire N64s lifetime too, not just in a couple of years (I know I saw it for sale in retailers bundles even towards the end of the consoles lifetime).
8 million certainly wasn’t going rate for N64 games.
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It’s all about how much you earn though, isn’t it? Before people complain about how much it costs in different regions relative to each other they should take a look at median earnings in those regions, or summat.
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Good for you! Anything to stop the spending spree of US and to a lesser extent UK consumers.
*cough*
But i don’t think economics has anything to do with it. A modern game is more expensive to make. For one, because it looks better.
Here’s UBI saying a next gen game costing 60 million $.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6212061.html
In today’s (dutch) newspaper was an article about games companies being unable to find talented people.
This also implies that saying you’re going to pirate more because games prices go up is not a valid argument. You will get a better quality product and videogames are very much hi-tech and cutting edge (as in: reinventing itself every few years, lacking standardized production methods, the need for people with up-to-date know-how).
That being said: JESUS! 40 pounds for a bloody game!
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It’s nothing to do with being spoiled skalpadda, it’s purely what people consider to be an affordable price for a computer game. £50 is not affordable or realistic for the majority. Unless the Amazon’s and Play’s go against this price point, you will definitely see a big drop in expected sales for this game and others that follow suit. Xmas or not.
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Rocketman, that isn’t an issue at all, LAN is dead except for Hamachi pirates, hell I can’t think of a LAN I’ve been too in the past 5 years that didn’t have high speed internet.
Besides it is a smart choice on their part, piss off the tiny pathetic percentage of their legitimate users (maybe 1% of users 1% of the time?), to screw over millions of potential pirates.
Sounds good to me from a business perspective.
This is speaking as someone who’d probably pirate it for the single player (because unlike console games you can’t rent the damn things) – play it for a weekend then uninstall and delete.
Too much of a clicks-per-second fest for my tastes.
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I used to buy 1 or 2 games a month when they were £17.99 – the last game i bught was in January at £19.99 and I haven’t felt tempted by anything else sinse at the higher prices. Also, after a month or two of release the prices generally drop but i’ve lost interest in the games by then …
There must be others like me – so the industry has lost a number of people who spent £35 a month on games .. what a great business model !
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@Katsumoto – it’s not really how much you earn, it’s more alligned to what you percieve to be good value or at least reasonable …
i earn very good money, but I refuse to pay £25 for a new PC game … if they had moved teh old £17.99 to £19.99 I wouldn;t of had a problem to be honest – but I percieve £25 to be too expensive for a PC game (my own perception)
To put something up at an even higher price is just madness, but I bet they will be quick to blame piracy for the failure to clear as many units – I wonder how much piracy would decrease if they put a more reasonable price point forward though ?
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Surely there’s not been such a big shift in currency rates that this is needed? I mean GTA 4 cost a shedload to make (probably more than MW2), a record amount if i’m not mistaken. And i still saw that for £25 mostly.
I know the pound has weakened since then, but c’mon.
Oh well… guess it’s time to ”Yarr harr, fiddle de dee!”…
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I should be clear, I meant LAN (the actual networking aspect of linking computers, not the parties themselves)…
In that almost all LANs I’ve been too play the game online still – usually because the LANs I go too have maybe 20-30 people all playing differint games, board games, tabletop RPGs, maybe a MAME box or 2, and then a half dozen playing one game or another, usually on online servers.
Mass networking of PC’s just isn’t done anymore when it’s so much easier for everyone just to jump on the wireless and pick an online server to join.
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Piracy isn’t only the only option, renting or buying from CEX and the like three months after release for £10 are perfectly legal alternatives, Activision still don’t see my money its true, but at £55 for the 360 version, Activision were never going to see my money in the first place.
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tbh I am surrised to see the next COD game on the PC. After such a huge console hit, and a huge piracy rate on the PC (as i recall RPS covered it), I can see activision shareholders having a decent business case to skip a PC release entirely, given the assumption that many console owners pirated the PC version rather than buy the console one.
COD isnt a micro-transaction game, nor an MMO, and historically has shipped without any harsh DRM. This is (unfortunately) rare. Everyone pirating it out of spite because of a price rise is only ensuring than we get even less PC releases. Say what you like about Activision, but COD4 was not a hacky console port to PC.
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Yeah well, if you want the latest bloom effect or whatever, you need to pay for it. The system requirements alone will probably force a number of people to spend hundreds on upgrades alone.
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But why would Activision care if it’s ‘affordable’? They’re not a government agency making sure everyone gets a go. All they need to care about is if the number of people who will pay £50 makes them a nice profit.
The price rise will have a deterring effect in some people’s minds, but Activision bet the game is attractive enough to overcome that for many people. I bet they’re right.
(Not for me though).
If you look at the cars some people drive compared to earnings and it’s clear that affordability is flexible when faced with desire.
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@Phil
It is not quite true that publishers don’t benefit from used sales. By buying a used copy, you are removing a copy from the market, making it more scarce, which helps keep the used value, and therefore price, up.
If the used price is increased, or at least doesn’t drop, then the difference between the used and new price is reduced, and when consumers are confronted with the option of buying new or used, the difference in price is a big factor in which a lot of consumers will go for.
So, by buying a used copy, you are helping keep the used price buoyant, which benefits the publisher indirectly, as more people are likely to buy the game new.
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“@Archonsod You trust a web proxy with your credit card info?”
Yeah, it’s my proxy :P
“It sucks when things go up in price. But compare pc game costs (and quality) with house prices (even now) over the last 20 years in the UK, and tell me with a straight face that gaming has got too expensive.”
Tell me with a straight face the game quality has significantly improved :P
And that’s without factoring in that twenty years ago if I bought a game, I could do what I like with it. Assuming a standard DRM solution, here I’m paying more money for a game I’ll only be able to install a limited number of times, I’ll not be able to sell on when I’m finished with it and I’ll be dependent on their servers to be able to play in the first place. In other words, they want to charge more and give me less.
I know what they can do with that idea.
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All that misses the point though. What they should be trying to do is not set a price that is somehow proportionate to the cost of developing the product. They should set the price to maximize earnings. Nothing more, nothing less.
Saying “our game costs twice as much to make, so you have to pay twice as much for it” is just a flawed argument. No serious company would ever price their products like that. It assumes that the same number of people are willing to buy it at this new price. It assumes that people *care* how much it cost to make the product. They don’t.
They care about the quality of the product, and the price they’re charged for it. If the company spends twice as much to deliver a game of the same perceived quality, then the company has screwed up, and customers are not going to, and should not, cover their asses by saying “oh, it’s ok, we’ll pay twice the amount to cover your expenses”.
I find it ironic that you talked about “free market” earlier in this thread, and now are trying to justify the price not through free market mechanics (which would say “sell the game at the price people are willing to pay”,) but through some obscure planned economy model, where the price is dictated by development cost and nothing else, and the amount consumers are actually willing to pay is completely and utterly irrelevant.
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@cliffski Now you’re just poking the beehive! :)
Do we know that CoD6 isn’t protected in some new way that foils the dirty pirates? It’s certainly a big enough game to make it financially worth some big investment in protection.
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tbh I am surrised to see the next COD game on the PC. After such a huge console hit, and a huge piracy rate on the PC (as i recall RPS covered it), I can see activision shareholders having a decent business case to skip a PC release entirely, given the assumption that many console owners pirated the PC version rather than buy the console one.
Bah! Bringer of Foul News! False Prophet!
Burn him!
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Whats more likely?
1)The head of Activision, the biggest games company on earth, is clueless when it comes to making money and maximising profits.
2)People online over-react in comments threads and the game will make more money at this price despite them.
My money is on 2)
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It’s on the same engine as the last two COD games right? It’s probably a piece of piss to port it to the PC.
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@cliffski
I believe that it probably will make them more money, but the excuse of “currency” is almost certainly a lie, it is just because the market will bear it.
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The COD games are always overpriced IMO, which is why I only end up buying them a year after release once they drop in price. Especially since with COD4, I found singleplayer incredibly boring (MP was fun).
P.
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@LewieP
You’re basically saying that if a lot of people buy used games then the prices of used games go up and less people buy them. From the publisher’s point of view that turns into:
If you lose a lot of sales then that will lead to losing less sales in the future. It doesn’t matter, you lose sales either way, because if you don’t lose them at first then you will eventually (if few people buy the game used the price goes down and people will buy it). Either way they lose
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So, does that mean that COD4 might be available for a reasonable price soon? I just want to play/go along for the amusement park ride that is singleplayer.
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(Just to be clear, while I think it’s overpriced, an entertainment company can charge whatever they want, and people are free to choose to buy their product or not. It’s not like we’re talking food or housing here.)
P.
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@Teo
You need to make a distinction between two different types of consumers.
Those who will only buy it used, because they prefer to not support the developer (I think Phil was identifying himself as one of these).
Those who would prefer new, but are sensitive to pric, and would buy used if it was at an acceptable difference.
The more of the first category that there are in the marketplace, the more of the second category will end up buying new (which benefits the publisher).
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I wonder how long it will take before the Brits decide to go with the flow and accept the Euro as their currency.
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I really liked COD 4′s single player and was honestly shokced by the ending (in a good way) I also played online for some time and enjoyed that as well. I would have liked some objective based game play with capturing points ALA DoD but what I got was fine. Really enjoyed the ability to set traps and use high powered rifles that could shoot people through walls ect.
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@LewieP
” I believe that it probably will make them more money, but the excuse of “currency” is almost certainly a lie, it is just because the market will bear it.”
That’s because marketing told him it’d go over better than: suck it, bitches.
Seriously though, if the UK sales region is going to make it’s phat profits for a US publisher who only cares about dollar profits and the dollar is rising that does mean that the exchange rates are eating into its profitability. I’m just confused as to why he mentioned the Euro, that seems irrelevant.
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@sajmn *Michael Caine voice* NEVA’! :)
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@Paul Moloney
Exactly. However there is the grand old British tradition of griping over the price of goods :)
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@JonFitt
I’m just confused as to why he mentioned the Euro, that seems irrelevant.
Smoke and/or Mirrors.
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Unless the UK sales are just part of an Activision European sales region? Then that makes sense. The UK would be performing worse as far as the European sales region is concerned (who probably set all European prices), and to make matters worse the dollar is rising too.
