What's a reasonable price to pay for a game?

[Saren]

I don't like to pay more than $30. I wouldn't pay for a game without voice acting - I just think voices bring characters to life and help you get absorbed into the game world better. A commercial game without voices seems deprived somehow.
Of course I completely understand if developers charge more than that to cover the costs of production. If a game has very good reviews, I'm willing to pay more.

[ThreeOhFour]

I've paid for games without voice acting. Yes, even adventure games - Time Gentlemen Please and Super Jazz Man are both commercial AGS adventures without voice acting, both very much worth the money I spent on them and both voiceless. Voice acting is often nice, but also can be horrid and ruin a game.

As for cost, it totally depends on the game. Usually I hold out for specials or buy older games, but every now and then I'll find something that piques my interest and enthusiasm enough that I will pay much more for it than I would for a game that catches my attention in the normal "Oh, that looks interesting" way.

[Anian]

$60 is too much for my budget, so I wait special offers (Steam etc.)

I also like voice acting in games, mainly because I think it adds some value, gives a bit more depth and because I hate reading on the monitor.
On the other hand bad voice acting can do some damage to the overall impression. Especially when the budget is not for a triple AAA game, so no pro actors, no pro recording studio etc. But AAA games mess it up as well, more often than they should.

[ddq]

I buy big name titles and indie games and, really, voice acting isn't a huge factor. I've played lots of games with great voice acting, terrible voices, and no voices, so VA or lack thereof isn't a guarantee of quality for me. Lots of games do well with no dialog at all. I payed $15 for Braid and it would have been worse if the vague text box exposition were read aloud. When I first played the Marionette, it didn't have voices and I would gladly pay for such a great game. It getting a voice pack doesn't inflate its value in my mind since the story already impacted me without VA.

[m0ds]

Being a cheapskate, I only ever buy games from the bargain bin or ebay. Back when I first bought games through mail order the adventure games were generally on discount anyway. The most I've ever spent on a game was probably 19.99 for LBA2 or a similar price for Theme Park when it first came out. But I'm not really a game buyer anyway. 9.99 is a nice price and would tempt me, anything higher - I'm happy to wait til it drops in price, be that a couple of years or ten. I'm personally against game prices above £20, I think it's totally unfair for younger people to have to fork out so much money on something they're likely to complete in a few days. Luckily nowadays with Black Ops and so forth you have the online element, but you never used too - so I considered prices then to be a rip off.

50,000 units sold at 34.99 makes a company £1,749,500. I find that greedy. That 750,000 will easily pay for the development and the team, the extra million is likely to go on a pretty shitty sequel. They'd have made almost a million at 19.99 which is a significant difference for those of us who rarely have extra money to spend on things like games. Naturally indies are going to struggle to sell 50,000 units, so I can understand higher prices for indie games.

[GarageGothic]

Kids today should know how lucky they are - I remember spending about $100 of my savings on Codename: Iceman back in 1989. I wonder if the investment made me appreciate the game more than most people, but damn I got my money's worth of joy and frustration. I spent weeks navigating that fucking submarine between icebergs, avoiding depth charges and playing sadistic dice games.

Today? $20 seems like a fair price for most indie games.

[m0ds]

Haha yeah! The most expensive computer software I've ever bought was the Games Factory, which was £79.99, me and my mate went halfs. Then two weeks later the price was dropped to 39.99. And then no more than a year later it was free. That was the biggest mistake of my buying-stuff-for-computers career (namely because TGF was a pile of poo). Still, I hope your 100 bucks for Iceman was worth it 

[Ali]

I used to use the Games Factory all the time, though luckily I bought it just after the price-drop. It was horribly buggy but I did use it to make the first ever adventure game for my girlfriend (now sadly lost). I made her another one, so it's OK.

[blueskirt]

I wasted far too much time in my youth playing useless and swallow games. The damage is done but it had a couple of positive effects on my life, the first is I can now recognize games that tries to waste my time with swallow mechanics and skinner box and ignore them, the second being that I now find myself with a very long list of actually good games I missed while I was playing these swallow games, which means I never have to wait for new games to come out because I always have cheap old games to play, and while I'm busy playing them, the price of new games and hardware drops steadily.

The last time I paid more than 20 bucks for a game was 5 years ago, when Blood Money came out, because even if I'm busy playing old game, there's still new games I want to play ASAP. And now with Steam sales, I don't think I ever will pay more than 20.

