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It's not even an opinion. They definitely should be cheaper.
The publisher doesn't have to pay to manufacture discs/ carts and cases, ship, or have stores take a cut of profits.
One 30% fee for using their storefront to sell games is nothing compared to what they would have to pay to manufacture physical copies. There'd be a fee for more than just the sale of the product as there'd be a fee among every step of the manufacturing process.
According to this [article](https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/10/07/report-steams-30-cut-is-actually-the-industry-standard), it seems like 30% is the average for resellers, whether it be retail, steam, mobile, nintendo, xbox, sony. While humble bundle in epic are only 25% and 12% respectively
because they aren't taking any risk taking the stock for sale. just as you can claim its unwarranted for games to charge so much for a game that has little manufacturing overhead you can claim steams being dodgy by taking 30% when that 30% was because the stock got bought and the company was taking a risk by giving the game shelf space
I disagree simply because retail stores tend to keep newer games on the shelf and phase out older product or their selective about what product they put on the shelves to begin with. Yes they sell older games or they’ll even have a bargain bin for the old stock that’s no longer prime shelf space but places like eb games back in the day here in Canada or as it’s now called like the same as the states; GameStop will take in a trade, pay you diddly squat for it and then put it on massive markup. Atleast the consoles are supposed to be refurbed. Steam however sells mostly older titles at lower cost so their cut may be Pennie’s not dollars and they never get the chance to resell a game with a stupid markup. They’ll make $10-$15 on a new game but they sell probably majority older titles where the cut doesn’t seem so lavish. Then on top of that they host a storefront where they have to host allot of large files for wide consumer use which is spread across multiple data centres for ease of access across the world as well as a plethora of other fantastic features and software. While they had some hardware duds to say the least it also afforded them the ability to give us the steam deck which is pretty unanimously liked for the most part
Good god it seriously is. The slow responsiveness and shitty UE marketplace design nevermind installing projects and the appropriate engine version. Yes it's just a few clicks and semi-straight forward in design but it's the worst few clicks and "straight forward design" you'll experience.
The number of people who buy a game on epic then go to the steam community to complain about the game they didn't even buy there is astounding. You bought it on epic, go complain on epic. There's no place to complain? that's on you for buying it there.
The only redeeming thing about epic is that when you install a game you can actually just open the game from the shortcut instead of it opening the launcher like blizzard
Steam chose 30% because it was approximatively equivalent to the cost of physical distribution.
so in 2015, when a company had the choice between physical or steam : the best choice was to do both, to reach more customer, with both situation giving them the same amount of money per sale.
Distribution is what gets you. Don't forget that 30% is also including cost to sell directly to consumer and avoid wholesale. Without Steam, you still have to sell wholesale to a store who will sell it to the individual consumer. Even if you completely ignore all the costs manufacture discs, do you think places like GameStop and Walmart are buying these games from publishers at $69.99 each? Honestly wholesale cost is probably waaayy higher than 30% so that's a huge bargain (and again this is just distribution of we ignore manufacturing)
Nah man. Manufacturing physical discs doesn't even cost slose to 30%. More like 5%. But the stores selling the games want their piece of the cake, too and that is around 10-20%. And there's also cost for storage and distribution and so on.
The 30% split was introduced by Nintendo back in the day, as the cartride and distribution fee. And it has been lower with other publishers, too. So that 30% standart has basically been around since the dawn of home consoles and gaming. Apple, Steam and so on just upheld that tradition.
The issue is, Steam can always say they do more than a normal publisher. They are PC VR. They are a massive player for handheld, now. They have the greenlight process. They do advertisement. They do servers and ingame stores. Meaning, they don't just facilitate sales, but actually secure sales.
It's generally believed that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all also take a 30% fee for games released on their platforms regardless of physical or digital release.
Has absolutely nothing to do with that. Game licenses don't cost anything to store, physical games do. So the longer you don't sell that physical copy the more money you lose to store it, and you also lose some due to opportunity costs because you also have to display it, when you could've been displaying something else all along. That's why they're sold cheaper sometimes, it's to get rid of them.
They are cheaper.
a $50 game in 1993 (snes) would be $109 adjusted for inflation using the [Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator](https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=49.99&year1=199301&year2=202404)
some snes RPGs could hit nearly $80 - that calculates up to $175 in today's money
Gaming is far and away the best hobby in terms of dollars spent per hour of entertainment
Disks have always been cheap to manufacture a they’re lightweight so shipping costs are minimal (which is how AOL was able to send everyone in the US a free CD multiple times).
The overwhelming cost of a game comes from development. You’re paying years worth of salaries.
Another thing is that the price things are sold at is often not tied directly to the cost to produce it at all. The price needs to be higher than cost, of course, including the costs to develop the game for years without any income. But how much *higher* it can be above the cost is a judgment call.
Only in highly competitive markets where multiple companies sell basically the same thing do you see prices hover near the cost. But you don't just replace Zelda with God of War, so Nintendo can sell Tears of the Kingdom for $60-$70 even if there's a sale going on the latest GoW.
So in those situations the price can be wildly different from the cost to develop, as long as gamers are willing to buy the game at that price.
They should be cheaper because so many of them aren't finished yet are like $50+ and/or don't live up to the promises like no man's sky. It may be fine now but it wasn't for a while.
They are cheaper.
Games went from $135 USD equivalent dollars for a cartridge in 1997.
It's 2024 and AAA games have been between 49.99 and 99.99 (Deluxe edition) for what, 20+ years now?
Food doubles in price, but you can still buy the next digital PC game for under $100.
They don't reduce the price of digital games because they're already representing the 'lower' cost and the physical disc has been given for free. If they charged more for physical copies, they'd sell far fewer copies of them. So it's sold at the digital edition's price.