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I wish I lived in the UK sometimes. I love to complain, I think I’d fit right in ;) Also your government is a lot more amusing to watch on television.
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I’m not sure if this is part of a massive trend in price increases. Rather, I think we’ll see a wide variety of pricing for lots of different games.
In this case, Activision is thinking “Hey, it’s CoD6 – every fucker will buy this. Let’s charge more!”.
I’m just amazed that they haven’t tried to do the typical Activision trick of bundling a plastic toy in with the game, then charging a hundred quid – oh wait.
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Owen:
It’s nothing to do with being spoiled skalpadda, it’s purely what people consider to be an affordable price for a computer game. £50 is not affordable or realistic for the majority.
Well to start off, the price issue here was £40, not £50. I’m speaking from my own point of view, living in Sweden, where a new game usually costs the equivalent of 50€, which would be roughly £43. My immediate reaction when I did the maths was wondering exactly what people were so upset about, after all you get very cheap games now and will still pay less than I do, so come back and complain when you have a real problem ;)
Whether that’s affordable or not, well I have no idea what the difference in income is between the UK and Sweden, but I doubt it’s very much. I live on far less than the average income here, and I can afford to buy one or two new shiny games per month and usually pick up some old games and indie titles cheap as well. And while on that subject, I usually have just as much or even more fun with the games I buy cheap than the expensive “AAA” titles.
The question of whether it’s affordable or not isn’t really relevant since it’s a computer game, a luxury product and not something you have to spend money on, like food, rent or transportation. If the price is really too high for the majority then the majority would be stupid to buy it.
Hopefully you’re right and people simply won’t buy it if they think it’s too expensive, and that’s very good for you since it sends a message that the game was indeed too expensive.
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It seems more sensible to keep mum about it lest they notice and go “Wait, we can charge 150 bucks now? Cool!”
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This is just crap…. it’s pure, unadulterated money-grubbing crap.
Seriously, the exchange rate has only fallen €0.3 per £ since Jan 2006…. VAT is lower, oil prices are actually slightly cheaper, i’m sorry but by any standards a £10-15 price hike is just them being greedy.
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Fuck that shit; there’ll be other, more sensibly priced FPS’s around that I’ll be more inclined to give my meagre available funds to.
Make the game that good that it deserves such a ludicrous price point.
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meh a FPS (linear) whoopeee-fukin-doo- daaa
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…and they have the cheek to tell Sony to lower their prices?!
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Seems Play have it for pre-order at about £30, which isn’t going to break the bank. Though apparently according to their listing Beyond Good & Evil 2 is out about a week before for £25, and that if it is the case far more likely to capture my gaming spends ;)
Seriously though when CoD4 was released they tried to charge Europe $20 more than the Americans, and then wondered why no one bothered taking them up on the offer. Personally if it reviews well I might get it from Play at release, but otherwise I’m happy to sit until it hits the bargain bins.
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“well I have no idea what the difference in income is between the UK and Sweden, but I doubt it’s very much” – about $10,000 according to Wikipedia. Wikipedia knows everything! But as you say, it’s a luxury so it’s all about how you choose to fit it into your budget.
As I need to set aside large amounts for Nandos and beer every month, I can’t afford games unless they’re under £25.
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“Serondal says:
I wish I lived in the UK sometimes. I love to complain, I think I’d fit right in ;) Also your government is a lot more amusing to watch on television.”
god yeah considering what other Gov’s get up to ours is a comedy goldmine.
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RESIST!! RESIST!!!! I COMMAND YOU ALL TO RESIST!!!!
The Pound is the best currency in the world: FACT. Why else would the Queen put her face on it?
We’re being treated like poo by publishers, it’s time we acted like it. Like poo. Sticky, smelly and warm. Do it.
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For me the problem with the price is that i just can’t afford to buy any game at that price, i am a stay at home dad and don’t have much money to spend on games these days, i mostly buy games on steam these days, mainly because of the lovely sales.
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yes i realise i say “these days” a lot, i feel old >.<
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Well, there’s one game that won’t be getting bought. At least it’s only a mediocre FPS we’re talking about and not something that would actually be missed.
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We got a lot of giggles from Saturday night Live making fun of our political figures but from the video’s I’ve watched the UK parliment doesn’t need anyone to satire it, it’s funny all on its own (Note however, that SNL has actaully done parody of the British parliment too. One episode a MP stood up and tried to pass a motion that the PM was a jack ass)
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I don’t really see what all the fuss is about. If it really is too expensive for the market to bear, then sales will tank and Activision/retailers will lower the prices, and they’ll have learned their lesson. If they still sell millions of copies (which I think is likely), there’s no reason for them not to charge that much. If you can’t afford it, buy something else. I still haven’t bought CoD4 because they haven’t lowered the price, but I understand that’s Activision’s choice. There’s no point in being upset about it – it’s like being angry about caviar being expensive.
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@JKjoker
Yes, and I suppose that’s why EA has eased off on its DRM. >___>
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Hahahaha.
No.
See, I’ve not seen a consummate rise in income. So I don’t have the extra money to spend. How about that?
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Sorry , I /am/ Serondal I just registered under Word Press’s forum thing a while back under a diffrent name so it randomly changes my name when I log in to post something in the RPS forum ;P
@Thrawny – I so wish I could be a stay at home dad, sadly my wife doesn’t have same work history as I do so should could never pull down the same amount of money as me :(
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Mister Adequate – Not seeing a rise in your income is your own fault not anyone elses.
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Railick – Really? I’m able to control the global economy and the exchange rates of the British Pound, Euro, and US Dollar?
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£55 is a lot of money (so is £40). I can understand a company attempting to continue maximising profits, but squeezing the little people for every penny during a difficult financial period just isn’t right, especially since it’ll be the Xmas release that every 12 year old will want.
I’m going to do the smart thing and wait for LewieP to tell me when to buy. Either way, it’ll have to be less than £30 for me to bother.
PS: No, I won’t pirate it. Like others have said, why give them an excuse to attack the PC or justify their price-point. If you don’t want to pay for it, don’t play it.
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Just to put in my worthless two bits (and this will cover multiple things in this conversation):
Price: It sucks for the UK, thats it, really, don’t care though.
Piracy: Yes, make them use tighter DRM and give them less sales, you totally deserve the fun great game they have for you, now while I’ll be working for my fun you can gently lead the industry into laws more like what China (and Australia now) have in place huh? Except it will be an industry ordeal and you’ll grind your teeth.
Other: I’ll be buying this game, looks great, better than the first for certain. I’ll be buying it on the 360 (which will cost me about 70$ with sales tax and the probable price increase) because I am a console junky and DIRTY! I’m dirty console swine I wallow in wired controller mud to feel nostalgic /sarcasm.
I’m lonely inside.
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I enjoyed CoD4, both Single and Multiplayer, for a loooong time. My housemates got a lot of play out of my copy of the game as well. It provoked happy social times and was a great way to spend an evening with my friends.
I will happily put this money down on the next episode after I read reviews to confirm that it is what I hope it is – more of the same with added maps, guns, modes, bells and whistles.
In my mind I’m getting a guaranteed quantity of fun.
I don’t get the uproar. 193 comments in and noone has said how much they loved playing the game. Well I did. So nyar!
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RPS, you should probably do something about your piracy advocates.
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Piracy should be advocated in this day and age…
That aside, I really don’t care about the price point for this game as I have no intention of buying it due to the last one being utterly awful. But wait, what’s this: I’m not following the sheeple…? 8-O
COD4 was not the messiah guys. Move the fuck on…
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@Dracko: Because accusing anyone who disagrees with you of being “piracy advocates” really takes the discussion to the next level.
Well done. I think RPS should do something about all their nazis, serial killers and rapists too.
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@Dracko
No, they shouldn’t. Unless the “advocates” are actively linking to illegal sites or explaining how to do illegal things, they’ve got a right to say their piece and provide a worthwhile counterpoint to the “let’s all bend over and take it!” crowd.
@Howard
No, it shouldn’t. Piracy is the best way I know to make sure that the kinds of games you like stop being made. At the end of the day all that matters is how you vote with your wallet, piracy is getting drunk and falling asleep on election day.
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@Dracko no one here is advocating it and even if they were I wouldn’t mind
the legality isn’t the problem with piracy, it’s the morality
copyright law is something very debatable
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@Vinraith
Normally I’d agree with you and if this was a game of any worth I would. However as this is a 360 prat fest that will not even register on the scale of real games, I say pirate yourselves silly boys.
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What are sales taxes like in the UK? That’d be worth knowing, to get the true end-user cost…
In Canada, A-list titles usually run $59.99, though $49.99 is more common – and, of course, this gradually drops to $30, $25, $20, etc, given enough time.
£40 is ~$70 Canadian. That’s pretty standard, actually ($59.99 x 1.13). I’ve gone to the US to pick up games when the Canadian dollar approaches par with the US dollar, since it’s such a better deal ($40 plus a 3% tax!). Of course, in Canada we sometimes get European localizations (often preferable), due to the need for a French translation to be included…
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VAT in the UK is 15% at the minute (was reduced for 12 months last December, will still be at 15% when MW2 comes out), but that is included in the RRP, and the sticker price of goods at retail.
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Things are sold with Tax included in the price in the UK. So £40 is the total.
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Then that is, in fact, very close to standard Canadian prices. Let the Australians complain, then, if anyone…
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Ugh, I fail at quoting. I quoted Howard’s post.
“Normally I’d agree with you and if this was a game of any worth I would. However as this is a 360 prat fest that will not even register on the scale of real games, I say pirate yourselves silly boys.”
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VAT in Britain is… uh… well it *used* to be 17.5%, but we got a cut to 15% when the recession started. Supposedly. I can’t remember whether that’s finished yet.
And I think Darling was talking about raising it to ~19% when the economy picks up and they begin to need to pay back debt.
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We’re just paying for the cod tag they’ve put back on.
Let’s hope they change their minds and see this is a bad decision.
Someone make a petition?
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Pretty certain people going IMMA GONNA PIRATE IT consists of advocacy, fellas.
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Vinraith: No one is forcing you to buy a piece of entertainment.
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@Dracko
Nope, they’re not. I’ve no idea what that has to do with the topic at hand, but if it makes you feel better I agree with you.
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John Walker says:
Eight comments in and an Australian hasn’t told me off for how crazy their prices are. Come on Australians!
