Price Drop: The long awaited savior of video games
Alright so a few weeks back I posted a bit on how in my opinion the internet is kinda ruining video games. Broken more or less unplayable games on launch are becoming the norm...because they can be fixed by patch thanks to the internet.
Similarly Season Passes mean you pay ahead of time for DLC you havnt gotten yet....and usually stuff thats put into production before the game even works, and the new trend seems to be not even telling you what your getting for your money. And as a possible side effect, we are seeing more and more games that appear to have basically no content....because the developer can sell that to you later as DLC (this to be fair mostly seems isolated so far to multiplayer focused or exclusive games).
Now of course, there are theoretically things that can be done to "protect" yourself against some of these outright predatory practices. I for example stopped pre-ordering games years ago, because it had become so common place for games to be badly bugged on launch day, only to be patched days later.
However even this seems to no longer be enough, as now it seems most major games are broken on launch day, and badly bugged for months following release. Which is why my new years resolution this year was not to buy any games within 6 months of launch. (Except nintendo, who no matter what you think of a given game, ALWAYS make actually functional and working games. Even their bad and/or poorly thought out/unwanted games like animal crossing amiibo festival, which is getting badly panned, plays AWESOMELY, no major glitches and it works as intended.)
Now what caused the seemingly notable decline in game quality? Well the logical reason seems to be that I'm in the minority, that most people didnt really give a shit if their new game was badly broken cause you know BRAGGING RIGHTS of getting to play (or try to) first. Same thing with the stripped down titles, people clearly figured being able to say they owned the game was more important than getting a game worth the price they paid for it.
But again, presumably there comes a breaking point. There is only so much content you can remove (or be perceived to remove) and/or so many glitches in a game a launch before you hit a tipping point and the majority of the market audience (AKA gamers) get fed up and finally refuse to put up with that shit anymore. Hell eventually even casual gamers/those who dont know much about games will catch on somethings fishy (even if they dont know exactly what).
Well good news folks.....I think we may have actually reached that point.
Ok so some background, I, like many others just recently (November) joined the current generation of gaming, having taken advantage of the usual price drop on consoles a couple years after launch. And I admit, I basically bought the games I wanted paying no real attention to when they were made...cause again until recently I figured my policy of not buying games at launch was enough.
Now admittedly on the one hand this didnt work out perfectly for me....there is a reason after all I decided to not buy any games until 6 months after launch. A couple of the games I bought are still irritatingly glitched (although admittedly still playable) and getting monthly stability patches. Or at least the ones that are less than 6 months old. I actually havnt seen any major glitches/glitches that impact enjoyment in any of my titles over 6 months old....cause they were already patched up.
Now this may seem tangential at first, but stay with me. One of the other things I try to do to "protect" myself from some of the more predatory practices is to always buy the most complete version of a game available, so as to not get hit by having to buy additional content via DLC. This means buying the "game of the year"/limited/gold/whatever term you want edition over the base edition....assuming the GOTY edition is the same price ($60) or less than the base game was at launch. That way I get the most value for my dollar.
So this is where I started to notice some interesting things, but its going to take a bit to lay it out so please bear with me One of the games I bought was Assassins Creed Syndicate, Gold Edition. Which is a fancy way of saying its the base game + the $35 dollar season pass, so should retail for $95 total. Thing is, I got it for $55. Base game alone would have been $40.
Another recent game I happen to own is WWE 2k16. Which should be(read launched at) $60. And I got the season pass (which would be another $25)...for a total of $60 (so basically i got the season pass for free).
Now what makes these 2 games in particular stand out is HOW new they are. Both of them are basically only 2 months old (having released October 27th and 23rd. In fact at the time I bought WWE 2k16 it was only 5 weeks old.
Witcher 3, which is slightly older (6 months) I got for 30. And consider this is the game most people would say is the game of the year. Yet somehow in just a couple of months....and at the same time it was awarded game of the year, it was also 50% off.
Now I admit that I did get a couple of these on sale, but even not on sale, none of them are worth the price they "should be"/were at launch In fact the "base price" of Witcher 3 is already down to $50, and again this was the generally accepted best game of the year.
