Re: You can change ONE trend in the videogame industry...
Posted: Wed Apr 16, 2014 9:23 pm
I guess it's also worth mentioning that I buy many more games than I actually play. That's definitely understandable with bundles, but there have certainly been times when I've bought single games that had a good sale, figuring I might get around to playing them at some point. Now I have so many on Steam, GOG, etc. that I don't see how I would ever play them all.matt wrote:While I think that is true to some extent, I don't think that's really the case overall. Gamers have a limited amount of time, so I don't they really will buy THAT many more games to make up for the low prices. Look at the iOS market for example. They have super low prices, but people still aren't buying that many games. The race to the bottom just forced devs to turn to F2P or super mass market appeal. :-/I guess the win/win for developers and gamers is if cheaper games just make people buy more, so we get more games without the total money going to the industry going down.
Also, with the shift to digital distribution, the marginal cost of each additional copy of a game is near zero, so that alone allows for lower prices.
Of course, none of this is to say that there isn't a race to the bottom hurting developers, and I agree that it looks more like that on mobile than on PC. But they are countervailing factors.