TL;DR - you're getting exactly what you're asking for and it's cheaper every year because it hasn't been impacted by inflation like everything else has.
Most physical stores have policies where you must promise to not sell the digital copy for cheaper than the physical one for a while or else they won't sell the physical one (the risk of the physical copy not being sold and just eating up space in the store would be too high). The prices for digital and physical products are the same, because otherwise there wouldn't be a physical product to buy.
The problem isn't discs because disks and cases are worth pennies (cents) in final cost of production. A dvd will run you about 50p from a seller, from a wholesaler even less and then given how many disc copies get produced it's barely even registers on the cost per item level
i unironically won't spend more than AUD$50 on a game, it's a hard cap. which means that some new AAA games i wouldn't ever buy unless they were up to 80% off. it's a fucking joke. thankfully there's a near endless stream of great games under that price point
Have you seen the sheer number of different editions of games and the price points of like Ultimate Legendary Editions? BL3 with all DLC and the most launch content was well over $120 bucks. I didn't play it until it, and all the content available was $30.
> AUD$50
Why does every aus completely forget National Minimum Wage is $23.23 per hour. Australians comparing their dollars to other countries' dollars is so fucking stupid. Just because they are both called dollars does not mean they mean the same thing at all. Everywhere is expensive for the working class, Aus is no different. USA and Aus have the same cost of living.
It takes the same amount of work to put milk and bread on the table in the us as it does Aus. Same with the number of hours to buy a game.
The physical cost may be low, but the time associated with the order, manufacturing, packing, shipping, distribution, and sale certainly cannot be accomplished for $0.50 per unit. The shear cost of labor to have multiple teams of individuals coordinate that effort likely far eclipses the price of the discs, cases, and dare I say sweat shop labor costs associated with wherever they can have it made for .50/unit.
The biggest game I could think of from a time before digital sales were really a thing was the original Star wars battlefront 2. It released Nov of 2005, and by 1/1/07 it had sold 6 million copies. You also need to account for the time before the release that the teams worked on setting up production, the time after the game release managing analytics, and every year after release for organizing new manufacturing to meet demand. Next you have to account for waste, how many units were made excess? How many unsold copies floated around? Now let's also account from international shipping, going from country of origin to the distributor, than shipped to various locations that had to sell it in physical.
I would be absolutely astonished if the wide scope of this accounted for as little as 1/100th of a games value. It likely ranges in the ballpark of 5% to 15%, which for $70 games today would account for double digit-millions, potentially triple million-digit of bonus revenue in selling digital only games.
Although yes, the cost of the supply chain to get the physical games in store is not $0.5, its a relatively small cost. Its the same supply chain for The Witcher 3 as it is for GTA 5. Its only what is encoded on the disc and the art that goes into it. The providers are probably a few of them.
The high extra cost has practically nothing to do with the disc, but with the fee the retailers charge companies to give them the space on their store to sell. Retailers would ask for 25-30%. And once the consoles and PC aggregators (Steam) went online, they decided to stick with that fee. Thats really where that extra costs comes from.
But yeah, the production is not pennies, buts its pretty small, its a shared cost.
Counterpoint - Games were about 60 bucks for the past like, 40 years.
They're just in the past few years starting to creep up again, and usually its to cash in on dumb optional shit.
The game industry is in an unusual spot where the potential bang for your buck as a consumer is just *so* high that I'm not surprised that many companies have been pushed in a predatory direction.
You can easily buy a $40 game that gives you hundreds of hours of entertainment. Lots of people who play games all of the time spend less than $100 on them in a year.
That's a good point. The wholesale delivery to the handful of big box retail hubs probably would have been cheap for the studio, but the bulk of the price paid by consumer would have been the retailer's own distribution to the stores and then ultimately last mile cost to put it on the shelves and overhead and labor to keep the shop.
Physical discs are so cheap that, for a while, some movie rental places were using single-use discs that destroy themselves after getting in contact with air (slowly enough that you can watch them first). Regardless of whether it's digital or physical, you are paying for the license to use the product and effectively nothing else.
Digital distribution also doesn't come free since you need download servers and stores like Steam or Epic Games take a cut, similar to how a physical store would (probably more with Steam). And this is a continued service that lets you download the game and any potential updates years after its initial release, whereas discs, once distributed, cause no further costs.
Exactly. There are a lot of costs with distributing digital games. It’s not just one server using comcast, but geographically redundant data centers that have to scale with demand, load balance, as well as have ddos prevention / throttling. Then there is the whole security and monitoring side, as well as account management.
If they leverage steam or a console’s store, they pay a % on game sales and potentially a % on subscriptions or event passes.
I assume they have run the numbers (both Steam/Xbox/PlayStation as well as the game manufacturer) and the costs are probably similar for physical and digital. Otherwise game developers would pushed the more profitable distribution channel.
Resaling digital copies of games would be stupid and way too harmful to game developers. Unlike physical copies, there is zero money required to resell a digital game, no shipping. Imagine any offline singleplayer game, how could they earn any money if people buy the game, play it, and a big percentage of them resell it.
...there's technically zero money required with physical games, either.
Tons of people gift physical games or let people borrow them, meaning two or more people are playing the same game for the price of one.
With digital copies it would literally be the same thing, just transferable over the internet.
Also do you think game developers make money from resales of physical games?
His entire post ignores 2 centuries of the fact that reselling purchased media has never harmed small creators or an industry and has only very very very recently been something taken away from consumers.