Also worth noting the newest major release for current gen systems was Star Wars Battlefront (which admittedly I dont own). Now that game came out November 17th, and like all games was I happened to be in gamestop the weekend Episode 7 came out, december 14th, so not even a month later...and it was $40
Now anyone looking at this has to think this is unusual. This is multiple examples of games that have lost a fair amount of their retail value very very quickly (most notably Battlefront, which lost 33% of its value in a bit over 3 weeks)
So what the hell is going on here? Now at first it might be easy to point to the aforementioned sales as the reason these games value disappeared. Which I might buy, had I not bought other games at the same time, notably The Last of Us remastered, and Dragon Age Inquisition, both games of the year the years they released (2013 and 2014)....and both on sale for $55, as opposed to the usual retail of 60.
So clearly they kept significantly more of their value over time, yet usually even with sales the older something is the cheaper. So what IS going on?
Well it turns out 3 of the new games I mentioned (Witcher, WWE and Syndicate) were all notably attacked for their glitches on launch and were all singled out for being rather buggy and broken. (syndicate also has the burden of being the follow up to a game (Unity) so badly broken the publisher had to give away a free game to anyone who bought the thing to make up for it)
And that 4th game, battlefront? pretty much every review on it suggests its highly lacking in content, a situation made worse when ti came out the season pass DLC would arguably have more content than the base game.
Now neither of these is true for Last of Us or Dragon Age....which is not to say they were perfect, both were bugged.....just not to the point it was considered game breaking or ruining enjoyment as with the later games.
Point is, what appears to have happened is that, with the 2015 games, the bad press about the bugs and lack of content finally hit home. Presumably the publishers weren't selling the amount of copies they expected to, and had to drop the prices to entice people into buying the bugged games.
In fact at launch Gamestop reported less than expected sales for both Syndicate and Battlefront....right before the prices on both games went down. Just saying, those two things might be related.
Battlefront by the way was projected by EA to sell 13 MILLION copies before the end of their fiscal year in March of 2016. The good news for EA is that, as of right now, they already hit 12 million....they only need to sell 1 million more copies in the next 12 weeks. The thing is, half those sales came after the price drop to 40.
So on the one hand the price drop clearly worked. More people are now buying the game, as the seem to believe for its new reduced price its actually a good deal for the amount of content purchased in the base game
On the other hand assuming EA meant 13 million full price games they really have only sold the equivalent of 10 Million full price games (the 6 million at full price and the 66% of 6 million (AKA 4 million) after the drop)...basically tripling the amount of games EA needs to sell over the next 12 weeks to hit the equivalent of their goal
I dont have the numbers of Syndicate, but by all accounts they are having the same problems. The company basically admitted to what Gamestop had said.....the game was not selling nearly as well as expected on launch.
Now unless you like getting ripped off, this is all GREAT news, cause it means the dissatisfaction with the state of modern games is finally hitting the publishers where it counts...in the wallet.
No longer it appears are people buying the games on blind faith to discover they are broken, now it seems enough people are waiting to make sure they work first before being willing to pay full price...and if they dont need to be enticed by the publisher (via price drops after patches to fix the problem) to buy them,
This is exactly what needs to happen to ensure a rise in the quality of games, and to ensure a notable decrease in the number of broken or empty games....and I hope the start of the long awaited reversal of the expectation that a launch day game should just be expected to be broken and that just being a part of gaming.
So hopefully 2016 will see the return to great quality gaming and the end of functionall unplayable games like Assassins creed unity, batman arkham night (PC), Battlefield and Halo Master Chief Collection (at least on launch day)
Similarly Season Passes mean you pay ahead of time for DLC you havnt gotten yet....and usually stuff thats put into production before the game even works, and the new trend seems to be not even telling you what your getting for your money. And as a possible side effect, we are seeing more and more games that appear to have basically no content....because the developer can sell that to you later as DLC (this to be fair mostly seems isolated so far to multiplayer focused or exclusive games).
Now of course, there are theoretically things that can be done to "protect" yourself against some of these outright predatory practices. I for example stopped pre-ordering games years ago, because it had become so common place for games to be badly bugged on launch day, only to be patched days later.
