When did Pc games creep up to $59.99

Sorry, but I was looking at the dollar and not the pound. So Pc games are only a couple of pounds more then I expected and I do normally wait for the Steam sales. However, I do see a fair amount of shitty games now trying to sell for the same price as some AAA games, so it makes me laugh when some people complain that a VR game is £14.99. In all honesty I think I've only seen a couple of VR games priced wrong in terms of what you get for your money. 

Techy111 said:

Check out some prices for addon aircraft for p3d fsx and xplane. Scary prices but I suppose a lot more works goes into them?

That's only the expensive top-end. Many excellent add-ons are half that price. If they were all that expensive, I wouldn't be flying or buying them - but I am buying good add-on aircraft regularly. Having said that, X-plane add-ons are more expensive than FSX/P3D in my experience - one of the reasons I uninstalled it.

I can only think of a couple of games I've paid full release price for in the last 5 years. I just wait for the sales.

Look, I've seen games like HellBlade: Senua's Sacrifice go at launch for 30$, half the price of an AAA title.

The game has incredibly impressive graphical fidelity.

I'd also like to note that the game got to their expected profit margins 3 months in advance.

Saying that graphical fidelity is the reason games cost more to develop, and thus cost more to us, is a moot point.
Nobody forces anyone to go to the graphical top end.
Art style is more important than graphics, any day, anyway.

Do note: Senua's Sacrifice used things like motion capture for facial animations and such.
Those are things we expect from games like Destiny, the game that cost the most to make, and gave you the least for what it cost to make.

There might be customers pushing for graphical fidelity, but I think the price range is really dependent on game length and engagement, not taking in replay value as a factor.

Senua's Sacrifice is a relatively short game. It's priced accordingly.

Witcher 3 is a gigantic game, with similar graphics, and a much smaller budget than most AAA games.
It is priced accordingly to its length and the engagement of playing it.

CD Projekt Red don't seem to be close to being bankrupt at any point in the next years.


Someone here presented the point that AAA games have to put in microtransactions, lootboxes and other such predatory practices to survive.

If we go towards lootboxes, then the point that lootboxes are needed for the games to make their money back is moot, as we saw clearly with BattleFront 2, when they took them out, and said, very explicitly, that it wouldn't impact whether the game netted profits or not. It only impacts how much profit they make.

You look at games like Shadow of War, where they explicitly said that they removed the lootboxes because it impeded the design structure of the game itself.

They called it a design oversight. If we translate from marketese, either the designers of these games are complete morons, or they designed the game in this predatory fashion on purpose, and are deciding to scapegoat themselves to keep us off of the company.


All of this, need I mention, is to please shareholders, whom have expectations of certain profit margins that impacts not the company, but their pockets lined by stock market manipulation.

Of course, I'll note here, microtransactions are okay.. In free games.


now of course, to go back on topic, the prices being brought up to 80$ for digital game downloads is another point of contention.

You see, the reason we were told retail games were at that price is that it's retail and you're paying for the box art, and having a physical copy.

This, I believe, is a great inflation of the actual manufacturing costs.

Now, we're at this price, when it's not even retail.
They're blaming publicity and marketing.

Publicity and marketing costs could be much, much lower than what these companies put into marketing.

I believe they're trying to see how far they can push the envelope before it snaps.

Doesn't CD Projekt Red own GOG of which they get 30% of every sale? That could be a good reason they can make games like The Witcher 3 without having to up the price an absurd amount.

I think $60 is fair to a degree - I have a few friends that worked for EA when I was out on the west coast about 10 years ago, the wage scale and hours are awful (of that there is no doubt) and unless you are a project lead, or someone else important it is just like regular work with the same daily headaches, overtime, etc.

Like any industry - there are people who are taking the lions share of profit, and everyone else is just trying to make a living. So while it would be nice to think that raising the price of games would mean higher wages for the average day-to-day developers (or periphery employees within the company) on any project - I think it would just mean more money into the executives pockets.

On top of that there are less physical production costs now - I mean most physical copies of games don't even include a basic manual anymore. Hell I bought the newest Mass Effect for PC from Bestbuy and there wasn't even a disc inside - it was just a leaflet with an Origin code.

I understand that what I am saying is anecdotal and conjecture - but I have worked in two major industries over the last 15 years and based on the stories I heard from my friends in the games industry and my own experience in both the consumer electronics and industrial MRO industries this is just SOP for any industry.

As someone who is just trying to make a living - the thought of a game doubling in price from $80 to $160 (CDN) would be enough to make me not buy games very often and likely never at full price. I mean I already usually wait for sales, and budget money for gaming (I spent pretty much my whole year's budget for gaming this year on the Rift, Virtual Rick-ality, Skyrim VR, Far Cry 5 and the SuperhotVR/Arizona Sunshine Bundle). In fact I probably spent a little into next years budget, lol - but that's okay because I think I will be busy for most of the year with Skyrim now.

I'm a mature gamer in my 40's and over the last few years i have noticed pc games price increase. Being old school means its rare that i ever pay that, there are alternatives..key websites, sales etc and i will will normally use them first, unless its a game i particularly want (1 or 2 titles per year at most) then i will grudgingly pay. But were talking rocking horse levels there.
Pc games were always cheaper than console, by at least a £10 for a new title, although that seems to be happening less and less now. I've never had any trouble buying form key websites, and developers will always want to charge the customer the maximum it can, that's business and i fully understand that, but people will always want pay the minimum....go figure! 