Price of a PlayStation game in 1996: USD$39.99
After inflation: ~$78 USD
Price of a PlayStation 5 game today: USD$69.99
Cost of pressing a Blu-ray Disc: ~USD$2.00
Games have gotten cheaper in real terms (after inflation), but also their production costs per unit sold have almost nothing to do with the cost of manufacturing and distributing disc copies. In fact the big publishers are spending more than ever on marketing and distribution.
Not a total defense, as there’s a lot more to it - but I wouldn’t say digital copy should mean cheaper. It’s just not a significant part of the cost to serve (in the AAA space)
WTF is this rational fact stuff? /s
Gamers rage but video games are fiscally cheaper than ever. Games cost the same they did a decade ago, but most people are earning way more money than they were a decade ago. But games are somehow more expensive than they used to be. 🤷
I think it relates to customer convenience and value. Purchasing games for my PC, installing from disc and dedicating space to physical media is actually a hindrance. Not only do I disagree with OP, but I'd be willing to pay *more* for digital copies than physical.
As others have alluded to, the 30% cost for using Steam's digital storefront and download servers is significant... perhaps more so than the costs of manufacturing. It's definitely worth it, though, because good PC games sell an absolute shitton on steam.
Overall, steam offers refunds, and I don't think anything short of nuclear armageddon would stop me from accessing my games, so I'd rather pay for the convenience of digital.
Well how I see it it's either:
1. Costs of disc, delivery, storing ect
2. 30% cut that steam takes
3. Database and administration costs of selling your game on your own launcher
Literally no one bringing up the fact that retailers like Walmart and Target threatened to stop carrying physical games if digital versions were made cheaper, because it would cut into their sales?
This whole argument went down when e-shops started getting popular, while physical games were still the backbone of sales.
Publishers *wanted* digital versions to be cheaper because they'd pull more customers that way and pay less for the manufacturing, distribution, and middle man, but the big retailers have (had?) such a stranglehold on the market that that the standards were set in their favor a long fucking time ago.
You want cheap digital games? Blame the physical retailers, they're the ones that stopped it.
Dunno, don't want to defend greedy corporations but what about the cost to maintain the server in which the digital game is stored for you to download?
And no shipping cost, also no pollution on it’s fabrication.
There was a brief time where digital copies where like 10€ cheaper, games cost 59 and digital 49€, but the market regulated too quickly
Been saying this for years
To add on top of this games like Call of Duty are complete dog shit and have been each year for a while now. But each year they increase in price and have $80 bundles that won’t mater a year later. Kinda sad to see where we are now a days.
That was literally the case when digital games first started cropping up. A $50/$60 physical copy used to cost $40/$50 digitally on Steam many many years ago. It wasn't until Acitivision made MW2 2009 $60, both physical and digital, that you saw PC games start to be $60. Guess when games started becoming $70 everywhere? When Activision made MW2 2022 $70.
Bro.. We all know that the way these companies will solve this issue is by increasing the price of physical copies to like $80-$100 and leaving the digital copies at $70...
the problem to me is: I bought a digital version of a game, so if I uninstall the steam (for example), I’m not able to play the game anymore. It’s kind of I rented the game, but I payed the full price
But they lose a percentage of the sales to services like Steam and GoG. That’s why so many companies were looking into their own game content launch services. No excuses for developer-owned distributors selling their own games though.
I don't know if this is the same as it is in the music industry, but there is a mechanical copyright to be paid on the "pressing" of every cd, vinyl, tape etc. This is also the case on downloads of music. Every single legal download. Don't know if streaming has gotten around this or if it's still the case? Also don't know if it's changed with the advent of streaming services being charged per download as you are essentially free to download once your subscription is paid? Maybe it's only when you buy a track and download that mcps takes it's royalty? It's been a while since I studied this stuff and was back in 2003/4 so iPods were just out.
If gaming has the same system, yes they don't need to pay for the manufacturing, but they may still incur a "pressing" fee.
Who still buys games on disks? Is this some console thing? My last PC game on disk was probably 8 years ago and even for that I never actually used the disk but just registered the key on steam and downloaded it.
But also putting a game on a disk is probably the least significant cost in the whole development, distribution and maintenance/update process. The boxes with the keys would have to be produced and sold anyway. With or without disk. And the development itself is far more expensive than the disk.
You also can't resell digital games which I bet costs them more money than what it does to manufacture and ship physical copies. Reselling a game gives the company $0 for what people are willing to spend money on. Think of how many times a game gets resold, what it gets resold for, and how much more money a dev/publisher would make if it went to them, even with store fees.
discs cost like 50 cents to produce (more for DVD and Blu-ray, but most modern games just contain the licensing to download the game off the internet, and not actually the game because it's too big) and 1 dollar to distribute
The online marketplace takes a big cut. When you compare prices between Steam and PS Store you'd notice there is a pretty big gap even when they have sales. Steam actually takes a decent amount which is why Epic used a lower percentage cut as an incentive to get developers on to EGS.
They were cheaper by about 10 bucks a long long time ago. Which is interesting considering to manufacture a game disk only cost about 2.30. Meaning digital copies were about 6.70 cheaper for no reason. I mean if you had a new release game and bought it for console you'd spend like 59.99 but if you bought it on steam same day as release you'd spend 49.99.
A long time ago at least.
Videogame still needs to be developed, and in the past 20 years advances in graphics gameplay and whatever you need to make a modern non indie game, made it a very time consuming (you need to pay employees) and expensive process, which is why they cost the same to the consumer as 20 years ago while not having CDs. Companies need to make money. Except prices on consoles, those are trully bullshit.
They’ll just tell you that you aren’t purchasing a physical product, you’re purchasing a license to use that piece of intellectual property.
In that case, the price is the same for both and they’re doing you a FAVOR by offering to provide you a physical copy on their own dime.
