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by mbateman 4481 days ago
But there's no limit on fixed costs for games. Presumably production could cost as much as a Hollywood blockbuster and be priced accordingly. Marginal costs aren't always everything.
2 comments

Historically pricing a game too high hurts sales because many people have a limit of some sort on how much they can spend on games. If a single game costs a huge percentage of that (say 50 or 60%) they are reluctant to buy it even if it's well-reviewed because it might turn out to be bad, and then they have no more games budget left.

Games prices have actually come down compared to the bad old days of paying upwards of $90 for Super Nintendo carts, for example.

It is the case that production costs have been shown to be scalable; hundreds of millions go into developing a game like Bioshock: Infinite or the latest Call of Duty, and hundreds more go into marketing and sales. In practice, it is possible for a publisher to recoup that investment and earn more on top, even if it's really difficult.

Games are already priced much higher than hollywood blockbusters. To see a blockbuster in the theaters costs about $10 per person, to buy a AAA game on release date costs $60 or more. And it's not as though the market is rejecting these prices, GTA V made around a billion dollars in revenue within its first week of release, games are already some of the biggest entertainment launches in history.
GTA V is also a game that easily costs a dollar an hour for play. That's much less than $10 for 2 hours.

When looking at the price of games, you have to remember you're normally going to be spending much more time playing that game than you are watching a single ticket's worth of a movie.

A similar argument could be made for physical movie media vs movie tickets. You pay $30 for a dvd, sure; but, you and 5 of your friends can all sit down and watch that DVD in the comfort of your home. 3 years later, you can watch it again, and again. The cost per hour of that DVD can easily, if you're an avid, repeat movie watcher, drop down to the same price per hour that you're paying for a game.

On the other hand, if you're buying a modern FPS for the story only and hate multiplayer, then you're getting about 6 hours of play for $60; and that's about the cost of a movie.

Coincidentally, there are many story-based single player games that in practice (and IMHO deliberately) are just that - consumed like movies; where the pacing, player input, difficulty and choice-options are tweaked so that for the things that most players will do, they in fact get a reasonable action movie on their screen for those 6-10 hours.