We pay a lot for games? This is news to me, ive always found the price of console and PC software to be very reasonable here in Australia and I wouldnt consider myself particularly wealthy.
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As I understand the word, saying “YOU SHOULD PIRATE IT” would be advocacy. “IMMA GONNA PIRATE IT” is not.
And as Vinraith said, as long as they’re not linking to illegal sites, or explaining how to pirate the game, is it such a big problem? If people seriously think that pirating the game is a good response to the price bump, isn’t that relevant input to the discussion?
Get over yourself. If you can’t deal with people who disagree with you, perhaps you just shouldn’t read other people’s posts on the internet.
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Suit yourself, but the Pound really doesn’t carry the weight it used to. The world is dealt in dollars, and whether the story refers to Britain or not, most people will understand the $ exchange rate better than the Pound exchange rate viz a viz their own currency.
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@A-Scale
I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but erm, we use the pound. So it sorta does carry some weight for us because it’s our currency.
In a story about something being priced in our currency, surely it’s logical to then list the price in our currency? If nothing else so that the story makes the slightest bit of sense to those it’s actually relevant to.
Most people over here won’t know nor care what the dollar exchange rate is, so it’s be lost on those who it’s important to.
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“It’s” should be “it’d”, obviously. Damn, I should be asleep.
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@simon
Seriously? We get screwed in Aus dude. If you need proof look at the prices of games on Steam. Although they are in US$ they are frequently vastly higher than the prices for Steam games in the US. This is a terrible attempt by publishers to avoid under-cutting the hugely inflated Australian retail prices. I haven’t paid over AU$50 for a game in years. I either buy digital versions of games or get hardcopies from Hong Kong.
(Yes John Walker, I am that Aussie Angry Internet Man you were pining for).
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Agreed. Prices in Australia are far too expensive. I also won’t pay over $50 a game. Looking forward to playing GTA4 in a year or so. In the meantime, my i7 is being kept busy with DOSbox.
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@ RobF
I’m aware that this is a U.K. based blog, but the internet is global, and the United States has 5 potential gamers for every 1 potential U.K. gamer. I have not seen the stats, but I would venture a guess that many, if not most RPS blog readers are U.S. based. Further, as I previously said, those who are neither U.K. nor U.S. based would probably be able to get an easier grasp on the meaning of the price increase if US and UK denominations were both listed.
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Damn, I screwed that one up format wise.
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Just a requisite note: The “we own the planet so you have to cater to us” mentality expressed by some US posters does not represent the position of all (or even most) of the US posters on this blog. It certainly doesn’t represent mine.
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I’m simply asking for the number to be posted in a denomination which will make sense to a greater proportion of the viewing audience, and you accuse me of demanding that the world bow to the U.S. You are an apologist of the worst kind.
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Oh, and just a little tidbit of info:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/rockpapershotgun.com
Alexa claims that 39.2% of the RPS audience comes from the USA, while only 15.4% originates in the U.K. Like I said, the good men who write RPS may state the figures in what ever denominations they like, but considering the viewing audience it seems pertinent to give the figures in a currency which will mean something to the greatest proportion of that audience (and which doesn’t require any conversion or travel to another site to do so).
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@A-Scale “You are an apologist of the worst kind.”
And you’re an embarrassment.
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There’s always a silver lining — the weak pound is super for Introversion!
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A-Scale
The dollar conversion is something you can easily google if it matters that much to you, all you really need to know from the story is that games used to cost x and now cost y, where y is greater than x.
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I’ve seen some silly arguments in my day, and this is right up there. Fer chrissakes A-Scale, the price points set for the UK (in pounds, naturally) doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what it will cost in the US. (in dollars, naturally.) That is, it’s not simply determined by the exchange rate at some point. Expressing the price for people in the UK in dollars would be profoundly stupid. Again, the exact number is only relevant to people in the UK.
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Hmm, I’ll take a bit of that back, I’m not sure what you’re looking for, but if it had been given in pounds and then had that converted to dollars for comparison, it would’ve been merely confusing, not profoundly stupid. Arr, why do I care?? why do we care? Arrrrrr..
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Dude, (39.2% – 1 person) Americans don’t care. Take your whining somewhere else.
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Why can’t we all get along?
Behold, the magic of Google!
£1 = $1.64
£40 = $65.81
£55 = $90.49
There’s no reason for RPS to have to mess with it when it’s so easy to find out on your own.
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Not only are you an expert at identifying stupid arguments, you’re also superb at creating them!
Unless this article was meant to be read by Britons only (and I saw no headline as such), the meaning of the price increase is totally lost on foreign audiences and anyone who doesn’t wish to look up the exchange rate. While the price change is relevant to Britons directly, it is of interest to me as a consumer, and a change from 30 pounds to 40 pounds (or whatever) doesn’t resonate as much as 30 pounds ($37.50) to 40 pounds ($48.75) or whatever. To make this more clear, if the story was reported that the price of rice in India has gone from 5 Rupees a sack to 650 Rupees a sack it would be informative to know just how much that translated to in a denomination that most people would be familiar with, even if people outside India won’t be directly affected by it.
But as I said, if you wish for such national interest only stories to be read by Britons only, I suggest that you petition RPS to add a “For British Eyes Only” title to this and all such following pages.
On the other hand, if keeping things in Pounds only on a British site regarding a British interest story is a matter of pride, then pride away; the only thing lost is the interest and understanding of 40%+ of the audience.
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Indeed, why have the author of the article do the work when 40% of the audience can do it for themselves, thousands of times over! It just makes sense!
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The meaning is this, A-Scale.
“The number has gone up a bit”
Really, that’s *all* you need to know. I’m befuddled as to why you’re making such a big thing of this.
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It just seems like an odd complaint. The article is about prices changing in Britain, not a comparison of prices between the US and UK. That 40% of visitors come from the US is an interesting fact, though.
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Well I’ll admit I misunderstood somewhat, since the kernal of rationality in what you’re getting at was misformatted as a blockquote a few comments up and I didn’t realize it was yours. Still, this argument is quite silly, and you’re right, I’m just being silly too. The idea that we all need to be told that ‘the pound is no longer the world currency and hasn’t been in ..’ etc. etc. is silliest of all.
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How much? The Pound has fluctuated greatly viz the dollar in the recent past. Am I a bad person for not keeping tabs on the day to day fluctuations in price between the two?
A jump from $30 to $40 is not negligible, but it is still acceptably small for most people. A jump from 30 to 40 Pounds is a much larger difference, and is probably something worthy of griping about. A 10 Pound note in the U.K. has a significantly different meaning than a $10 note in the U.S.
I’m just suggesting (not demanding) that the RPS fellows add the amount in U.S. to stories where they speak of pounds (and visa versa, frankly). It seems a reasonable request to me, given the fact that most RPS readers are U.S. based, and that the U.S. Dollar is the standard monetary around the world today. The fact that you lot are so up in arms about it seems far more befuddling to me. In any case, I’ve said my piece. Goodnight.
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cliffski owns this thread with common sense, good work man.
And a bloody pox on anyone who thinks this justifies piracy. If you don’t like the price-point, then wait for it to come down in price and reach a price point you do like instead of pretending it justifies your grubby, greedy thievery.
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Pretty sure A-Scale is joking. The avatar should be a giveaway.
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I think in euro’s!! Which blog am I supposed to read now!?
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@Gpig
Now why didn’t I notice that? Bleh, long day, I’ll try to avoid further feeding the trolls.
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@ A-Scale
Come back when the dollar is stronger than the UKP and EUR again.
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PC prices in Australia have been around the $80-90 mark the past 10years.
I recently purchased a 360 and most of the brand new games are around $120!!!!!
Even now trying to get COD4 which is 2years old is still around $60!!! lucky I have a friend that doesn’t play anymore.
I will be getting Cod6 on 360 and I will have to pay $120~
Welcome to my world :(
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“There is good reason the BBC reports figures in Pounds with the Dollar amount immediately next to it.”
…
No it doesn’t? It does however put the amount in pounds next to dollars any time they are used in a story. Maybe that’s what you meant.
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Ohh wait Orange Box was $99 :(
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But due to differing incomes and costs of living, just knowing how much the game will cost in dollars doesn’t really tell you anything. I suggest RPS adopt the economist’s Big Mac index when expressing financial values in the future…
Anyway, Aussie here. The reason no-one has complained about our high game prices is that these price points (for both console and PC) are pretty much our standard RRP for games. Welcome to the club. Of course, as far as I am aware, they haven’t announced Au pricing for MW2 yet, so when that clocks in at the equivalent of £65 ($105 US, €75, ¥10,000) we’ll be back.
The Night Vision Goggles will almost certainly be an Active IR setup, similar to the Eyclops toy goggles that retail for about $80 in the US. Passive Image Intensifier style goggles of the sort the military uses still cost about five times that much (per eye) for the oldest generation of technology.
(If you want some good, old-fashioned, Aussie price complaining, I checked the price of those Eyclops goggles in a store here yesterday to get an idea of what the MW2 Goggles Edition might cost if they even decide to sell it here. They are charging the equivalent of $200 US)
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WOOOOOOOOO its pretty dark down here. on the off chance shiggz reads this. Cameron is a stuffed shirt, puff of hot air under a haircut. there is NO need internationally for a strong UK. We’ve past into history and obscurity. It will happen to the US one day.
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I like the way certain people have managed to turn a price increase for a COMPUTER GAME that hasn’t even been released yet into some sort of argument as to why RPS is racist/nationalist.
What’s with you people; the discourse on this site is usually mature and well thought through but parts of this comment section are starting to read like a 4Chan “US>Europe; Discuss” post.
When do we all start referring to each other as fags?
Ok so a BRITISH writer wrote about a BRITISH price increase and referenced that price increase in BRITISH money. That’s not because he hates the rest of the world; it’s because it makes sense. Yes he could have parenthesized the price increase in dollars or you could do what pretty much everyone else who was curious to know what that figure was in dollars did; you could look it up.
This is the internet; it’s supposed to be the last place left on earth where free and independent thought is permissable and encouraged. Do your own price conversion if you’re that interested.
When you’re all done with those chips on your shoulders can I have them? I love chips.