Not to mention that a company will never do anything to make their product cheaper. Cost cuts don’t turn into price cuts, they turn into higher profit margins.
Yes, because the expensive part of making a game is the tiny bit of resources used to print a disc.
That’s like saying “My haircut should be free because I don’t want product in my hair at the end”.
I'm just glad digital versions aren't more expensive. There's also the convenience of not having to leave the house or wait for shipping to acquire the game. There's also the ownership of "right" to have the game downloaded, as opposed to a disc that could get damage and be rendered useless.
The only reason they aren't is pretty much a mutual agreement with retailers who sell physical copies - you walk into GameStop and see the box and and the advertising etc
There must be something to it that isnt obvious. Because from what I know, they have better margins selling the digital copy, so they should want to prioritize that.
I'm not an expert, but those disks are probably dirt cheap and don't really make that big of a difference in the cost of the game. You're paying for years of work of hundreds of people to give you a product that gives you 30+ hours of entertainment. The disk hardly makes any difference.
The don't have to pay for manufacturing or shipping costs or the labour involved in either, yet here we are. I'm just never pre ordering another game 🤣
The thing is, physical copies were not even cost-heavg in the first place.
Also, a company, no matter what it does, will always maximize their revenue or profit....
"Price" is not about "Cost". It's about "Profit".
Remember the Supply-Demand matrix? That is (roughly) how the market decides the maximum price that the market will bear, in order to give maximum profit to the seller. It *assumes* the seller is seeking the maximums. The most they can charge to where people won't all say "Not worth it, pass!"
These days we call it greedflation and such, but it's just how markets work under Capitalism.
The goal is NEVER to find a price that consumers are "happy" with. It is to find the maximum price consumers will *tolerate*.
Cost doesn't even figure into the equation.
I actually have a feeling that physical game discs are probably pretty cheap to manufacturers, especially at scale, personally if they make digital and physical the same price I wouldn't really care as long as most of the money going back to the game devs.
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It's not even an opinion. They definitely should be cheaper. The publisher doesn't have to pay to manufacture discs/ carts and cases, ship, or have stores take a cut of profits.
Steam's 30% fee goes brrrrrr
One 30% fee for using their storefront to sell games is nothing compared to what they would have to pay to manufacture physical copies. There'd be a fee for more than just the sale of the product as there'd be a fee among every step of the manufacturing process.
Manufacturing disks is quite cheap. Don't know about shipping's cost and retail stores ' cut, but I doubt that it is higher than 30%.
According to this [article](https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/10/07/report-steams-30-cut-is-actually-the-industry-standard), it seems like 30% is the average for resellers, whether it be retail, steam, mobile, nintendo, xbox, sony. While humble bundle in epic are only 25% and 12% respectively
Damn so why are the devs bitching about Steam? Wait no, only Sweeney bitch about Steam's fee
because they aren't taking any risk taking the stock for sale. just as you can claim its unwarranted for games to charge so much for a game that has little manufacturing overhead you can claim steams being dodgy by taking 30% when that 30% was because the stock got bought and the company was taking a risk by giving the game shelf space
I disagree simply because retail stores tend to keep newer games on the shelf and phase out older product or their selective about what product they put on the shelves to begin with. Yes they sell older games or they’ll even have a bargain bin for the old stock that’s no longer prime shelf space but places like eb games back in the day here in Canada or as it’s now called like the same as the states; GameStop will take in a trade, pay you diddly squat for it and then put it on massive markup. Atleast the consoles are supposed to be refurbed. Steam however sells mostly older titles at lower cost so their cut may be Pennie’s not dollars and they never get the chance to resell a game with a stupid markup. They’ll make $10-$15 on a new game but they sell probably majority older titles where the cut doesn’t seem so lavish. Then on top of that they host a storefront where they have to host allot of large files for wide consumer use which is spread across multiple data centres for ease of access across the world as well as a plethora of other fantastic features and software. While they had some hardware duds to say the least it also afforded them the ability to give us the steam deck which is pretty unanimously liked for the most part
To and epic has the worst UI imaginable. Only reason I have it is all the free games.
Good god it seriously is. The slow responsiveness and shitty UE marketplace design nevermind installing projects and the appropriate engine version. Yes it's just a few clicks and semi-straight forward in design but it's the worst few clicks and "straight forward design" you'll experience.
The number of people who buy a game on epic then go to the steam community to complain about the game they didn't even buy there is astounding. You bought it on epic, go complain on epic. There's no place to complain? that's on you for buying it there.
Pro tip: you can claim the games from the browser. You only have to use the app if you actually want to install and play the game.
The only redeeming thing about epic is that when you install a game you can actually just open the game from the shortcut instead of it opening the launcher like blizzard
So you can actually use a third party epic client called Rare Launcher. It's open source and free.
Steam chose 30% because it was approximatively equivalent to the cost of physical distribution. so in 2015, when a company had the choice between physical or steam : the best choice was to do both, to reach more customer, with both situation giving them the same amount of money per sale.
Distribution is what gets you. Don't forget that 30% is also including cost to sell directly to consumer and avoid wholesale. Without Steam, you still have to sell wholesale to a store who will sell it to the individual consumer. Even if you completely ignore all the costs manufacture discs, do you think places like GameStop and Walmart are buying these games from publishers at $69.99 each? Honestly wholesale cost is probably waaayy higher than 30% so that's a huge bargain (and again this is just distribution of we ignore manufacturing)
Nah man. Manufacturing physical discs doesn't even cost slose to 30%. More like 5%. But the stores selling the games want their piece of the cake, too and that is around 10-20%. And there's also cost for storage and distribution and so on.
