Topic: Namco: 'We must change the price of games'

[idolminds]

Article

“I am convinced that in the future we must change the price of video games – they’re too expensive for the audience. With the cost of development and the retail margins, £40 ($60) is a fair price [to us], but for the consumer it is too much.

“From September to December there are three new blockbusters every week, and consumers just can’t afford to buy all that.

“A good price of a game should be around £20 – but for this price we can’t make a ten to 15-hour adventure. So for £20 we should offer consumers four to five hours of gameplay, then after that we can make additional money with DLC.”

Urg. The problem is we're already getting charged $60 for the 5 hour games and then DLC on top of that...so what the fuck?

[Pugnate]

All of these assholes are trying to act like saints... like they want to do us a favor. Fact is that DLC makes them drool with dollar signs in their heads.

[ScaryTooth]

Not to mention that by the time the DLC comes out, the core gameplay might have grown stale, and the DLC is always lame. Ohh, a new map!...where I can do the same shit that I can do on the other 8 maps..

[idolminds]

I was thinking about that, how a lot of big blockbuster expensive-to-make games are designed. Its major set piece after major set piece where the player moves from one to the next, but the underlying gameplay is kind of bland and repetitive. Gameplay needs to be more fun all by itself.

Its like HL2 and L4D. HL2 was the set piece model where I played to see the next cool moment but the actual gameplay wasn't particularly fun. L4D on the other hand is good not because of the levels and stuff themselves, but shooting hordes of zombies with 3 other people is fun all by itself!

[MysterD]

Forget DLC (episodic short content). DLC is only good when they package a bunch of it together and sell it together like the size of one big RPG expansion pack.

Bring back the old days of expansions. Bring back them $20-$30 expansion packs that gave me a substantial amount of content - see most RPG expansion packs, if you catch what I'm driving at here: 10-20 hours worth of NEW content here.

Not everything needs to be voice-acted, either. And we wonder why games cost so much to make and why companies like UbiSoft can't break even w/ AC2, even though it sold over 9 million copies... *shakes my head*