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I’d say there’s a serious quality consideration here. If a game is good enough (and that includes things like duration and multiplayer and replayability), then £40/£55 isn’t that much at all. So, for something like the Orange Box, I’d be fine with a higher price than the £40 I ended up paying. Conversely, everything I’ve heard about Far Cry 2 suggests it’s about a £15-£20 game – which it is, now – so I’ll just wait. Comes back to the (flawed) idea of replacing review scores with the reviewer’s estimated cash value for a game; “Mirror’s Edge is a good game with a few problems. Buy it when it’s about £20.”.
This falls down somewhat if you’re a fan of internet multiplayer, though, since getting in at the start is the only real way to ensure there are lots of players around for a long time.
@ M.P.: “Daddy Warcraft” is a brilliant idea. Well done.
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Personaly I see it as a reasonable thing for them to do as a company.
If it was my game I was selling, yea id sell it high, then drop it down to a decent price once i’d skimmed the market.
That said, I wouldn’t buy COD6 for anything more than £25.
@A-scale
Your also forgetting that RPS is a privately run site, they can price things any damm way they feel like, hell they could start pricing in peggle’s if they felt like it. (£6 to 1 Peggle)
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Fault of the weak pound sounds like a rather poor excuse, on main land Europe these higher prices (for PC games) from big publishers like EA and Activision are nothing new (and Australia… yeah, that’s a case apart :) ). The regular retail price for a PC game is about 40-50 euro here (in Belgium) but games like Call of Duty 4, Prototype, Red Alert 3, The Sims 3 all debuted at a 60 euro price point. If we keep buying those games at that price then EA/Activision (and others that follow) will keep upping the cost.
I say fuck them, especially for what you get in the box and as a game experience. And you know this strategy only works for certain hits like CoD or The Sims, Red Alert 3 and Prototype dropped down the PC charts pretty fast and RA 3 already has a severely lowered price. I still remember Sins of a Solar Empire debuting with a price of 40 euro with a pretty cool box and lots of extra goodies. It’s time some publishers start taking note of this. A decent boxed version can make a difference in sales.
On the UK thing: don’t be ridiculous guys, this is a valid post, period. Though on other topics there certainly is something to note about British or even American self-centered games coverage, there is no such thing as a perfect global games publication which keeps all regions in mind.
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The problem with giving exchange rates would be that the information might be outdated minutes later anyway…
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Cash Cow Britain, pure and simple.
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A Scale
The price hike is in the UK only, this site is written by people from the UK, it initially assumed a readership from that region, and they were somewhat surprised to find the amount of Americans that read it. They also use UK release dates, because that’s when the game comes out for them.
In the end they aren’t some corporate run site tailoring their content to the audience figures. They’re four guys writing about what they think about games, and the audience it a happy accident.
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You’re right C-Row, untill the economic crisis I used to broadly know the exchange rate, now I have no idea.
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So once again we get a price hike and people are suprised. I remember Ultimate Play The Game rising the price of Spectrum games to a massive £5.50 with Jet Pac. There was outcry then but did they lower the price? no. Unfortunately prices just get more and more for everything these days.. mostly blaming the recession.. big suprise then that Activision have decided to do this, it will not be long before the other publishers “do a Cameron” and jump on the bandwagon. A shame to be sure, but valid nonetheless. The big shame is that Valve proved you could make more money by selling games cheaper with the Left 4 Dead special offer, come on Activision (and other publishers), take note!
When you consider that I’d have to buy 2 copies of this for both me and my son in order to play online then it becomes just too expensive a hobby.. time to dig out the plastic soldiers I think, as I’ll definately be giving this one a miss, which is lamentable as I really, really enjoyed the first one despite the length of the single player experience.
So, relatively pointless post, but hey I’m old and had to stick my oar in. Now, where are my slippers…..
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I find it interesting that one person suggested how long they play the game has nothing to do with how much it’s worth. How exactly does everyone here rate how much a game is worth?
Because if you look at it based on how long you play, with multiplayer/mods/etc many games can beat other forms of entertainment (e.g. cinema) hands down in terms of value. If you look at it from a ‘quality’ perspective that’s somewhat more subjective and an interesting question. How would an average game measure up in ‘quality’ to a film, a book, or a music album?
Personally I won’t be buying this, since the Modern War setting doesn’t really excite me, and neither game seems to have been especially revolutionary (I’m also not a big fan of MP). When they get cheap I might buy them, but that has no impact on the current situation.
And I don’t think pirating it because it’s a bit more expensive is a good thing to do. If you want it, save up a bit longer. It’s only a tenner, right? Don’t go to the pub one night. Else wait for it to get cheaper, or never get it at all.
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Heh, you think that’s bad look at Mortal Online’s price – nearly 70 quid for the preorder.
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Hmm…didn’t you crazy British people refuse to use the Euro (and stop driving on the wrong side of the road..) when it was first introduced? Well, that’s what you get for not wanting to play with the other kids, you end up paying more :p
But seriously: while I do see that developers need to earn money and all, I never quite understood the price-difference. And for a publisher to blame it on currency-rates and all is just a bit of a lame excuse, seeing that I can order a game from Taiwan (or from wherever CDWow sends their packages) or the UK and pay half the price I’d pay if I went to a local store.
I just don’t see this strategy with different pricing working in the future with all this globalization going on..
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I would buy that game if YOU paid me. I fucking hate that franchise.
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Simple point from me, i’m not paying that its an absolute disgrace. I always buy my games rather than Pirate them, if Valve can release the Orange Box for less than 40quid then I think somebody is taking the piss. The trouble is it will still sell, the little lads who live next door to me will pester their mum and dad until the money is put forward. Just seems like there is little or no respect for the consumer.
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WAR… WAR NEVER EXCHANGES
*ba bum tss*
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John, could you possibly try and get the government to talk in foreign accents from this point forward? Just, you know, in case what they’re saying is shown in any other countries.
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I am Australian and I should like to complain. Young people are too fat these days. Flavoured water is a scam. There are too many smelly people on trains. Also I question Cityrails efficiency.
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John Walker says:
Eight comments in and an Australian hasn’t told me off for how crazy their prices are. Come on Australians!
Sorry to disappoint John, timezone’s and all most of us were still at work :D
I read the story title and got down to the prices being quoted and figured you were heading in the direction of “contrary to people saying prices were rising they’re actually falling.” Then I realised I was wrong :(
Some inevitable comparison then. EBGames here has MW2 (stock standard edition) priced at:
PC: AUD 100 ~ GBP 49 ~ EUR 57 ~ USD 80
Console: AUD 120 ~ GBP 59 ~ EUR 68 ~ USD 96
The thing is $90 – $100 is pretty standard here for new major releases. Hence my increasing love of steam sales.
Hell, until a recently commenced sale, EBGames was still selling COD4:MW @ $90 and COD5:WaW for $80.
/commence pity (or sniggering and finger pointing) of poor Aussies now.
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I don’t mind the price being in £
Gives the site its own identity
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Infinity Ward should pay me to buy their game. I hate that franchise.
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I’m buying it.
I’m buying it because I know how good it’s going to be. I loved COD4 single player, it blew me away. Didn’t really touch the MP, ’cause I’m a slow old man who prefers the chess-like pace of BF2.
I said to myself after finishing it “Gulag, my old son, you can’t wait for more of that.”
Now they’re delivering more. More of what I enjoyed so much first time round. If delivering quality AAA games, polished so bright you can see the future in them, requires a higher price point, I’m fine with that.
Like most PC gaming fans, I’m more than willing to put up with bugs and patches and other oddness if the game is a flawed gem, demanding respect and admiration despite it’s faults. I love every minute of it, but every so often it’s nice to load up something so well executed and presented that it takes your breath away.
That’s why we pay the big bucks for food by a certain chef, or performances by acclaimed actors/conductors/bands/teams; because we recognise excellence. We should apply some of that thinking here. AAA games are one of the things that are touted as “What’s Wrong With The Industry”, but I say they have a place, and a purpose. We should celebrate the ones that spend those enormous dev/marketing budgets well, and bury the ones who promise much and fail to deliver.
COD4 nailed that promise from the opening beat to the final, slo-mo killshot. I’ll put money down for more of that, because you just can’t get it anywhere else.
I’m buying it.
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You’re having a laugh, A-Scale. I’m Norwegian, and I certainly prefer the £ to the $. I have a pretty good idea of how both relate to our currency, but I’ve got a slightly better idea with the pound (no doubt related to my love for English football).
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Who let Glenn Beck on the blog?
Anyway, almost 300 comments so far, and there really is nothing more to be said. If COD5 is too dear for you, then buy it on offer, wait ’til the price drops or buy a cheaper game. People are acting as if COD5 is the only game being released this year and is a fundamental biological requirement.
P.
P.
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It’s hilarious though really, isn’t it?
Most PC gamers are going to be intelligent enough to be offended by what’s going on, so there’s going to be a large majority who’ll wait for it to hit the bargain bin or seek out the best deal quite on purpose, if only to counter-sting Activision.
The console punter is going to look at a shelf full of games priced from £30 to £40, then they’re going to pick up and look at the latest COD, they might grin a little about it, but then they’ll see the big, shiny £55 price tag. They might’ve heard rumours about it, but seeing it for themselves, they feel the sting and put the game back on the shelf, opting for a more sanely priced game that’s going to offer just as much enjoyment… or more.
The only annoying part about all this is that Actard is going to blame piracy for lost sales. Ooh, those evil PC pirates, oooh, those evil 360 pirates, oooh, those evil PS3 pi–wait, there aren’t any PS3 pirates. So how’s that going to work?!
Are Actard going to cook up a story about an underground network of PS3 pirates? Oh, no, wait, they don’t have to because they can just say that their lost sales are all Sony’s fault for making their consoles so pricey.
/headdesk
There’s a massive aura of idiocy around Actard, hence why I tend to call them Actard and I feel as though it’s completely justified. I’m just going to strap myself in and wait for their shitstorm about pirates to pass.
Footnote: It probably won’t sell well because yes, it’s a free market, and the average person is at least smart enough to have the most basic understanding of ethics and equity, especially when things are being weighed against them that they feel the pinch (see … oh, I don’t know, just about every revolutionary war and/or effort in history for a valid example of this).
If there’s a row of games on a shelf for £25-30 and one is £40 (or, good grief, a row o f games for £30-£40 and one is £55) then the average person is going to be able to spot the inequity and the unfairness of that, and they’re going to act accordingly.
Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
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If peeps are moaning about the price then fight back and not buy the games, the publisher with have sit and listen then, but peeps keep bitching and pay.
so what do you do next.
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The huge price differences in retail occur because of intermediaries, not because of currency. Most producers have exclusive distributors assigned in each country they won’t distribute themselves. Depending on the market, the publishers supposedly give different wholesale prices, depending on transportation costs, taxes and the local market’s buying power. Thus, some Asian markets have really cheap retail prices on games.
While there are many countries using the Euro, there are significant price differences among them. Sometimes even insanely irrelevant to wages. Here in Greece games cost more than Germany or France, even though our wages are almost half of theirs.
I own somewhere round 150 PC games, only 5 of which I bought from a local retail store. All the rest I ordered from abroad, usually the UK. Oh, and I almost never buy a game when it first gets released. I wait for a price drop, for even UK prices are too much for us here, where the basic wage is round 600 Euro.
I feel a bit of guilt for not supporting the publishers and the local retail market, but I guess it’s still better than pirating the games. To be honest, I think that around 30 Euro is the most I would invest in a game, especially now that I’m self-employed.
As children, my generation grew with pretty petty allowances. We usually had the chance to own a single platform for games, while consoles were the upper-class kid’s thing for you couldn’t pirate cartridges. I never owned a single Amiga game I played, nor did any of my friends.
Growing in such a gaming culture meant making the step towards stopping piracy and buying games pretty hard. Many friends actually mock me for paying for PC games while they’re available for free with even less hassle than 15-20 years back.
Many also resort to never buying games, but rather playing them in net cafes, where it usually ends up costing less to finish a game by paying the hourly rates than to buy it.
It’s true that compared to the apparent inflation on all gods over the decades, games really kept a fairly set price range. The difference is that back then the market was a lot smaller and PC or consoles were still considered new and hi-tech equipment. Now that in most of Europe a PC is as common as a TV set, such factors can’t really affect the pricing.
I can’t tell how much the development, production and marketing costs of a game amount to, really, and I bet some titles such as this series (COD) do need a big investment from the publisher. Still lowering the price should eventually lead to a whole lot more sales, making up for the price reduction.
I wonder, if the game came out new at 25 Euro, how many wouldn’t think twice before pre-ordering it? As people posted above, can’t Steam’s offer sales tell anything to the publishers?
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Agree with above comment from Paul, we live in a free market economy and Activision are under no moral obligation to sell the game at £30.
Its simply up to us wether we pay the price they want to get our hands on a few hours of highly polished SP railtracks game play and multiplayer if thats your thing.
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I simply will not buy the game.
I am never willing to buy a PC game for over £30, preferably £25 or under.
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@Wulf “The console punter is going to look at a shelf full of games priced from £30 to £40, then they’re going to pick up and look at the latest COD, they might grin a little about it, but then they’ll see the big, shiny £55 price tag. They might’ve heard rumours about it, but seeing it for themselves, they feel the sting and put the game back on the shelf, opting for a more sanely priced game that’s going to offer just as much enjoyment… or more. ”
How does this imaginary scenario tally with the fact that COD6 XBox 360 & PS3 top the all-formats pre-order charts on play.com?
http://www.play.com/Games/Games/6-/PreOrderChart.html
(Oh, and the £70 AssCreed2 Special Editions take up slots 5 and 6. Obviously noone has told gamers there’s a recesssion on.)
P.
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@l1ddl3monkey
When you’re all done with those chips on your shoulders can I have them? I love chips.
Surely you mean fries?
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£40 for COD? i’d pay. I been playing COD4 online sice it came out, much the same i did for COD 2 (and played it untill COD4) so value for money would be good for me even if the game was £60. but how many guys like me are they in UK? how are they going to attract new players with such a high price?
I understand why they made this decision, but I think they reasoning flawed.
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Knowing the exchange rate really doesn’t explain what a price hike means in terms of cost of living or price expectation anyway. That’s all entirely local. (someone may have mentioned this already).
I’m not kidding about the Au$150 thing though. This could be part of a new pricing trend, as said, that means it goes up here by christmas. They will use any excuse to put it up. Releases in Aus often come by Europe (not sure how often this happens any more or on consoles though). Still, it’s a big number that might be seen as pricing themselves out of the market.
Then again luxury spending hasn’t taken much of hit these days, from what I gather.
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And just to note that play.com have COD6 for £29.99:
http://www.play.com/Games/PC/4-/10109313/Modern-Warfare-2/Product.html
So, what is all the fuss about, exactly?
P.
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On a day when the Vatican has tried to reclaim Oscar Wilde, I thought his definition of a cynic was apt: a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
P.
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I’m guessing this has something to do with COD4 being £40 RRP at initial release (if I remember correctly anyway), and the £40 RRP GOTY edition (both PC versions I’m talking about), and other pricing experiments from Activision. What they probably didn’t factor in, of course, was if retailers dropped the prices – what’s 1000 sales at £40 for them is 1000 sales at £30-£35 for us if retailers drop prices, since it doesn’t affect Activision’s profit margins. So I’m wondering if retailers will take any more losses with this if they try to keep the game competitive (if COD:MW2 sells, they make money, so they’ll want it to sell). Retailers don’t have to sell at the RRP, after all, and in effect we, the customer, we see no change (it’s probably already been pointed out in above comments somewhere). But I wonder how this will affect games on digital distribution services.
Prices have been a bit weird for games though. If the price makes people want to make people buy it because it looks like a better game than everything else, then good for them – low prices can have a negative effect as much as high prices, and the constant price lowering is doing nobody any favours, not even the customer imo. The simple fact is, not all games are equal, and the higher price could well be justified, and developers can’t continue living on no money. But when other big companies aren’t quite taking the same stance – EA don’t intend to raise prices, say MCV [ http://www.mcvuk.com/news/35051/EA-No-price-rises-from-us ], and THQ are being a bit skittish about it (they give the impression they’re considering it, but haven’t committed to anything so are probably waiting for the outcome of Activision’s approach) – it has to be asked whether Activision are being real smart and gutsy, or real stupid and greedy. But I doubt it’s either. More likely just balancing their accounts correctly, like all entities in the business world that want to survive.
It’s hard to care too much somehow, even though this could come around and affect me. I don’t have to play it, and it’s not like I’d miss out that much. It’s just a game.
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A-Scale: Our website used to say how big demos were in a unit we entirely invented. Of course we’re going to be archaic. It’s all part of our charm.
KG
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You know, I haven’t kept tabs on game prices, but I think it’s rather odd to see how staunchly gamers hold on to traditional prices while other products’ prices often increase with inflation.
Also, I suspect that a lot of gamers have gotten used to these prices so much, and the fact that they can buy X games in a year or so, that they’ve forgotten games are luxury products. I mean, I may be wrong here, but I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing when games are seen as valuable enough that you don’t just buy one, whereas now it’s not as necessary to be that selective/critical towards games.
The above also keeping in mind the lower prices games go for when
-purchased x months after release
-purchased online.
This doesn’t mean I advocate higher prices, I’m just wondering whether the prices we pay are (in comparison to what we pay for other goods) not relatively low, right now.
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@ MC cliffski owns this thread with common sense, good work man.
God! Now you made me want to discuss his points – some of which i agree with, some i don’t. ;)
Cliffski says:
Secondly, take a step back and look how much entertainment a GOOD game gives you. Someone claiming COD4 was 5 hours of fun are having a laugh. I clocked up easily 200+ hours on it with the excellent multiplayer. Even if that had cost me £50 its still laughably cheaper than any other form of entertainment.
Except that there are plenty of people out there who don’t play multiplayer and will never get the same value (what a subjective term that is!) out of the game. Why should i pay for a component that i don’t want or will ever use? Just because it wasn’t your experience doesn’t invalidate others’ perceptions/conclusions about a game’s worth.
Cliffski writes:
You get what you pay for. It’s a free market.
I like saying that too but i’m increasingly aware that it’s patently untrue. You often do not get what you pay for and you also often get more than you expected… Like i said, everyone has different levels of value.
Cliffski writes:
It sucks when things go up in price. But compare pc game costs (and quality) with house prices (even now) over the last 20 years in the UK, and tell me with a straight face that gaming has got too expensive.
Oh come on, you of all people should be able to see how silly this statement is. House prices are directly linked to income and economy (for lending)…. it’s something that is seen as an investment of your time and money regardless of how much you pay for it because you own your property once you pay for it. The bank/lender also gets lots of money back so in the “good times” they pour out the money lent (which helps throw up prices) and reign it in when the “bad times” come crawling. With games 10 or 20 years ago you ‘effectively’ owned them once you bought them (like lease hold/free hold properties, though i think it may only be one of them?) regardless of the ‘EULA’ because there was no DRM.
These days are totally different. The proper housing analogy for consumers is that we’re being asked to pay full buying price of a house to then only rent it – the council (or housing association) can chuck us out whenever they want and in fact probably will do once it becomes too expensive for them to keep having to give us our keys every time we want to access the property.
On the publisher/developer side of things for COD:MW2 the analogy is that they already bought their house (game engine and license property name) and want to do an extension and redecoration of the current property. There’s no massive outlay of having to buy the house from scratch, it’s mostly just a cosmetic improvement. Yet, they want to sell the property on to the consumer at effectively ~15% increase when house prices have actually dropped by 30% and many people are out of work due to the economy. It’s unrealistic.
I’d love to see the CEOs of game companies on the antiques and property shows that are on in the middle of the day…. they’d never win and they’d never want to sell or buy at a realistic price. :)
Cliffski writes:
This is how the free market should work, and it should work for EVERYONEs benefit, especially the consumer. Company makes awesome product. Company is rewarded by high sales, and boost to reputation that ensures premium price for future products. Thats a GOOD thing.
Argh! The ‘free market’ argument! I love this – people are so naive when they spout this. Yes, in theory the free market works and benefits everyone. In practice it does not work – proof of this being all the commissions, watch dogs and oversight committees that have been formed by every government to make sure that corporations and companies do not take advantage of the consumer/law (and even other companies).