However even this seems to no longer be enough, as now it seems most major games are broken on launch day, and badly bugged for months following release. Which is why my new years resolution this year was not to buy any games within 6 months of launch. (Except nintendo, who no matter what you think of a given game, ALWAYS make actually functional and working games. Even their bad and/or poorly thought out/unwanted games like animal crossing amiibo festival, which is getting badly panned, plays AWESOMELY, no major glitches and it works as intended.)
Now what caused the seemingly notable decline in game quality? Well the logical reason seems to be that I'm in the minority, that most people didnt really give a shit if their new game was badly broken cause you know BRAGGING RIGHTS of getting to play (or try to) first. Same thing with the stripped down titles, people clearly figured being able to say they owned the game was more important than getting a game worth the price they paid for it.
But again, presumably there comes a breaking point. There is only so much content you can remove (or be perceived to remove) and/or so many glitches in a game a launch before you hit a tipping point and the majority of the market audience (AKA gamers) get fed up and finally refuse to put up with that shit anymore. Hell eventually even casual gamers/those who dont know much about games will catch on somethings fishy (even if they dont know exactly what).
Well good news folks.....I think we may have actually reached that point.
Ok so some background, I, like many others just recently (November) joined the current generation of gaming, having taken advantage of the usual price drop on consoles a couple years after launch. And I admit, I basically bought the games I wanted paying no real attention to when they were made...cause again until recently I figured my policy of not buying games at launch was enough.
Now admittedly on the one hand this didnt work out perfectly for me....there is a reason after all I decided to not buy any games until 6 months after launch. A couple of the games I bought are still irritatingly glitched (although admittedly still playable) and getting monthly stability patches. Or at least the ones that are less than 6 months old. I actually havnt seen any major glitches/glitches that impact enjoyment in any of my titles over 6 months old....cause they were already patched up.
Now this may seem tangential at first, but stay with me. One of the other things I try to do to "protect" myself from some of the more predatory practices is to always buy the most complete version of a game available, so as to not get hit by having to buy additional content via DLC. This means buying the "game of the year"/limited/gold/whatever term you want edition over the base edition....assuming the GOTY edition is the same price ($60) or less than the base game was at launch. That way I get the most value for my dollar.
So this is where I started to notice some interesting things, but its going to take a bit to lay it out so please bear with me One of the games I bought was Assassins Creed Syndicate, Gold Edition. Which is a fancy way of saying its the base game + the $35 dollar season pass, so should retail for $95 total. Thing is, I got it for $55. Base game alone would have been $40.
Another recent game I happen to own is WWE 2k16. Which should be(read launched at) $60. And I got the season pass (which would be another $25)...for a total of $60 (so basically i got the season pass for free).
Now what makes these 2 games in particular stand out is HOW new they are. Both of them are basically only 2 months old (having released October 27th and 23rd. In fact at the time I bought WWE 2k16 it was only 5 weeks old.
Witcher 3, which is slightly older (6 months) I got for 30. And consider this is the game most people would say is the game of the year. Yet somehow in just a couple of months....and at the same time it was awarded game of the year, it was also 50% off.
Now I admit that I did get a couple of these on sale, but even not on sale, none of them are worth the price they "should be"/were at launch In fact the "base price" of Witcher 3 is already down to $50, and again this was the generally accepted best game of the year.
Also worth noting the newest major release for current gen systems was Star Wars Battlefront (which admittedly I dont own). Now that game came out November 17th, and like all games was I happened to be in gamestop the weekend Episode 7 came out, december 14th, so not even a month later...and it was $40
Now anyone looking at this has to think this is unusual. This is multiple examples of games that have lost a fair amount of their retail value very very quickly (most notably Battlefront, which lost 33% of its value in a bit over 3 weeks)
So what the hell is going on here? Now at first it might be easy to point to the aforementioned sales as the reason these games value disappeared. Which I might buy, had I not bought other games at the same time, notably The Last of Us remastered, and Dragon Age Inquisition, both games of the year the years they released (2013 and 2014)....and both on sale for $55, as opposed to the usual retail of 60.
