again, though - steam sells a LOT of games for significantly less than the $60 mark. those are always the big AAA titles - the ones also sold at gamestop and walmart for the same amount. and again i point out - there's likely good reasons (many of them legal) why a game can't be sold for less on a digital distributor than it can at a regular retailer.
Unless someone can find a legitimate source (that infographic doesn't cite points and the source article urls on the bottom are practically unreadable) as far as I know no one knows what Steam's cut is, everyone just assumes it's 30% because that's what Apple takes from the app store. But it makes no real sense to charge a flat rate to everybody since EA has a lot more negotiation leverage than some random indie dev and unlike Apple they don't just approve anything and everything that comes in.
In any case the best choice is to buy digitally direct from the publisher/developer when you can. Consider Minecraft, originally Notch was selling it via his own site through Paypal. The fees for paypal? 30 cents + 2.9% of the transaction fee. Even when you factor in the cost of bandwidth for sending out the game himself thats a far cry from the 30-to-whatever percent cut a major distributor is going to take.
I don't think the developer/publisher paradigm is going to change any time soon for AAA titles because like you said... someones gotta pay. I like to hope maybe indie devs will make it big and move into the AAA market but that seems unlikely and whats worse is usually if a studio proves itself on its own it'll just get bought out by a publisher and the cycle continues anyway...
there's likely good reasons (many of them legal) why a game can't be sold for less on a digital distributor than it can at a regular retailer.
If they're just legal reasons then they're not really "good" reasons at all. That just means that the customers are getting screwed... legally.
I'm sure you're right though. It's just probably a comfortable relationship between them to keep the price equal across all distribution methods. That way the publishers get a bigger cut from digital. Gamestop/Walmart still sells boxes. And, as usual, the ones that get shafted are the developers and customers.
i didn't mean good as in acceptable or beneficial to all involved..i just meant "good" as in if you were keyed into the details you'd understand why it's the common practice.
I dont think ive seen a game that wasnt a collectors edition over £40. Infact, i got the Dark souls collectors edition, with an artbook, cd and poster for £29 so i really have NO idea what shit youre talking.
It seems like its a PS3 thing mainly and thats not something i considered, then again you didnt specify either.
I dont know enough about money to really understand how currency or relative value works. Oh well, most games are closer to $80, hell... some are pretty similar.
I'm only paying attention to RRP. We're lucky that we have a price war going on thanks to new players in the games space (e.g. the big supermarkets), so it is usually possible to find most things a lot cheaper.
Unless the next generation of consoles double the current price on games we're still in a golden age of cheap video game entertainment at the cost of studio closures & layoffs.
No idea if it's any good but it looked to have a kinda cool story and I've not played any FPS properly since HL2 almost a decade ago... no doubt I'll generally just run around looking at everything to see how they made it
FPS are great if they have a good story I think... I tried Crysis 1 but it just felt a bit wishy washy for my tastes... it looks like they refined the story for 2 after getting the tech right in 1.
Crysis 3 looks horrible. AVP but without aliens or predators haha
I don't know - I do feel somewhat cheated when I put down £60-65 ($100) for a game to have it only last me for about three hours, and I'm still not overly keen when it's as little as five.
Rent it first, try a demo, read some reviews?
As said, it's this automatic expectation that a studio WILL do repeat good work, or the whole give-away extra pre-order culture that has people suckered into getting ripped off.
Buy games 6 months or a year later with all the extras for about £25, once all the bugs are fixed etc etc, and you also get a feeling from demos or a rental that it is the game for you.
There is no reason any one should get shafted these days if they don't want to be.
It's a good topic to discuss because each person is different and it's interesting, but falling for marketing tricks/hype is pretty easy to avoid.
Pre-order 'gifts', yeah... pre-order bribes more like. Buy the game early as a beta tester, struggle with an un-finished game that ruins the experience, all so you can have a different gun or a car with stripes on it. Great.
Agree with that. I've been buying games based on priority for a while now and I never feel cheated. It's as simple as not buying on launch day and waiting 2~6 months for most games. Only very special games like portal 2 that are 95%-sure awesome get a preorder. Everything else gets bought at €10 or €20. The waiting also forces/gives me time to think whether or not I want a certain game, read some reviews and so on.
By buying at a lower price, I can buy more games, while not having to trade in games (I never do trade-ins: gotta support fellow devs) and I almost always feel like it's worth the money (aside a few games I knew were bad but I got because of their legacy).
TL;DR: If you're not sure a game is worth it, wait.
The story was confusing. The cut-scenes just confused more a lot of the time.
The fighting was generally all very samey.
What did strike me though was how your brain fills in for missing gaps. We see this in reading a book. My memories of the story in the book are the images I painted with my mind, not the words on a page.
And this extends to playing games. Quake 1 in my head looks as good as Crysis 2 just has.