[Kweepa]

50,000 units sold at 34.99 makes a company £1,749,500. I find that greedy. That 750,000 will easily pay for the development and the team, the extra million is likely to go on a pretty shitty sequel.

Hold on now. What sort of game are you talking about?

A decent game these days takes a team of about 30 working for 2 years.
An average developer salary might be 40k UKP. Studio costs are reckoned to be about the same again per person. So that's 80k x 30 x 2 = 4.8 million UKP. Then there are advertising costs and publisher overheads.

It's unlikely that a game that sells 50,000 will make any money for the publisher. They need sales of at least 500,000. The dev house will probably be ok since they are funded for development, unless they slip and miss several deadlines. But if the game doesn't sell well, the publisher may not be interested in another game deal.

Most games don't make any money. It's the big hits that keep the industry going. Hence the sequelitis and sorry state of innovation.

[Igor Hardy]

Most games don't make any money.

That's difficult to believe. Any hard evidence?

[m0ds]

50,000 units sold at 34.99 makes a company £1,749,500. I find that greedy. That 750,000 will easily pay for the development and the team, the extra million is likely to go on a pretty shitty sequel.

Hold on now. What sort of game are you talking about?

A decent game these days takes a team of about 30 working for 2 years.
An average developer salary might be 40k UKP. Studio costs are reckoned to be about the same again per person. So that's 80k x 30 x 2 = 4.8 million UKP. Then there are advertising costs and publisher overheads.

It's unlikely that a game that sells 50,000 will make any money for the publisher. They need sales of at least 500,000. The dev house will probably be ok since they are funded for development, unless they slip and miss several deadlines. But if the game doesn't sell well, the publisher may not be interested in another game deal.

Most games don't make any money. It's the big hits that keep the industry going. Hence the sequelitis and sorry state of innovation.

My bud just worked on dj hero 2. For 1 year. He's certainly not on 40k. Half that yes. I'd expect that game to sell at least 50 thou.

If games don't make much money and it's only the big hits that keep companies going, how do you explain Wadjet Eye? They manage to keep going. Whatever, commercial games companies with shop sales in the UK make millions. Why is it the COD publishers keep asking one of two different companies to bring out their latest sequel? To me it says they're obviously rolling in it and can afford to keep asking for alternative versions. It's like me asking Mike Doak to make Fatman 2 and also Ben304. Because I've got enough money to pay off the shitter one.

I used to use the Games Factory all the time, though luckily I bought it just after the price-drop. It was horribly buggy but I did use it to make the first ever adventure game for my girlfriend (now sadly lost). I made her another one, so it's OK.

Can't argue with that. Obviously, our misguided use of TGF led to fate bringing us together. You to make a game, me to ruin it with plinky plonky shit

TellTale seem to be doing well balancing commercial price with indie ones. An episode free is excellent, even if we can assume it's really just their version of "demo".

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Well, since Steve actually works in the industry I think he has a pretty fair idea of how it is -- and even if he didn't I would agree with his statements, though not necessarily for the same reasons.  I happen to think that the industry has become a bloated albatross much like Hollywood, where they've focus-grouped things to death and become so fixated on big budget no-fail games and zero-risk ventures that that's all anyone expects to see, so much so that anytime a more modest game is released, unless it has some really inventive gameplay or fills an emerging niche it becomes a commercial failure. 

Wadjet Eye is a different situation.  For one thing, Dave does not (and cannot) afford to pay the kinds of salaries he'd have to were he hiring some of the talent that Activision or EA employs, essentially limiting him to the types of games he's making now.  Secondly, he's catering essentially to what has become a niche market (adventure games) and, provided he does not run into too much competition, he can continue to produce games that will keep the company reasonably funded. 

Meanwhile, mainstream industry largely competes via sequels to hit games and games with frameworks that prove to be bestsellers.  It's not the 'ideal' way design games imho, but these companies are able to maintain a workforce and a profit by doing so and still occasionally produce something actually worthwhile to those of us who aren't part of their 'core' audience. 

I think the thing that bothers me most about the game industry are the so-called celebrity designers like Cliffy B and Dave Jaffe who overhype their roles and expect ridiculous salaries for them.

[ThreeOhFour]

Computer games have a lot of money spent on them.

Here are some numbers http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_game_costs

Some bigger figures: http://www.digitalbattle.com/2010/02/20/top-10-most-expensive-video-games-budgets-ever/

[kaputtnik]

Yup. Those numbers seem to show that developing video games is getting more expensive as the audience is getting more demanding and wants cinematic games and epic universes and whatnot - I fear that the video game industry might be going the same way the music industry went.