So clearly they kept significantly more of their value over time, yet usually even with sales the older something is the cheaper. So what IS going on?
Well it turns out 3 of the new games I mentioned (Witcher, WWE and Syndicate) were all notably attacked for their glitches on launch and were all singled out for being rather buggy and broken. (syndicate also has the burden of being the follow up to a game (Unity) so badly broken the publisher had to give away a free game to anyone who bought the thing to make up for it)
And that 4th game, battlefront? pretty much every review on it suggests its highly lacking in content, a situation made worse when ti came out the season pass DLC would arguably have more content than the base game.
Now neither of these is true for Last of Us or Dragon Age....which is not to say they were perfect, both were bugged.....just not to the point it was considered game breaking or ruining enjoyment as with the later games.
Point is, what appears to have happened is that, with the 2015 games, the bad press about the bugs and lack of content finally hit home. Presumably the publishers weren't selling the amount of copies they expected to, and had to drop the prices to entice people into buying the bugged games.
In fact at launch Gamestop reported less than expected sales for both Syndicate and Battlefront....right before the prices on both games went down. Just saying, those two things might be related.
Battlefront by the way was projected by EA to sell 13 MILLION copies before the end of their fiscal year in March of 2016. The good news for EA is that, as of right now, they already hit 12 million....they only need to sell 1 million more copies in the next 12 weeks. The thing is, half those sales came after the price drop to 40.
So on the one hand the price drop clearly worked. More people are now buying the game, as the seem to believe for its new reduced price its actually a good deal for the amount of content purchased in the base game
On the other hand assuming EA meant 13 million full price games they really have only sold the equivalent of 10 Million full price games (the 6 million at full price and the 66% of 6 million (AKA 4 million) after the drop)...basically tripling the amount of games EA needs to sell over the next 12 weeks to hit the equivalent of their goal
I dont have the numbers of Syndicate, but by all accounts they are having the same problems. The company basically admitted to what Gamestop had said.....the game was not selling nearly as well as expected on launch.
Now unless you like getting ripped off, this is all GREAT news, cause it means the dissatisfaction with the state of modern games is finally hitting the publishers where it counts...in the wallet.
No longer it appears are people buying the games on blind faith to discover they are broken, now it seems enough people are waiting to make sure they work first before being willing to pay full price...and if they dont need to be enticed by the publisher (via price drops after patches to fix the problem) to buy them,
This is exactly what needs to happen to ensure a rise in the quality of games, and to ensure a notable decrease in the number of broken or empty games....and I hope the start of the long awaited reversal of the expectation that a launch day game should just be expected to be broken and that just being a part of gaming.
So hopefully 2016 will see the return to great quality gaming and the end of functionall unplayable games like Assassins creed unity, batman arkham night (PC), Battlefield and Halo Master Chief Collection (at least on launch day)
The only point here that I disagree with you on is the assertion that the internet is what is ruining the video game industry.
ReplyDeleteEverything that is being done wrong now (and more) was done leading up to the North American video game crash of '83, and without the benefit of the internet (which was in it's early infancy at the time). Really, this problem boils down to the fact that recently there have been a significant number of big titles that are, not to put too fine a point on it, executed poorly. Very poorly. Been there, done that, and apparently that lesson didn't quite stick. Even if the specific methods by which these companies are screwing themselves differ somewhat, the differences are almost entirely the result of the technological advancements we have made in the last 32 years (yes, primarily the internet); the business practices that are the driving force of these unwise decisions are the same.
One can't reasonably blame the internet beyond the possibility that some companies figured that it provided a new tool with which to trick consumers. Yes, it is playing a role, but without the advent of the internet the people responsible would likely have found a different way to make the same mistake.
*For what it's worth, it is very unlikely that a video game industry crash like the one in the 80's will happen any time soon; game quality was only one of the causes, and it will be harder to repeat the other mistakes that were made then.
**I realize that the companies that make video games are more politely referred to as "game developers", but both titles are accurate and in the context of this conversation I think that my word choice is the more appropriate option.