by Gavin Plumton

Created on: May 02, 2010   Last Updated: May 03, 2010

Video games prices seem like they have gone up every time you walk into a store. I remember being amazed when video game prices jumped from 40 dollars to 50. By the time I got around to commenting on that price jump, video games had already climbed to 60 dollars for a single game. Just think about that for a second. Just buying five games costs you 300 hundred dollars. That is an incredible amount of money to be paying for a rather small return. Sure, there are some games that you could argue are worth 60 dollars, but when every game costs 60, are they really worth it?

The gaming industry has been reporting profits for a long time now, and they even started out the rescession making profits, although they did eventually start taking losses. However, despite their incredible profits, you have to consider just how much it costs to make a game for a current gen console or PC. Consider that it takes a whole team of developers and artists to animate a single person walking across the screen. Games can cost many millions to produce, and in each game they have to push the graphics further and further along or they risk falling behind their competitors so the costs for making games just keep rising exponentially.

In stark contrast to that rise in the cost of both creating games and the cost to buy a game, are the consumers, the people who are actually buying the games. With the rescission just beginning to lighten, most gamers are not swimming in spare cash for games. To make matters even worse, piracy has continued to rise as a popular way of getting games without having to pay anything. Lots of people do still buy games, but many more are just downloading a game, and if they really like it, they will buy it, but otherwise they are done with it in a few days.

It is understandable that game companies would want to charge more since their costs are rising, but they also have to take into account just how much the consumer is willing to pay. With the lower income and possibility to simply download a game, they are being forced to use protection and Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes that only increase the cost further. To show an example, Atari’s new Assassin’s Creed 2 has a system where all save games are saved to a central server to force people to buy the game instead of pirate it, but this will force the game to cost even more to produce. It quickly becomes a spiral of ever increasing costs of improving both graphics and copy protections, which comes at an increase in shelf cost and a possible sacrifice of story and game play on the part of the game developers.

Given all this, I think it is safe to say that while games do cost too much, the problem is much more complex than that and that the only way to bring the cost of games down without sacrificing the game’s quality would require a cultural shift, and not just a change in the sticker price.

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