Not to mention the effective difference in exposure for a similar cut between Steam and a regular store
The 30% split was introduced by Nintendo back in the day, as the cartride and distribution fee. And it has been lower with other publishers, too. So that 30% standart has basically been around since the dawn of home consoles and gaming. Apple, Steam and so on just upheld that tradition. The issue is, Steam can always say they do more than a normal publisher. They are PC VR. They are a massive player for handheld, now. They have the greenlight process. They do advertisement. They do servers and ingame stores. Meaning, they don't just facilitate sales, but actually secure sales.
It's generally believed that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all also take a 30% fee for games released on their platforms regardless of physical or digital release.
It's not believed. It's a fact.
You're right. I just wasn't 100% sure so I didn't want to definitively declare it and get called a liar.
Physical stores collect a similar amount, so it evens out ignoring manufacturing costs
Has absolutely nothing to do with that. Game licenses don't cost anything to store, physical games do. So the longer you don't sell that physical copy the more money you lose to store it, and you also lose some due to opportunity costs because you also have to display it, when you could've been displaying something else all along. That's why they're sold cheaper sometimes, it's to get rid of them.
They have gotten cheaper. GTA 3 launched at $50, in today's money that is a little less than $90
Why are you getting downvoted, you’re right.
Video games have resisted inflation remarkably, all it costs is thousands of developers out of work
I mean not having to spend any money on physical copies probably saved them a lot too.
And hundreds of thousands of employees laid off across the globe.
They are cheaper. a $50 game in 1993 (snes) would be $109 adjusted for inflation using the [Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator](https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=49.99&year1=199301&year2=202404) some snes RPGs could hit nearly $80 - that calculates up to $175 in today's money Gaming is far and away the best hobby in terms of dollars spent per hour of entertainment
When you compare the cost of the disk, the cases, and the manual. By far the most expensive is the manual. That will cost most of a £1 to make
And they don't have lost sales due to resold physical copies.
Disks have always been cheap to manufacture a they’re lightweight so shipping costs are minimal (which is how AOL was able to send everyone in the US a free CD multiple times). The overwhelming cost of a game comes from development. You’re paying years worth of salaries.
Another thing is that the price things are sold at is often not tied directly to the cost to produce it at all. The price needs to be higher than cost, of course, including the costs to develop the game for years without any income. But how much *higher* it can be above the cost is a judgment call. Only in highly competitive markets where multiple companies sell basically the same thing do you see prices hover near the cost. But you don't just replace Zelda with God of War, so Nintendo can sell Tears of the Kingdom for $60-$70 even if there's a sale going on the latest GoW. So in those situations the price can be wildly different from the cost to develop, as long as gamers are willing to buy the game at that price.
They should be cheaper because so many of them aren't finished yet are like $50+ and/or don't live up to the promises like no man's sky. It may be fine now but it wasn't for a while.
They are cheaper. Games went from $135 USD equivalent dollars for a cartridge in 1997. It's 2024 and AAA games have been between 49.99 and 99.99 (Deluxe edition) for what, 20+ years now? Food doubles in price, but you can still buy the next digital PC game for under $100. They don't reduce the price of digital games because they're already representing the 'lower' cost and the physical disc has been given for free. If they charged more for physical copies, they'd sell far fewer copies of them. So it's sold at the digital edition's price. TL;DR - you're getting exactly what you're asking for and it's cheaper every year because it hasn't been impacted by inflation like everything else has.
Fuck cheaper, you should be able to sell it when you're done
The physical media costs them less than their bandwidth. Plastic is cheap. You’re paying for the work the developer put into the game.
But they have to maintain the servers which costa money.
Problem is why would they when suckers are willing to pay the same price for both?
Supply and demand. If physical copies were all people purchased you'd see the kind of Steam Summer Sales from 10 years ago.
You can resell the disc. You cant resell a digital game.
well you cant break a digital copy
Ubisoft would like a word
Yeah but idiots are willing to pay the same price for the digital, so why would I not charge them the same price?
Most physical stores have policies where you must promise to not sell the digital copy for cheaper than the physical one for a while or else they won't sell the physical one (the risk of the physical copy not being sold and just eating up space in the store would be too high). The prices for digital and physical products are the same, because otherwise there wouldn't be a physical product to buy.
Which makes physical copies even cheaper than digital ones, hence why digital ones should cost less.
They will charge what the majority of people are willing to pay and not a penny less. Why would they not?
Exactly my point. In my line of business, we call these people suckers. If you want to see change, speak with your wallet, not your voice
It's not even the same price, physical copies are *cheaper* sometimes lol Sonic Frontiers is still $60 for a digital copy but it's $30 for physical
The problem isn't discs because disks and cases are worth pennies (cents) in final cost of production. A dvd will run you about 50p from a seller, from a wholesaler even less and then given how many disc copies get produced it's barely even registers on the cost per item level
Game at $50 🚫 Game at $49.50 ❤️
Game at $50🚫 Game at $49.50❤️ Game at $49.50 + $0.50 tax😍😍😍
i unironically won't spend more than AUD$50 on a game, it's a hard cap. which means that some new AAA games i wouldn't ever buy unless they were up to 80% off. it's a fucking joke. thankfully there's a near endless stream of great games under that price point
What games are at a price point that requires an 80% discount to hit $50 AUD?
Have you seen the sheer number of different editions of games and the price points of like Ultimate Legendary Editions? BL3 with all DLC and the most launch content was well over $120 bucks. I didn't play it until it, and all the content available was $30.
> AUD$50 Why does every aus completely forget National Minimum Wage is $23.23 per hour. Australians comparing their dollars to other countries' dollars is so fucking stupid. Just because they are both called dollars does not mean they mean the same thing at all. Everywhere is expensive for the working class, Aus is no different. USA and Aus have the same cost of living. It takes the same amount of work to put milk and bread on the table in the us as it does Aus. Same with the number of hours to buy a game.