Innovation going down, profit margins going up, more people trying to get their share who are not in the slightest way contributing to the production (licensing agencies, marketing, corporate identity departments, market researchers, statistical evaluation groups, stock brokers, massive human resources departments, talent scouts...). So, like ProgZmax, I feel that the industry has become a ridiculously bloated behemoth where creativity is not the driving force anymore.

But - remember my music industry parallel - that's where angry indie game developers come in! They offer innovation, and they offer it cheap. And they will continue doing that until they have reached asignificant market share of, let's say 3%, and then they will gradually and happily be swallowed by the industry behemoths and start working enthusiastically on a project that never gets finished, that does not turn out like they wanted because of label restrictions and so forth...

On topic: I think 20â,¬ is my game threshold. I won't pay more under any circumstances, no matter how new the game is, how high the budget or how badly I want it. It's just not reasonable to pay more.

[mkennedy]

Anything more than 30 bucks is too much, unless it's a compilation with several titles. 5 bucks or less is best, but rarely do i get anything that cost more than 15 bucks. Some of the pricier items I bought, "Morrowind, Game of the Year" (Included both expansions) "Diablo 2, Battle chest" (Included expansion, hint book, and original Diablo  1!) and "Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Complete" each less than 30 bucks. Also bought the "Complete Ultima 7" and "Ultima Underworld series" for 15 bucks each. The profit can be estimated at the price of the game, times the number of copies you sell. The cheaper the price the more copies you sell, not sure what the optimum price is though though I imagine 15 bucks is the average I pay.

[Monsieur OUXX]

I read a PC video games magazine where they always take the price in account before giving a grade to a game. They compare:
- the quality/finish of the game
- the life expectancy of the game (are you going to finish it only once or are you still going to reinstall it in 5 years?)
- the expectations regarding potential (free) mods
- the expectations regarding (non-free) DLC or add-ons.

...And then they tell you if they price is robbery or if it's fair -- whatever the price is, low or high.

E.g. they can still call a cheap game a robbery because of a bad combination of the factors above. Or sometimes for an expensive game they tell you "Go for it! It's worth its price!". Sometimes they even say : "IT'll be worth it in 5 months when it goes 'discount'".

[Babar]

But don't most games follow the trend that they're super expensive when they come out (I remember seeing $60 for some just release console game), and slowly the price winds down, until they're all generally the same price ($20-$30?) except for ancients, or bargain games, which are cheaper?

I speak of in actual, physical stores, of course.

[Iliya]

Example: "Machinarium" is a hit this year. Amanita Design are selling it for 20$. They made 2 promotion dates one in August and one for this Christmas. Promotional price is 5$ (if I remember correctly). I think this is reasonable. "Machinarium" proves that adventure games are NOT dead!

[strangechicken]

Like most things, it depends what it is. For example, I bought the king's Question collections from VU for about 14, they're cheap thrown together compilations, where as I think i payed upwards of $40 for an original copy of Phantasmagoria 2 (which i regret for the record, M Night Shyamalan would even say "now, thats a fuckin stupid plot twist.") Really if it wasn't for some lovely gory deaths like the stapler bit, the whole thing is beyond awful. Unless you like to see a shit-ton of tits and BDSM than thats your game, if you like intelligent and clever or even remotely enjoyable stories, than your fishing in the wrong lake) but because of its so called "rarity" people jack u pthe prices, luckily i got Phant 1 for only avout $15 at a sale.

So another thing is it depends who's selling it, and how they sell it. Because some will sell it as "some old game" or yo uget the adverse "this is the rarest game in the world, Roberta William herself gave it to me, its the only copy, i once paid people $30 to see it and now i'm selling it to you for $40, rare, rare, rare game!"

I find he best way to do it is to look for modern day compilations which are designed to work on modern computers, they sell for pretty cheap like the Broken Sword Trilogy, and The VU Sierra compilatons. But most games I buy, at least modern ones, don't ever relaly peak about the $20 mark, i'd pay $30 for a decent adventure game, i'd pay more, but it'd have to be f***ing amazing. the Runaway series seems to be preety expencive in Australia, I've seen those games come in at about $70 on release, I usually wait for those games to come down and they usually do!

So I agree, it is around $20-$30 mark thats reasonable!