In reality the above theoretical example just does not tend to happen – especially with an entity with stockholders. Instead it goes like: Company makes good game – gets lots of sales and lots of money. Stake holders like money and demand more…. company makes another game but charges more or develops fewer features using the base engine to cut down on costs etc. therefore getting a higher revenue/profit. Eventually the cost/revenue/profit ratio becomes so one-sided that their product suffers and they lose reputation but still charge the high price point that they have gained through their release history (and in the case of the games industry: the accepted price point). Unfortunately, the mass market is not educated in said product area and so do not know enough to dislike it.
Eventually word filters through and they have to increase the quality/perceived value of their product or they’re forced to expend more resources due to generational shift.
Unfortunately, this is the difference between artists and businessmen.
Cliffski writes:
I want Infinity Ward to be driving porsches and paying off mortgages. They deserve it,
Huh, i don’t see this myself. Why are they more deserving of that than I or anyone else. What about the people who supply them with food? The person who invented the microchips that their games utilise? These people aren’t driving porches (or even Ferraris ;))…. it’s just not how the world works. I think it’s very rare for the person with the idea or who put in the hard work to actually benefit from it…. especially in a company. Chances are that with the continued success COD developers haven’t seen any wage rises past industry standard and it’s in fact the publishers, stockholders and CEOs who get the pay rises that are disproportionate. Even if they deserve it and if the game does well, they probably won’t see a penny of that success.
Cliffski writes:
As more people produce games as good as COD, the supply rises, and the price should equalise.
Again, not how it works – especially the gaming industry. For some reason every other industry that i can see tends to lower prices from competition… the gaming industry seems to just set a standard price – regardless of quality or length etc. Prices will indeed stabilise…. but instead we’ll just be getting the same quality games at the new higher price point and history has shown this to be true.
Cliffski writes:
If the free market works well, they WILL make piles of money, more people will emulate them, and we get better games.
I’m quoting this after its position in the comment because i think it links in quite nicely with the above point.
Are you seriously telling me/us that you believe that we’re getting better games than last generation? Graphics quality aside, has much changed?
By your logic games like God of War, Half Life 2, Call of Duty, Gran Tourismo, Final Fantasy, Killzone, Resident Evil etc should be the majority, having spurred all developers to produce fantastic quality games…. but that’s not what i’m seeing. From my personal experience, the ratio of quality to crap seems about the same. There are the few good games and the load of mediocre/average games and the ton of literally rubbish games.
Instead of a good game inspiring companies to make better games, they end up copying or trying to ride on the coattails of said popular game. Perhaps the inspiration argument works for individuals and i agree that i believe that developers themselves want to release the best game they can and that they will be trying to beat or equal the great games they see released…. unfortunately, developers do not control the money or the time line till release or even if the game gets released at all.
Another thing that people forget to take into account when they cite the lack of inflation of games’ price points is economy of scale. The market for games (especially console games) has increased exponentially over the last 20 years.
For example:
Super Mario Bros. 3 sold 11 million copies from release in 5 years worldwide by 1993.
Halo 3 sold 8 million copies worldwide in 8 months.
The market for games is completely different now. Sure, it may take 1.5 million copies of a game sold to break even…. but getting that 1.5 million copies out of a larger install base is much more likely. In my opinion, if it fails to break even or make a profit it’s down to poor marketing/release strategies, budget and market demand considerations and poor quality – which does affect sales.
Again, for example a comparison of generations total lifetime sales – bearing in mind that some consoles are still on sale and a large portion of these numbers will occur after the ‘end’ of the generation.
NES: 61 m (was sold through until 1992 or 1993)
Master System: ~ 13 m
(Because really, there were only two :p) Total: 74 m
SNES: 49 m
Megadrive: 29 m
Total: 78 m
In between: Saturn: 9.5 m (not added to any generation totals)
N64: 32 m
PS1: 102 m (was sold until 2008?)
Dreamcast: 10 m
Total: 144 m
PS2: 140 m (still being actively sold)
GC: 21 m
Xbox : 24 m
Total: 185 m
Bear in mind that this gen is still pretty young.
360: 30 m
PS3: 22 m
Wii: 50 m
Total: 102 m
So, although we’re only 4 years into this gen we’re already at 55% of the most successful generation to date which took 9 years to reach those numbers. I think that’s pretty impressive considering the economic downturn and overall expense of the current console generation compared with the previous ones and shows how the market for games has grown over the generations…. which negates the cost of having to increase the cost of the game to the consumer because of increased sales and negligible post development costs to produce the product.
I know it’s a bit of a long post and i’m sure many people will disagree with my thoughts as well. Hope it wasn’t too ‘wall of texty’ :D
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Whilst this is clearly just Acti gouging their most loyal fans, the PC version is still £30 most places, which is the same price The Sims was or most other megaton PC games released, CoD4 and WaW were this too, so there’s no real difference in practice for us in the PC crowd, it’s the console fans who are going to get ripped off.
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I wonder if they have ever considered selling a “Single player only” version of the game for, say, half price, then offer the multiplayer as DLC.
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A-Scale says:
Suit yourself, but the Pound really doesn’t carry the weight it used to. The world is dealt in dollars, and whether the story refers to Britain or not, most people will understand the $ exchange rate better than the Pound exchange rate viz a viz their own currency.
The Pound has fluctuated greatly viz the dollar in the recent past. Am I a bad person for not keeping tabs on the day to day fluctuations in price between the two?
Actually, it’s not the pound that’s doing the fluctuating, rather it’s the US dollar that’s been doing the fluctuating against a whole heap of other currencies.
Living in Australia, I don’t have an issue with a GBP price being used – I understand it. Contrary to your belief, the world doesn’t deal in dollars, they deal in their local currencies. Given, it’s a common currency to use when travelling to multiple countries as it’s easily exchanged in many countries. Personally, apart from that I only use USD on Steam (no other choice) or if transacting with the US itself, otherwise I deal in the currencies of the 2 countries involved. Further, the business I work for never uses USD as a basis for contracts as the exchange rate fluctuations present too great a risk.
Just my opinion.
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@ Duoae owns this thread with common sense, good work man. ;)
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@Owen: Argh! No! Now my credibility is gone! ;)
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[i]NikRichards says:
Personaly I see it as a reasonable thing for them to do as a company.
If it was my game I was selling, yea id sell it high, then drop it down to a decent price once i’d skimmed the market.
That said, I wouldn’t buy COD6 for anything more than £25.
@A-scale
Your also forgetting that RPS is a privately run site, they can price things any damm way they feel like, hell they could start pricing in peggle’s if they felt like it. (£6 to 1 Peggle)[/i]
Don’t be [b]stupid[/b] a Peggle is measurement of file size. Idiot! I can’t believe retards like you exist on the internet. You’re worse than Hilter and I bet you hate kittens too!
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Seriously though I believe A-scale is actually from the UK and is pissing himself because hes got so many people worked up…
Even if you really are American the thought of the subtly and Englishness of that type of humo[b]u[/b]r still makes me laugh…
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On topic: Its priced like that because it will sell. Any excuse given is a lie. People get pissed off over lies.
People who don’t want to pay that price don’t have to, but have the right to complain if they want – not that it will do any good.
Piracy of this game will be very high, but so will sales. I wonder if different blockbusters have different ratios of sales to pirate copies?
Finally: I still didn’t play COD4 because of the price. Plus the demo was pretty crappy and didn’t interest me in the game…
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Remember when Infinity Ward were amazed by the level of pirated copies playing MW online? Hope they’ve got a strong drink handy for MW2 with that price point!
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I fail at html, too used to bbs… Also lack of edit is rather annoying…
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@ Lewis P
“I wonder if they have ever considered selling a “Single player only” version of the game for, say, half price, then offer the multiplayer as DLC.”
I’d buy it.
The single player for CoD4 was a surprisingly clever, deep depiction of war we’ve never seen in games before or since. The muliplayer is an ultra hardcore fest aimed squarely at twitch gaming counter strike players. I’ve never touched the multiplayer on my copy of CoD4 and never intend to, so yes, I am paying for five or six hours, not two hundred.
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This is great. The games get shorter and more expensive.
No way I am spending 60 bucks in this
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Because this game is clearly going to sell truckloads, this does reek somewhat of Actizzard wanting 2,171,290 money hats instead of just 1,687,932. That said £40 is roughly what I’m used to paying for a new console title, never really understood why the PC versions were cheaper, I just assumed they didn’t sell as many.
I won’t pay more than around £45 even when I’m feeling flush. Guess I’ll wait for price-drop or 2nd-hand copy ‘cos I’m a broke student!
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A-scale, the US dollar has been fluctuating more and has been losing influence since the 70′s. Now that China made a public outcry to the US to get there act together we can only wait until the currency balance will tip over. Note that it has been shifting already in the last few decades.
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@Duoae
The point is, the top class multiplayer makes it excellent value for money even at 55 gpb to someone who likes multiplayer and therefore it makes perfect sense to sell it at that price point. If you don’t then wait for it to come down in price and reach a price point where it does provide you with value for money. Duh. The way game prices decrease with age means games sell at a variety of price points lower but not higher that the initial one. The way the games market works is such that all you need to do is wait for it to reach a price point you like. What’s to complain about?
The rest of that post is just confused. Like you give an example of supposed market failure in which it is clear the market response works and forces the company to lift their game! Or you get confused talking about DRM analogies when the point is one of simple inflation. Or get confused about whether the developers get pay rises when the simple point is that if that investors just got rich off of a polished AAA game we will see more investment in attempts to make polished AAA games. Or complain about the games industry having a standard price while complaining about MW2 experimenting with a price increase above the current standard. Or try to pretend that you can decide what the proper pricing should be by waving your hands about console sales as if that were the only factor. No, no, no.
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@Duoae: Sorry :)
@mrrobsa: I believe it’s because for consoles the developer (?) has to pay for a software licence to allow them to develop for the platform (360, PS3 etc). Thus this cost is then tagged on to the cost of the games RRP.
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“complaining about MW2 experimenting with a price increase above the current standard”: Hmm, that’s a unique way of putting it!
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In this comments thread, people defend the price rise by talking about free markets and the benefits of unadulterated capitalism.
Outside my window, my neighbour walks by on his way to the Job Center.
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I’m definitely not trying to troll or upset anyone here, but the discussion has me interested, so turning the question around then:
Is there a good reason why the UK should have lower prices than the rest of Europe?