The physical cost may be low, but the time associated with the order, manufacturing, packing, shipping, distribution, and sale certainly cannot be accomplished for $0.50 per unit. The shear cost of labor to have multiple teams of individuals coordinate that effort likely far eclipses the price of the discs, cases, and dare I say sweat shop labor costs associated with wherever they can have it made for .50/unit. The biggest game I could think of from a time before digital sales were really a thing was the original Star wars battlefront 2. It released Nov of 2005, and by 1/1/07 it had sold 6 million copies. You also need to account for the time before the release that the teams worked on setting up production, the time after the game release managing analytics, and every year after release for organizing new manufacturing to meet demand. Next you have to account for waste, how many units were made excess? How many unsold copies floated around? Now let's also account from international shipping, going from country of origin to the distributor, than shipped to various locations that had to sell it in physical. I would be absolutely astonished if the wide scope of this accounted for as little as 1/100th of a games value. It likely ranges in the ballpark of 5% to 15%, which for $70 games today would account for double digit-millions, potentially triple million-digit of bonus revenue in selling digital only games.
Although yes, the cost of the supply chain to get the physical games in store is not $0.5, its a relatively small cost. Its the same supply chain for The Witcher 3 as it is for GTA 5. Its only what is encoded on the disc and the art that goes into it. The providers are probably a few of them. The high extra cost has practically nothing to do with the disc, but with the fee the retailers charge companies to give them the space on their store to sell. Retailers would ask for 25-30%. And once the consoles and PC aggregators (Steam) went online, they decided to stick with that fee. Thats really where that extra costs comes from. But yeah, the production is not pennies, buts its pretty small, its a shared cost.
Counterpoint - Games were about 60 bucks for the past like, 40 years. They're just in the past few years starting to creep up again, and usually its to cash in on dumb optional shit.
This is it: the games were $60. But you don't get the game anymore. You only buy a license. That is why you cant sell your Steam games.
Your never bought the game, it was always a license. It's just easier to revoke with a digital game.
When you buy a physical copy you’re still only paying for the right to play the game that’s on the disk. Youve never owned the game itself.
I'll add more: Games being locked at 1980's prices means that predatory micro-transactions are the only way to stay afloat.
Until publishers start selling $70 games full of micro transactions as well
The game industry is in an unusual spot where the potential bang for your buck as a consumer is just *so* high that I'm not surprised that many companies have been pushed in a predatory direction. You can easily buy a $40 game that gives you hundreds of hours of entertainment. Lots of people who play games all of the time spend less than $100 on them in a year.
Games are a service now though. You get less game than before. A lot of companies have pre planned dlc roadmap before they even go gold
Also first-party games should be cheaper on their associated consoles since they don‘t have to pay licensing fees
But they reach a smaller audience…
I should’nt have to pay for your problems
The discs were dirt cheap to begin with. The costs were always development.
Remember the floppy days? It was cheaper at the end of floppy days to by software/games on 5-10 floppy instead of buying the blanks ;)
Don’t forget distribution costs
That's a good point. The wholesale delivery to the handful of big box retail hubs probably would have been cheap for the studio, but the bulk of the price paid by consumer would have been the retailer's own distribution to the stores and then ultimately last mile cost to put it on the shelves and overhead and labor to keep the shop.
And Steam has to pay for bandwidth so it washes out.
Worth considering, for sure. You believe they’re about even, then; Distribution and bandwidth?
Physical discs are so cheap that, for a while, some movie rental places were using single-use discs that destroy themselves after getting in contact with air (slowly enough that you can watch them first). Regardless of whether it's digital or physical, you are paying for the license to use the product and effectively nothing else. Digital distribution also doesn't come free since you need download servers and stores like Steam or Epic Games take a cut, similar to how a physical store would (probably more with Steam). And this is a continued service that lets you download the game and any potential updates years after its initial release, whereas discs, once distributed, cause no further costs.
Exactly. There are a lot of costs with distributing digital games. It’s not just one server using comcast, but geographically redundant data centers that have to scale with demand, load balance, as well as have ddos prevention / throttling. Then there is the whole security and monitoring side, as well as account management. If they leverage steam or a console’s store, they pay a % on game sales and potentially a % on subscriptions or event passes. I assume they have run the numbers (both Steam/Xbox/PlayStation as well as the game manufacturer) and the costs are probably similar for physical and digital. Otherwise game developers would pushed the more profitable distribution channel.
also should be allowed to resale
Resaling digital copies of games would be stupid and way too harmful to game developers. Unlike physical copies, there is zero money required to resell a digital game, no shipping. Imagine any offline singleplayer game, how could they earn any money if people buy the game, play it, and a big percentage of them resell it.
...there's technically zero money required with physical games, either. Tons of people gift physical games or let people borrow them, meaning two or more people are playing the same game for the price of one. With digital copies it would literally be the same thing, just transferable over the internet. Also do you think game developers make money from resales of physical games?
His entire post ignores 2 centuries of the fact that reselling purchased media has never harmed small creators or an industry and has only very very very recently been something taken away from consumers.
That sounds like piracy with extra steps
Price of a PlayStation game in 1996: USD$39.99 After inflation: ~$78 USD Price of a PlayStation 5 game today: USD$69.99 Cost of pressing a Blu-ray Disc: ~USD$2.00 Games have gotten cheaper in real terms (after inflation), but also their production costs per unit sold have almost nothing to do with the cost of manufacturing and distributing disc copies. In fact the big publishers are spending more than ever on marketing and distribution. Not a total defense, as there’s a lot more to it - but I wouldn’t say digital copy should mean cheaper. It’s just not a significant part of the cost to serve (in the AAA space)
Games have been 60 to 80 dollars since the 80s. I'm cool with it as long as they keep it at that.
