Another primary reason games are a fast growing form of entertainment is their price per hour is much more affordable than other options. Rising prices will lead to reduced sales as the primary consumers of games are teens and 20 somethings. Neither have massive cash to spend. Need evidence, look at the music and movie industry, who’s primary consumers USED to be teens and 20 somethings until they priced themselves into the “once a month” category for those markets.

If anything prices of games should go down and with digital distribution right around the corner, it BETTER! The savings made by companies by no longer producing packaging, disc, materials, cost of shipping and percentages paid to retailers MUST be passed on to the consumer. If not, old school gamers will know that these companies do not care about us in general and are merely attempting to set an new market price for upcoming gamers who don’t understand how much a Nintendo cartridge (which cost more to make than CDs) used to be much cheaper than the new HALO coming out.

That $60 retail boxed game cost at MOST $3 for all packaging and printing. Going digital is not free since it still costs 13 cents a gig for quality bandwidth so now you are looking at .50 cents for a game versus $3.

There is a huge advantage which is the publisher does not have to pay up front but rather per copy sold so there is no inventory or horrible landfill ET-like situations. However, that is just reduced risk, better cashflow and better logistics not actual reduced costs directly.

The biggest reason for increased pricing is the growing official used market. 50%+ of Gamestop/EB Games/Game revenue is used. They won’t even let you buy new without asking if you want to buy used. Every retailer is getting in on this action. It is a chicken and egg kind of problem though. If games could afford to be priced at $20 like a DVD/Blueray, I believe more people would just choose new. Publishers and developers do not see a single penny from used games. YES, Gamestop says that money goes to another new games but not always. I see a lot of people just buy a bunch of other used games. Games ARE too expensive hence why there is a thriving used market but it is also harming the industry big time.

It also does not help that the market is fragmented into various consoles and PCs unlike film that can be viewed on various platforms and for the most part has a single standard but that is another story . . . . hard to call games mainstream until the market has one standard ala DVD or Blueray for playback.

Flying to Germany to drive a borrowed Ferrari 250 LM for an hour or two at the ‘Ring sounds like fun to me and would seem “worth it” to me. I don’t think means the price of a typical PC game should go up.

On a related note, when will the cost savings of digital distribution be passed to the consumer? That PDF manual on disk… that was supposed to shave a few sheckles off production costs over a having a printed manual. When will that be reflected in game pricing?

It’s tough when I pay $20 for a movie, only to go out and spend $60 on a video game. Sure the movie is cheaper, but it doesnt provide the same type of value.

Just simply torn….

Living on Europe i cant really say anything about the price situation in America.

But i would have to pay an average ~ 330 $ + to buy an ps3 slim 120gb, i actually dont really have access to demos via the psn store.(had to create a fake us-account)

you should include the development of offering pricy DLC-content.( ie. bad company with only like 3 different game modes [ kinda boring after awhile ) and then they release a dlc package with a new game-mode for about 14 $)

14$ may not be much, but after you’ve arleady spent 60 $ for a game i want to have at least access to a lacking game-mode