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Also people avoid attempting half assed comparisons with house prices when talking about games, as a point of justification for price hikes. The reason uk house prices have consistently gone up higher than inflation is down to a combination of supply & demand and increasingly flexible buy to let options, nothing to do with the manufacturing costs. It’s all about desirability.
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Also LOL at the guy asking for RPS to go over to putting prices in $. What next should we celebrate the 4th of July?
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I don’t get why everyone thinks they’re just setting a higher price to screw people. They’re setting a price they think will make them the most money, period. If they think the demand is high for the product and their profit-maximizing price is higher than the standard game, that’s what they’ll price it as.
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I don’t see why not. And the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th. I’m all for celebrations, no matter the date!
@skalpadda: I don’t think it’s lower than “the rest of Europe”. Lower than Scandinavia, certainly, but everything is expensive in Scandinavia. It’s less to do with things being cheap in the UK, and more everything being overpriced in Scandinavia (and I believe typical wages are higher as well, so it all more or less evens out in the end). ;)
Apart from that, keep in mind that the pound has dropped something like 20% in value, so compared to other countries, everything in the UK suddenly seems much cheaper — but it isn’t for people who live there. They get paid the same amount of pounds, and everything they buy costs the same amount of pounds.
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@Legionary:
Yeah, I’m sure nobody is every unemployed in non-capitalist countries. Not.
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I remember spending $35 on Atari 2600 games in the early 80′s. That would be something like $78 in 2009 dollars.
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A-Scale: You actually don´t really need a dollar price here. you see that it has gone from £30 to £40, an increase by 33%, which is quite a lot.
What do you need a dollar price for here, it could as well have been an increase from 100 potatoes to 133 potatoes, 33% is 33%.
Regarding the topic: That´s too bad and i hope that other publisher´s don´t follow Activision´s example here. I´m from Germany, but often order my games from the UK, because they used to be cheaper, and in some cases i can´t get an uncut version over here (recent example: Left 4 Dead).
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You know, they could charge 150 pounds and package it with a rape kit and people would still buy MW2.
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oh wait.
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The free market is apparently always better for the consumer, even when the consumer is paying more for less content. I would be GREATLY surprised if mow2 represented a massive improvement in multiplayer, so the only game is the single player content. Thats fine by me, as I never played multiplayer on the first one anyway. I rarely buy brand new games, and price tags going up is only going to encourage me to do so.
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Having said that, I don’t want to actively complain about this… it’s their money and they are free to charge as much as they like for their product. I suspect it is a foolish move, but I don’t know for sure.
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just to jump in on a tangent:
“The price of music has come down partly because you can now buy for £100 in software the sort of recording studio capabilities that would be 6 or even 7 figrues back when I was a teenager.”
no, it’s happening because it’s better to make a dollar on a song than nothing on a song, since people are going to download it anyway. a lot of smaller labels are dying because they have just enough popularity to get downloaded but not enough added value to get people to pay for the music they’re already going to listen to.
recording costs on the high end are still pretty astronomical, even before you get to the mastering stage.
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jalf:
I don’t think it’s lower than “the rest of Europe”. Lower than Scandinavia, certainly, but everything is expensive in Scandinavia. It’s less to do with things being cheap in the UK, and more everything being overpriced in Scandinavia (and I believe typical wages are higher as well, so it all more or less evens out in the end). ;)
Apart from that, keep in mind that the pound has dropped something like 20% in value, so compared to other countries, everything in the UK suddenly seems much cheaper — but it isn’t for people who live there. They get paid the same amount of pounds, and everything they buy costs the same amount of pounds.
I made a quick check online, comparing Sweden, Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland and Norway; the price point for new big budget games seems to hover around 45-55€ (roughly £39-£47 at current rates). We don’t use the Euro here, but we pay the same price as most other European countries over Steam, in Euros, which is good or bad depending on the current value of Swedish Crowns to Euros. Right now it’s bad.
I know about the Pound value, at the moment our currency has plummeted as well, primarily because we’re so dependant on export trade with the US, so we’re pretty much in the same boat. That’s how economics work though.
From my point of view it looks like Activision are trying to charge the people in the UK the same as the rest of Europe. I’m not saying it’s a good thing and certainly their objective is maximizing profits rather than some notion of fairness, but still, what’s all the fuss about? ;)
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Quote fail, the second paragraph should be part of the quote as well. Edit function, gods of RPF? *puppy eyes*
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Well, then logically prices should be raised by 30% in Sweden as well, to compensate for the publisher’s lower income per sale. ;)
See the problem? Just because the value of your currency has fallen doesn’t mean you, as a person living in the country, is willing or able to pay the equivalent price premium.
Well, you pretty much cherry-picked some of the most expensive countries then. How about the prices in Romania, Greece or Prague?
The fuss is about the fact that britons do not live in the rest of Europe. They live in the UK, they have UK economies, are paid UK wages and pay UK prices for anything they buy. There are countless reasons why they might have a slightly lower disposable income than other parts of Europe. Lower wages, higher costs of living, different tax system, fewer benefits for those taxes, higher costs on health care or education there are a lot of factors that could cause it. Ultimately, you can’t charge people in one country based on the price in another. That’s why they don’t charge €50 for a game in China. They know it wouldn’t sell. That’s why everything is sold for peanuts in Eastern Europe. They know that selling at western European prices would just make the product unaffordable. It doesn’t work.
They have to set the price in each country based on how much that country is likely to pay. The amount you or I, who live in other countries, pay is irrelevant. Just like it’s irrelevant to US prices that we pay ~40% more than them.
It doesn’t matter to a British gamer that his game is cheaper than it’d be if he bought it in Denmark. If it is 30% more than he used to play, he is likely to buy 30% fewer games.
Apart from that, it still baffles me that you accept those €50+ prices. I haven’t bought a game from local stores for something like 5 years (HL2 might have been the last one, actually). I’d much rather pay half that and order it from a UK shop. I’d assumed people did the same in most of the rest of Europe.
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The biggest complaint is that MW2 will have a short single player campaign so it should cost $35 instead of $70. What if they spent the extra money required to make a or 20, 30 hour single player campaign that maintains the same production values and quality as COD4 single player? Would that justify an increase in price?
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@Owen:
Thanks for input on pricing, nice Gravatar too!
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No worries mrrobsa, thanks.
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I would like to try selling the single player separately and charge per hour for the multiplayer. I’m sure everybody here hates this idea, but let’s think about it for a moment:
What makes a “pay as you play” model good or bad is the price of the subscription, not the fact that you have to pay regularly.
Currently, (most?) people who bought CoD4 are only interested in the single player. Many of them think that that $70 is too much money for this.
Then there are people who play only the multiplayer player, or both modes, but they never get into the game so much that they play much.
And finally we have people like cliffski who say they put played “200+ hours”.
If think the whole experience is worth $70, it would be reasonable to charge $20 for the single player, and $0.25 per hour for playing the multiplayer. That way everybody pays for what he consumes. And you could still sell the whole package with a lifetime subscription for the people who want it all.
And the reason why this does not work is
1.) because most people who buy a game only use a fraction of the content,so they would never reach $70, and
2.) because Activision would never make prices like that. They would probably let you pay $50 first and then $10 per month or so.
but I also believe that 1) is the reason most potential customers do not buy the product and 2) is something companies can learn by failure.
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sorry for all the spelling errors… I need the edit button more than you do!
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Jalf:
The prices of imported goods do fluctuate quite a lot here, depending on the current value of our currency. Furthermore, if we want to buy digitally distributed games on Steam for example, we pay in Euros or Dollars (which of course get converted by your bank later) so in that regard we pay exactly what the value of our currency dictates. That goes for things like MMO subscriptions as well of course.
About the countries comparison, it was simply ones which were easy for me to check online. We already had one poster here from Greece saying the prices there are similar to the rest of Europe and I searched around a bit on Google trying to find retailers in other countries (surprisingly hard when you don’t understand much of the languages).
I couldn’t find much info on general prices, but two online stores I found in Poland had recommended market prices for new games (I looked for The Sims 3, Prototype and a few others) at around 120-160 zloty, which would be 28-37€ or £24-32.
Flipping that around, a quick Wikipedia search for the GDP per capita gives:
Sweden: $37,383
United Kingdom: $35,445
Poland: $17,625
(World Bank 2008)
Of course GDP isn’t a direct measure of your disposable income, but it should serve fairly well as an indication, and the differences between the UK and Poland are quite striking, yet the prices of PC games seem similar to the current UK prices.
I personally consider (the equivalent of) 50€ to be a lot of money, it’s not something I’ll toss away on an impulse buy and I’ll only buy new games at full price if I’m very certain I’ll have a great time playing them. For a good game it amounts to cheap entertainment, for a bad one it’s a terrible waste. I’m perfectly happy with waiting for price drops and there’s still plenty of opportunities for buying at sales, older games and cheap indie stuff, which is great.
Of course it doesn’t help that our retail of PC games is virtually dead.
Again, I’m absolutely not trying to annoy or anger anyone, I’m really curious of the motivations for all this :)
(Also, RPF? I should have my keyboard confiscated by the typo police)
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40 quid? Fuck. That. Shit.
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@Kieron
And that’s charm that I love. I thought the Peggles unit readout was brilliant, if only because it gave people an idea of just how long they would have to spend downloading a demo/game before they could play it. It’s a minor service that you provide(d) to your audience, and I loved it. I think that providing prices in USD as well as GBP is another minor service that the majority of your readers would find handy. But like I said, it’s your site, so feel free to report prices in Pounds, Battlefield Heroes points, or any other denomination you choose. I was simply making a suggestion.
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I simply can’t afford games at £40. I would pay that for huge releases like Half Life 3 or similar but that’s about it. It’s rare enough that I pay £35 these days, one of the reasons I’m a PC gamer is because on the whole it’s the cheapest platform, the average price I pay must be £25 for a relativley new game.
Thank goodness for great multiplayer games like TF2 that will last me years.
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Way to encourage piracy, make people wait for price drops, or Steam specials, buy second hand and generally hurt sales. Nice that they are subsidising the PC version by hiking the Console price though.
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If any retailers actually sell it at that price I’ll be pretty surprised… Particularly good retailers like amazon. £25 is my bet from there, maybe 30.
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£40 for a game? No way in hell am I ever gonna buy a game at that price.