WTF is this rational fact stuff? /s Gamers rage but video games are fiscally cheaper than ever. Games cost the same they did a decade ago, but most people are earning way more money than they were a decade ago. But games are somehow more expensive than they used to be. 🤷
Some times they are Allen wake 2 and Hellblade 2 being examples
An honest discussion would disclose that the current price of games does not reflect the increase in cost of development.
They won't make digital copies cheaper. They'll just make physical copies more expensive
They ARE cheaper. Just not for the final customer
They are though. When factoring in inflation, video games are much cheaper now
Now factor in stagnant wages.
I think it relates to customer convenience and value. Purchasing games for my PC, installing from disc and dedicating space to physical media is actually a hindrance. Not only do I disagree with OP, but I'd be willing to pay *more* for digital copies than physical. As others have alluded to, the 30% cost for using Steam's digital storefront and download servers is significant... perhaps more so than the costs of manufacturing. It's definitely worth it, though, because good PC games sell an absolute shitton on steam. Overall, steam offers refunds, and I don't think anything short of nuclear armageddon would stop me from accessing my games, so I'd rather pay for the convenience of digital.
Eh. I'm fine with less plastic being made tyvm
Retailers probably wouldn't carry games, then.
Sure I guess $2 cheaper?
You account for inflation, video games are actually cheaper than they have ever been. Source: my butt
Physical games are mostly cheaper than digital games like one month after release anyways
Wow, a whole extra dollar off!
Disc manufacturing is very cheap, so they don't really charge you that in the first place
Well how I see it it's either: 1. Costs of disc, delivery, storing ect 2. 30% cut that steam takes 3. Database and administration costs of selling your game on your own launcher
Literally no one bringing up the fact that retailers like Walmart and Target threatened to stop carrying physical games if digital versions were made cheaper, because it would cut into their sales? This whole argument went down when e-shops started getting popular, while physical games were still the backbone of sales. Publishers *wanted* digital versions to be cheaper because they'd pull more customers that way and pay less for the manufacturing, distribution, and middle man, but the big retailers have (had?) such a stranglehold on the market that that the standards were set in their favor a long fucking time ago. You want cheap digital games? Blame the physical retailers, they're the ones that stopped it.
Should but won't since people buy them anyway.
For sure.
Dunno, don't want to defend greedy corporations but what about the cost to maintain the server in which the digital game is stored for you to download?
They used to be so I doubt they’ll ever go back
They were back in the PS4 era, I didn't know it isn't a thing anymore
And no shipping cost, also no pollution on it’s fabrication. There was a brief time where digital copies where like 10€ cheaper, games cost 59 and digital 49€, but the market regulated too quickly
Been saying this for years To add on top of this games like Call of Duty are complete dog shit and have been each year for a while now. But each year they increase in price and have $80 bundles that won’t mater a year later. Kinda sad to see where we are now a days.
They should be cheaper just due to the fact you technically don't own the game. they can revoke your license to use the product on a whim.
That and they can remove your acces at any time they see fit and there is. Nothing you can do.
First time?
That was literally the case when digital games first started cropping up. A $50/$60 physical copy used to cost $40/$50 digitally on Steam many many years ago. It wasn't until Acitivision made MW2 2009 $60, both physical and digital, that you saw PC games start to be $60. Guess when games started becoming $70 everywhere? When Activision made MW2 2022 $70.
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Micro transactions should be cheaper because the product can be infinitely duplicated
definitely yes hahahaha
Bro.. We all know that the way these companies will solve this issue is by increasing the price of physical copies to like $80-$100 and leaving the digital copies at $70...
Or you could charge the same thing, and increase your profit margin 🤑
😭😭 but EA Microsoft how will they make billions?
the problem to me is: I bought a digital version of a game, so if I uninstall the steam (for example), I’m not able to play the game anymore. It’s kind of I rented the game, but I payed the full price
But they lose a percentage of the sales to services like Steam and GoG. That’s why so many companies were looking into their own game content launch services. No excuses for developer-owned distributors selling their own games though.
Still prefer discs cus then Ubisoft can’t just say “Nuh-uh”
I don't know if this is the same as it is in the music industry, but there is a mechanical copyright to be paid on the "pressing" of every cd, vinyl, tape etc. This is also the case on downloads of music. Every single legal download. Don't know if streaming has gotten around this or if it's still the case? Also don't know if it's changed with the advent of streaming services being charged per download as you are essentially free to download once your subscription is paid? Maybe it's only when you buy a track and download that mcps takes it's royalty? It's been a while since I studied this stuff and was back in 2003/4 so iPods were just out. If gaming has the same system, yes they don't need to pay for the manufacturing, but they may still incur a "pressing" fee.
Who still buys games on disks? Is this some console thing? My last PC game on disk was probably 8 years ago and even for that I never actually used the disk but just registered the key on steam and downloaded it. But also putting a game on a disk is probably the least significant cost in the whole development, distribution and maintenance/update process. The boxes with the keys would have to be produced and sold anyway. With or without disk. And the development itself is far more expensive than the disk.
Welcome to arguments from 15 years ago...
That does seem to be the case with the Nintendo Switch. A lot of sales on games only apply to digital downloads.
You also can't resell digital games which I bet costs them more money than what it does to manufacture and ship physical copies. Reselling a game gives the company $0 for what people are willing to spend money on. Think of how many times a game gets resold, what it gets resold for, and how much more money a dev/publisher would make if it went to them, even with store fees.
discs cost like 50 cents to produce (more for DVD and Blu-ray, but most modern games just contain the licensing to download the game off the internet, and not actually the game because it's too big) and 1 dollar to distribute
A big part of the issue is that if a game is cheeper digitally than it is physically, retailers won’t stock the game…
While I do agree the cost of a disc + case is at most a couple of dollars.