After 5 minutes the visuals 'quality level' disappear and you immerse yourself into the unfolding events irrespective of the appearance to a fair old extent.
What makes anything memorable (and that is what I think we derive most pleasure from, the memories rather than the instant gratification at the time) is the combined effect of all the stimulus, and that is visual, audio, immersion, emotion etc.
Crysis 2 delivers amazing visuals so all credits to the artists, but it rarely hit me on any other level.
Just a few parts really stick in my mind now, but were subsequently ruined.
Freeway with the APC... great fun to getting there and proceeding in the APC, but then it's abruptly ended with invincible enemies to make you get out of the APC and go by foot. Play that part three times till you realise they are invincible and it ruins it.
Why not just have a collapsed tunnel end so you CHOOSE to get out to proceed!?
Helicopter flying around the lab shooting you. It took me three attempts looking around to try get out of there till I realised you had to shoot the chopper to make it crash into the lab so you could get out. Doh!
It felt great getting into the lab and stuff, a great bit of action, ruined with another dumb story line process. Why no voice saying "shoot the chopper down" to make it really obvious?
Then that final fight. The trigger lines for events are easily avoided in some cases so you are running around wondering why the game won't end. In my view that is not acceptable in a modern game.
Ie, voices going 'hurry up' but you can wait 30mins and there are no consequences. Plenty of games in the past have punished in these cases. BUT, they have been clear so you know what you have to do, not running around trying to work out what you have missed so things will continue moving.
Crysis 2 feels less sand-boxed and more scripted along a very specific path than games that came a decade before it (HL2 for example)... worse still that a bit of running/jumping can get you around trigger lines.
Why not just see those different approaches and provide a different ending... it'd give the game replay value if you offered up different enemy configs by using different approach strategies. Ie, shoot enemies from a distance and that triggers enemies near your location, rather than shooting a load of AI that just stand around as you shoot them. Or how about creating a distraction, they leave their positions bar a few, so you can stealth attack and undertake the objective with minimal combat.
It just feels like an increasingly disproportionate amount of time is invested in visuals (no bad thing), but if they just spent a fraction more of that on the story, AI and scripting the games would be many factors better overall.
I have just as vivid memories of Quake 1 as I do of HL1 and HL2, Unreal, Hidden and Dangerous etc etc... they all look vastly different visually, but all 'look' the same looking back from an experience point of view.
So in my view the £25 easily covers the art work/rendering in this game. Amazing value in that regard. Just a shame that without the story clarity and cohesive game design to go with it that it all just feels a bit wasted.
I'd rather pay £40 for it and have it excellent across the board since the tangible assets in the game are good enough to tell a much more compelling story in my view!
Replies
In any case the best choice is to buy digitally direct from the publisher/developer when you can. Consider Minecraft, originally Notch was selling it via his own site through Paypal. The fees for paypal? 30 cents + 2.9% of the transaction fee. Even when you factor in the cost of bandwidth for sending out the game himself thats a far cry from the 30-to-whatever percent cut a major distributor is going to take.
I don't think the developer/publisher paradigm is going to change any time soon for AAA titles because like you said... someones gotta pay. I like to hope maybe indie devs will make it big and move into the AAA market but that seems unlikely and whats worse is usually if a studio proves itself on its own it'll just get bought out by a publisher and the cycle continues anyway...
If they're just legal reasons then they're not really "good" reasons at all. That just means that the customers are getting screwed... legally.
I'm sure you're right though. It's just probably a comfortable relationship between them to keep the price equal across all distribution methods. That way the publishers get a bigger cut from digital. Gamestop/Walmart still sells boxes. And, as usual, the ones that get shafted are the developers and customers.
The RRP for Ps3 games up until last year when some titles started to finally go down in this country is £54.99; some are more expensive. If you got them cheaper, then that's great for you, but I'm hardly 'talking shit'. Just take a look at Play's listing for pre-orders:
http://www.play.com/Games/Games/6-/Search.html?searchstring=&searchtype=&searchsource=2&searchfilters=ae212{647562}+c{362}+c{10065}+&ob=3
Dead or Alive 5's collectors edition is the most expensive thing going (game, artbook and soundtrack) at £69.99.
Rocksmith is £54.99 with an RRP of £64.99 - that's the game only, nothing extra. FIFA 13, Resident Evil 6, and Assassin's Creed 3 all RRP at £54.99.
I dont know enough about money to really understand how currency or relative value works. Oh well, most games are closer to $80, hell... some are pretty similar.