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“The free market is apparently always better for the consumer, even when the consumer is paying more for less content.”
Oh yes the free market has really assraped us poor gamers over the years!. Back in my day, a game cost at least as much as now (if not more) in inflation-adjusted terms, and yet the game shipped on a single 1.44MB floppy disk (or a ZX spectrum cassette) and contained less artwork than a modern-day banner advert.
And now games have maybe 30 hours of voiceovers, full screen video, interactive tutorials, 32 bit color in 1900×1200 res with online multiplayer and integrated voice chat…
We are so fucking ripped off. The amount of effort in making games, and their quality has not changed since 1981.
/sarcasm
Anyone who thinks there is not a free market in making and selling games probably should try running a games company before asserting that.
I’m as ‘fuck the big companies’ as anyone else, but the truth is, there *is* a free market to make and sell games now.
Do all you people get so foaming-at-the-mouth if your local coffee shop sells its coffee for more than you want to buy? Just move on and spend your cash at another coffee store guys.
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@cliffski:
“And now games have…”
Seriously, I wish producers would stop trying to justify product prices by listing production costs. I as a consumer decide what I am willing to invest in a game. A producer needs to make games so he can make a profit by selling them at prices that are within my budget.
It is not important how many hours a game can be played, only how many hours are actually played by the person who makes the buying decision. It is not important how much money it costs to make a game, it is only important how much money and time consumers are willing to spend on computer games.
As an individual consumer I can tell you that it is extremely difficult to sell me a game for $70. Interestingly, it is far easier to make me buy 4 games for 20,-. A company like Activision/Blizzard should consider this type of consumer feedback when they plan projects.
“Anyone who thinks there is not a free market in making and selling games”
The PC is of course a free market. Console markets less so, since they are regulated. I think that’s interesting to point out, since for cross platform games, the two worlds clash.
“Back in my day…”
I remember these days, and there was not even close to that much competition as there is today. Think about it: The games from back then are still part of todays game pool. I can get some awesome 200+ hour game for 20,-, even for 3,-. Surly this has an impact on prices of new ‘AAA’ releases?
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How many retailers actually charge the full RRP anyway? Most of the PC or 360 games I buy are supposed to be about £10 more than I pay for them. I rarely pay more than £25 for a PC game and about £35 for a 360 game. In fact most of the PC games I’ve bought in recent times have been about £17.99.
I think MW2 will still sell by the truck load even at the ridiculous price of £55 due to the huge fan base, but I can’t see many other titles being able to pull that off.
We’re in the middle of a recesion, unemployment is rising. All that will happen if they put prices up by a tenner are that the overall sales of games will go down as people can afford to buy less of them. Seems like a no brainer to me.
Price is certainly a major factor in my games purchasing. On the 360 for instance I’ll wait for new releases to drop to around the £30 mark before I’ll buy them. For instance I’d like a copy of “Call of Juarez 2″ for my 360, but not whilst the cheapest I can buy it for is £37. Games publishers might say that the high price of games reflects the costs of production etc, but my wallet says otherwise.
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Sorry cliffski but I’ve gotta intervene on one small point a hot chocolate from starbucks would cost me about £3.20 (Umm I think, it’s been a few weeks since I last bought one), which isn’t quite the same as buying a game which is a much larger one time outlay. Is the hot choco a tad overpriced, I think so, but I feel more comfortable absorbing a near impulse price purchase than I do a full game purchase. That said, remember what happened to the music industry? Turns out 70p per track on ITunes is easier to absorb than £1.10-£1.50 per track when the music industry was massively overcharging on albums and the consumer revolt eventually came back to bite them on the ass in a pretty big way. Not that I use ITunes, I still feel that service is a rip-off, but that’s just me I guess.
Personally, my whole frothing at the mouth problem is that a typical game is already quite significantly far from impulse purchase levels (AAA titles anyway) that I am much more likely to pick and choose only a small selection of games.
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Oh, and you can now pick and choose music tracks, instead of being forced to pay for a whole album only to find only 3 of the 10-15 tracks was actually any good. Grrr.
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If the prices go up I will rethink even bothering to buy another gaming pc, and really I will just flog my consoles on ebay and take up crack or something, will end up cheaper.
Anyone want, 360 elite, ps3, wii psp and a dslite … going cheap.
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if game developers split their games up and allow you to pick and choose what bits you want, they get accused of charging for stuff ‘that should be free’ and ‘price gouging’ and ‘greed’.
Nobody HAD to buy horse armour in oblivion, but apparently giving people the option was evil.
Developers get slagged off regardless what they do, price wise.
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@MC
If you don’t then wait for it to come down in price and reach a price point where it does provide you with value for money. Duh. The way game prices decrease with age means games sell at a variety of price points lower but not higher that the initial one. The way the games market works is such that all you need to do is wait for it to reach a price point you like. What’s to complain about?
Gee! Thanks, mister. I never wouldn’t had thought ‘uh nothing like that.
Seriously though… the whole point of your little aside there is completely at odds with how game developers and publishers want the game industry to work. The prices shouldn’t fall that fast…. there’s no need for them to. Imagine if you turned around to Cliffski and told him that you expected to pick up his games for £2, 6 months after release. What do you think he thinks about that? I certainly believe that game prices fall off too quickly at retail and relying on that system to get what you want actually puts developers out of pocket instead of rewarding them for the game you want – whether that be SP, SP+MP or MP.
The rest of that post is just confused. Like you give an example of supposed market failure in which it is clear the market response works and forces the company to lift their game! Or you get confused talking about DRM analogies when the point is one of simple inflation. Or get confused about whether the developers get pay rises when the simple point is that if that investors just got rich off of a polished AAA game we will see more investment in attempts to make polished AAA games. Or complain about the games industry having a standard price while complaining about MW2 experimenting with a price increase above the current standard. Or try to pretend that you can decide what the proper pricing should be by waving your hands about console sales as if that were the only factor. No, no, no.
It’s not my fault you can’t follow reasoning. If it’s confused then it’s because the initial points i was responding to make no sense either…. hence the point of my response. I could respond to each and every one of your complaints about my points and clarify them for you but since you’re clearly not interested in debate, more in dismissal (and it seems no one else is either) then i guess i won’t.
If you want to continue i’m happy to do so… but less of the under-handed insults because i don’t follow your exact viewpoint or am a fan boy of “whatever point of view” please…
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Could do with editing, lol. The missing bit of the first part of the response would be:
That part of the ‘free market’ seems to work quite well but it’s based mainly on self space, used games and not so much on the quality of a game title (which would be a better reason for reducing the price of a game so quickly after launch). The reason to complain is that because of the way the games industry works (i.e. discrete price points) then what we’ll see is many new games just setting their prices at the new ‘normal’ regardless of quality, content or perceived worth – same as it’s ever been….
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Man, how much will the collector’s edition (the one that includes NVG) cost!?
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For £55 I could buy *all* of the following (new/boxed):
The Witcher, Mass Effect, World of Goo, GTA IV, Tomb Raider Underworld and Bioshock.
Games I buy now are typically between £5 and £15, (eg last month: Dead Space £7.99 released 9 months ago) and I might stretch to £25 for a newly released game if it was something special, but that’s about it.
It doesn’t bother me that much if a games company wants to try and ‘over-price’ its games. It is very rare that the price remains very high for very long (even very strong sellers seem to eventually drop at least to under £20) and there are a lot of other games out there for me to spend my time and money on while I wait for the price to fall.
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@cliffski
If publishers would actually sell significant amounts of content for a reasonable price, then I don’t think anyone would care too much (I haven’t seen much in the way of complaints regarding the Fallout 3 DLC pricing)
The horse armor DLC was your coffee shop example of offering to sprinkle some cinnamon on the $3 coffee for an extra dollar. You can argue all you like about how only people who want to pay for it need pay for it, but everyone else will be over here condemning them for, at best, not understanding their market; or more likely, preying on the ignorant to make a quick buck.
Do you honestly think that if MW2 was offered as either the single player component, or the multiplayer component, for 2/3rds the price of a normal game, or both for full price, it wouldn’t be hailed by gamers everywhere as the best deal since sliced bread?
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No it wouldn’t. I’ve read enough threads when abuse gets hurled around for people trying to separate games into different parts to know that it would just result in the same.
The only answer the majority of gamers will give to any discussion of game pricing is “we want everything we have right now, but much cheaper”.
There is a free market. Anyone who doesn’t want to buy COD6, just don’t buy it, then get on with your lives.
if you want to be annoyed about prices, get annoyed about energy or water prices, something where you *have* to consume it.
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I’m not sure it’ll come to much. I seem to recall Half Life 2 costing more than anything else on PC at retail when it was first released, purely because Valve / whoever the publisher was knew they could get away with it. Everything else just stayed the same.
Cod6 is expensive, no doubt, maybe too expensive, but it’ll sell by the bucket load. I don’t think every other publisher will automatically follow suit though. Regardless of personal opinion, Modern Warfare 2 is probably 2009′s biggest gaming release, by a distance. You can realistically sell it at £40 for the pc version – but the same doesn’t necessarily apply to Mirror’s Edge 2, Dragon Age, Diablo 3, or whatever.
Sadly, I will almost certainly pay over the odds to have Cod6 in my hands on the day of release, as I belong to a Cod4 clan, and our masterplan (I use both ‘master’ and ‘plan’ in the loosest possible sense) is to get a couple of UK servers up tout suite (sp?). It’s all about bums on seats, apparently. I won’t be paying £40 mind, but it’ll still be more than I’m used to (according to shopto.net, the RRP for Cod6 PC is actually £45).
As an aside, my clan has somewhere between fifteen and twenty members who play Cod4, but only two or maybe three of us (including myself) have ever actually played the single player.
Basically I might pay extra for this, but everything else can wait for the sales. Apologies for over-long rambling.
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Well, this is an interesting turn of events. Wonder if ActiBlizz are thinking twice now…
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Interesting to see this story is The Times frontpage news (at least online);
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/gadgets_and_gaming/article6728189.ece
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Huzzah!
http://savygamer.co.uk/2009/08/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-2-pc-2799.html
£27.99 preorder.
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66,6£ for this in Norway, you get thing too cheap :p
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If the price stays that high, I’ll just buy a CD-Key in some Korean Online store and get the CD somewhere else. No way I’m spending that amount of money on a game.
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