You make good points, Simon.  I remember back in the 'old days' the excuse for a high price was that they had to provide a manual and also a box etc of course, but the manual was often quoted - now, as you say, we're lucky if we get a couple to four pages, yet the games are not cheaper for it.

I can tell you that I used to be on a test team for an add-on product for a flight sim. That add-on is one of the most successful for the sim. The developer made a contract with a well-known publisher and there is a disc version and a download. They both sell at the same price (funny that - most of them have the same price, so how would they explain that?), yet for every sale of the £27.99 DVD the dev got a paltry 50p. This wasn't a simple add-on, either - development took years and I personally clocked up thousands of flight hours testing it.

Brixmis said:

You make good points, Simon.  I remember back in the 'old days' the excuse for a high price was that they had to provide a manual and also a box etc of course, but the manual was often quoted - now, as you say, we're lucky if we get a couple to four pages, yet the games are not cheaper for it.

I can tell you that I used to be on a test team for an add-on product for a flight sim. That add-on is one of the most successful for the sim. The developer made a contract with a well-known publisher and there is a disc version and a download. They both sell at the same price (funny that - most of them have the same price, so how would they explain that?), yet for every sale of the £27.99 DVD the dev got a paltry 50p. This wasn't a simple add-on, either - development took years and I personally clocked up thousands of flight hours testing it.

Yep - when you calculate in all the overhead that it takes to make any product it eats up the profit fairly fast. It would not surprise me that is all they were making off the physical copy.

I have released two physical albums in the last 10 years and am well aware of the costs associated to physically releasing something - and the more elaborate it is the more it costs. Our first CD was a four panel digipak with a custom die-cut to allow you to pull a rabbit out of the hat, based on the cost to record the album, make the artwork for it, get it printed put it around $9.1 per CD - and I sold them for $10 at shows, and even that was a hard sell (as mentioned in other threads - people don't buy music anymore and haven't really since Napster came around) so I still have most of the CDs boxed up. LOL

I wonder what they made on the digital downloads - assuming that they were selling on Steam or GOG, they lose 30% on each sale - but they should still be making decent profit after the overhead.

Alright, I want to make one point clear.

I'm not condoning piracy, but piracy is better than using key sites.

Here's a quote I found that explains why rather well:

"G2A is worse for 2 reasons:

1) You are rewarding and enabling people who defraud keys

2) When a chargeback is issued because of credit card fraud used to buy keys from a retailer, the chargeback hits the pocket of the developer/publisher to the tune of around $22 per chargeback. It can also mess with their credit rating.

The person who sold the dodgy key in the first place faces no repercussions.

The chain is like this:

Defrauded credit card > buy key > sell key on G2A > customer buys key > defrauded cc owner does charge back > dev pays ~$20 > customer probably loses key > key reseller keeps money.

What about piracy?

Sure, it may reduce overall sales, although the success of games available on GoG suggests that the overall effect has been massively overstated.

A pirated game does not necessarily equal a lost sale. A game bought on G2A marketplace does, plus the possibility of a charge back. A game bought on G2A's actual store means the devs/publisher get less money than they otherwise would have from your purchase and again, that money goes toward giving fraudulent key resellers a platform."

Ah, that's right, I had forgotten Steam's overhead fees.

Are they enough to equate the amounts normally paid for retail?

SimonSays28 said:

Brixmis said:

You make good points, Simon.  I remember back in the 'old days' the excuse for a high price was that they had to provide a manual and also a box etc of course, but the manual was often quoted - now, as you say, we're lucky if we get a couple to four pages, yet the games are not cheaper for it.

I can tell you that I used to be on a test team for an add-on product for a flight sim. That add-on is one of the most successful for the sim. The developer made a contract with a well-known publisher and there is a disc version and a download. They both sell at the same price (funny that - most of them have the same price, so how would they explain that?), yet for every sale of the £27.99 DVD the dev got a paltry 50p. This wasn't a simple add-on, either - development took years and I personally clocked up thousands of flight hours testing it.

Yep - when you calculate in all the overhead that it takes to make any product it eats up the profit fairly fast. It would not surprise me that is all they were making off the physical copy.

I have released two physical albums in the last 10 years and am well aware of the costs associated to physically releasing something - and the more elaborate it is the more it costs. Our first CD was a four panel digipak with a custom die-cut to allow you to pull a rabbit out of the hat, based on the cost to record the album, make the artwork for it, get it printed put it around $9.1 per CD - and I sold them for $10 at shows, and even that was a hard sell (as mentioned in other threads - people don't buy music anymore and haven't really since Napster came around) so I still have most of the CDs boxed up. LOL

I wonder what they made on the digital downloads - assuming that they were selling on Steam or GOG, they lose 30% on each sale - but they should still be making decent profit after the overhead.

That's right, I had made my own die-cut for business cards at one point. Since I had made the design myself, I didn't have a designer to pay.

But that's still 200$ for a die-cut. Don't even get me started on things like special foils.

I had to go with UV gloss after the fact. Still made a nice effect, but overall, I ended up paying 450$ for a pack of 250 business cards.

I still have most of them.

Still, the costs go down the more you produce in bulk, when it comes to printing on the press anyways. I don't know about CDs or DVDs. 

But let's be real. Those things are done in Mexico because they don't have to pay the employee's wages as high.

My god, and don't even get me started on tax evasion.