[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Assassins-Creed-III-Playstation-3/dp/B0050SXFKE/ref=sr_1_28?ie=UTF8&qid=1347274226&sr=8-28&keywords=ps3"]Amazon.com: Assassin's Creed III: Playstation 3: Video Games[/ame]
[ame="http://www.amazon.co.uk/UBI-Soft-Assassins-Creed-PS3/dp/B007BLPNJY/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1347275058&sr=8-7"]Assassin's Creed 3 (PS3): Amazon.co.uk: PC & Video Games[/ame]
Or should i only be paying attention to the RRP?
No idea if it's any good but it looked to have a kinda cool story and I've not played any FPS properly since HL2 almost a decade ago... no doubt I'll generally just run around looking at everything to see how they made it
FPS are great if they have a good story I think... I tried Crysis 1 but it just felt a bit wishy washy for my tastes... it looks like they refined the story for 2 after getting the tech right in 1.
Crysis 3 looks horrible. AVP but without aliens or predators haha
Can anyone say the word "original" any more?
Hmmm
Dave
Rent it first, try a demo, read some reviews?
As said, it's this automatic expectation that a studio WILL do repeat good work, or the whole give-away extra pre-order culture that has people suckered into getting ripped off.
Buy games 6 months or a year later with all the extras for about £25, once all the bugs are fixed etc etc, and you also get a feeling from demos or a rental that it is the game for you.
There is no reason any one should get shafted these days if they don't want to be.
It's a good topic to discuss because each person is different and it's interesting, but falling for marketing tricks/hype is pretty easy to avoid.
Pre-order 'gifts', yeah... pre-order bribes more like. Buy the game early as a beta tester, struggle with an un-finished game that ruins the experience, all so you can have a different gun or a car with stripes on it. Great.
Dave
By buying at a lower price, I can buy more games, while not having to trade in games (I never do trade-ins: gotta support fellow devs) and I almost always feel like it's worth the money (aside a few games I knew were bad but I got because of their legacy).
TL;DR: If you're not sure a game is worth it, wait.
The story was confusing. The cut-scenes just confused more a lot of the time.
The fighting was generally all very samey.
What did strike me though was how your brain fills in for missing gaps. We see this in reading a book. My memories of the story in the book are the images I painted with my mind, not the words on a page.
And this extends to playing games. Quake 1 in my head looks as good as Crysis 2 just has.
After 5 minutes the visuals 'quality level' disappear and you immerse yourself into the unfolding events irrespective of the appearance to a fair old extent.
What makes anything memorable (and that is what I think we derive most pleasure from, the memories rather than the instant gratification at the time) is the combined effect of all the stimulus, and that is visual, audio, immersion, emotion etc.
Crysis 2 delivers amazing visuals so all credits to the artists, but it rarely hit me on any other level.
Just a few parts really stick in my mind now, but were subsequently ruined.
Freeway with the APC... great fun to getting there and proceeding in the APC, but then it's abruptly ended with invincible enemies to make you get out of the APC and go by foot. Play that part three times till you realise they are invincible and it ruins it.
Why not just have a collapsed tunnel end so you CHOOSE to get out to proceed!?
Helicopter flying around the lab shooting you. It took me three attempts looking around to try get out of there till I realised you had to shoot the chopper to make it crash into the lab so you could get out. Doh!
It felt great getting into the lab and stuff, a great bit of action, ruined with another dumb story line process. Why no voice saying "shoot the chopper down" to make it really obvious?
Then that final fight. The trigger lines for events are easily avoided in some cases so you are running around wondering why the game won't end. In my view that is not acceptable in a modern game.
Ie, voices going 'hurry up' but you can wait 30mins and there are no consequences. Plenty of games in the past have punished in these cases. BUT, they have been clear so you know what you have to do, not running around trying to work out what you have missed so things will continue moving.
Crysis 2 feels less sand-boxed and more scripted along a very specific path than games that came a decade before it (HL2 for example)... worse still that a bit of running/jumping can get you around trigger lines.
Why not just see those different approaches and provide a different ending... it'd give the game replay value if you offered up different enemy configs by using different approach strategies. Ie, shoot enemies from a distance and that triggers enemies near your location, rather than shooting a load of AI that just stand around as you shoot them. Or how about creating a distraction, they leave their positions bar a few, so you can stealth attack and undertake the objective with minimal combat.
It just feels like an increasingly disproportionate amount of time is invested in visuals (no bad thing), but if they just spent a fraction more of that on the story, AI and scripting the games would be many factors better overall.
I have just as vivid memories of Quake 1 as I do of HL1 and HL2, Unreal, Hidden and Dangerous etc etc... they all look vastly different visually, but all 'look' the same looking back from an experience point of view.
So in my view the £25 easily covers the art work/rendering in this game. Amazing value in that regard. Just a shame that without the story clarity and cohesive game design to go with it that it all just feels a bit wasted.
I'd rather pay £40 for it and have it excellent across the board since the tangible assets in the game are good enough to tell a much more compelling story in my view!
Dave