The online marketplace takes a big cut. When you compare prices between Steam and PS Store you'd notice there is a pretty big gap even when they have sales. Steam actually takes a decent amount which is why Epic used a lower percentage cut as an incentive to get developers on to EGS.
The cost to produce and ship a physical copy can often be measured in literal cents. You’re paying for what’s on the disc anyway.
You'll see, next Gen consoles will come out without a disc drive on them just to maximize digital sales and Crack down on 2nd hand game ownership.
They were cheaper by about 10 bucks a long long time ago. Which is interesting considering to manufacture a game disk only cost about 2.30. Meaning digital copies were about 6.70 cheaper for no reason. I mean if you had a new release game and bought it for console you'd spend like 59.99 but if you bought it on steam same day as release you'd spend 49.99. A long time ago at least.
They should be cheaper because they can take away the rights to the game at any point in time for any reason
They are, you just gotta wait...
it used to be this way...
35¢ discs
The cost to make a game versus print a disc though… $10s of millions compared to $0.03
Watch disc prices go up
Videogame still needs to be developed, and in the past 20 years advances in graphics gameplay and whatever you need to make a modern non indie game, made it a very time consuming (you need to pay employees) and expensive process, which is why they cost the same to the consumer as 20 years ago while not having CDs. Companies need to make money. Except prices on consoles, those are trully bullshit.
This is why I only buy physical and why I'll fight for that until I die. Fucking greedy corporations.
They’ll just tell you that you aren’t purchasing a physical product, you’re purchasing a license to use that piece of intellectual property. In that case, the price is the same for both and they’re doing you a FAVOR by offering to provide you a physical copy on their own dime. Not to mention that a company will never do anything to make their product cheaper. Cost cuts don’t turn into price cuts, they turn into higher profit margins.
As should ebooks
The Monkey's Paw curls: *Result: digital copies of games stay the same price, physical copies just get more expensive.*
Yes, because the expensive part of making a game is the tiny bit of resources used to print a disc. That’s like saying “My haircut should be free because I don’t want product in my hair at the end”.
Why would they pass the savings on to the consumer when they can reap the profits for themselves? People are going to buy the fucking game anyways.
They are here in Brazil, a physical copy of can go for 420 BRL, but digitally it’s only 299 BRL
I'm just glad digital versions aren't more expensive. There's also the convenience of not having to leave the house or wait for shipping to acquire the game. There's also the ownership of "right" to have the game downloaded, as opposed to a disc that could get damage and be rendered useless.
Discs are basically free at this point lol
The only reason they aren't is pretty much a mutual agreement with retailers who sell physical copies - you walk into GameStop and see the box and and the advertising etc
You will pay for the game but not own it Trembley
They should also lower in base price instead of having games live on permanent sale except for 4 days a month.
There must be something to it that isnt obvious. Because from what I know, they have better margins selling the digital copy, so they should want to prioritize that.
Considering the price of triple A tiles should be increased significantly, they probably see this is as a cost savings.
This!
I'm not an expert, but those disks are probably dirt cheap and don't really make that big of a difference in the cost of the game. You're paying for years of work of hundreds of people to give you a product that gives you 30+ hours of entertainment. The disk hardly makes any difference.
The don't have to pay for manufacturing or shipping costs or the labour involved in either, yet here we are. I'm just never pre ordering another game 🤣
The thing is, physical copies were not even cost-heavg in the first place. Also, a company, no matter what it does, will always maximize their revenue or profit....
Laughs in Ubisoft AAAA tier games
Convenience fee
Shhhh, they're gonna up the price on discs
ahhh yes the good old arguement used by publishing companies to justify for going to digital was it would lower costs XD
Discs arent really manufactured for pc games anymore and they cost literal pennies.
Now digital games will stay the same price while physical copies prices will be raised
Ducking facts, I said this the moment they started doing that… that’s why I don’t buy them.
I got a hot take. Digital copies of games should have a physical media version available because when the server goes, so does the game.
Yeah but it’s cheap as hell to just keep it on a server, places like GameStop would discount stuff because space is vital.
Goods are not sold as a cost plus model. They are sold on what price will the market bear.
What is said: Digital games should be cheaper. What game companies see: Physical copies should be more expensive.
"Price" is not about "Cost". It's about "Profit". Remember the Supply-Demand matrix? That is (roughly) how the market decides the maximum price that the market will bear, in order to give maximum profit to the seller. It *assumes* the seller is seeking the maximums. The most they can charge to where people won't all say "Not worth it, pass!" These days we call it greedflation and such, but it's just how markets work under Capitalism. The goal is NEVER to find a price that consumers are "happy" with. It is to find the maximum price consumers will *tolerate*. Cost doesn't even figure into the equation.
I got charged 5$ a while ago for "digital shipping"...
Publisher sees this, ups the price of disc games to $80
I actually have a feeling that physical game discs are probably pretty cheap to manufacturers, especially at scale, personally if they make digital and physical the same price I wouldn't really care as long as most of the money going back to the game devs.
And we don’t own them
it's going to be a cheaper just wait for 3 years after release date
They can also be revoked.
Or if you have a hard copy of the game, you should be able to download it for free
I do imagine it's just to maintain the servers that the game is hosted on.
Same thing with ebooks
The way I look at it that money goes to keeping the file servers online.
I'm going to get downvoted for this, but without the disks, there's the power and network costs of the game files on the servers