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"Are you sewious Dad?!?" > GAMESTOP Commercial
WhereEaglesDare:
well yea because they are PC games, and they dont resell FFXI for PS2 cuz nobody wants to buy it!
RayB:
Considering Wow is a free download or $5 in store now, I wouldn't expect to see it "used". You're paying for a monthly service and an account with WoW, the media is "free".
MidnightClubbed:
--- Quote from: RandyT on December 12, 2010, 04:58:20 pm ---
--- Quote from: RayB on December 12, 2010, 02:10:08 pm ---I remember saving up and buying "Hacker" by Activision for the C64 (1985?) for $35.
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There were also only about 20 million C-64 / C128 systems sold in over a 10 year period. Just the 360 has more than 2 1/2 times as many units sold in less than half that time. Considering that titles are now pretty easily ported from one system to another, the total market size is even much larger for a title. More possible sales make it much easier to recoup investments (and much, much more) today than it ever was in the 80's.
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Porting a AAA game from one platform to another will typically take several man years of work (assuming you are doing a half decent job), even games developed simultaneously on multiple platforms will need sub-teams of platform specialists - porting down from PC to Wii/DS/PSP will generally need a lot of changes to art as well as substantial programming effort. Probably far more time than the total development effort on any C64 game.
--- Quote from: RandyT on December 12, 2010, 04:58:20 pm ---The gaming industry should adopt a similar strategy to that of what the movie industry currently does with Blu-Rays. For about a week, a new title is sold at a good price. After that, it goes up and you can wait a while for it to come back down, unless there is a promotion of some nature. This would give folks a chance to get in on a new title while everyone is still playing it on-line, and some occasional price fluctuations would wreak havoc on the used markets price structure. As I stated, there are things they can do to keep much of their profits from going to Gamestop. But they would need to let go of the idea of "having their cake and eating it too", which they are loathe to do.
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That is happening more and more, typically Target and Frys here in CA will have the weeks new releases at some discount. Amazon often do the same thing with gift card bundles for first week sales. Prices then slowly drop up to the game going greatest hits after a year (and to $30 or $20). You really need a much larger number of consumers before you can make games for dvd/blu-ray type prices - unless you want the production values to drop.
But I do absolutely agree that $60 is way too much for most people (myself included) unless it's an absolute must have game (GT5 did it for me this month). Hopefully at some point games are so mainstream that there are hundreds of millions of players and prices can drop substantially - unless you count Farmville in which case it's here already and it looks remarkably like a C64 game!
RandyT:
--- Quote from: MidnightClubbed on December 13, 2010, 12:37:26 am ---Porting a AAA game from one platform to another will typically take several man years of work (assuming you are doing a half decent job), even games developed simultaneously on multiple platforms will need sub-teams of platform specialists - porting down from PC to Wii/DS/PSP will generally need a lot of changes to art as well as substantial programming effort. Probably far more time than the total development effort on any C64 game.
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Maybe. It took an awful lot to make a good game on a C-64. It was all bit-twiddling. No huge (in relative terms) amounts of memory and storage, no amazing graphics hardware, no high level C-language programming and portability, no incredible tools (other than what developers made for themselves), no ready made game engines, etc. In the case of vintage hardware, you can't just look at the end result and gauge what went into it, without having spent some time there yourself. Some of what was accomplished in those titles, with that hardware and at that time in history, could only be done by a very, very small number of individual on the planet. Some games still took years because they had far fewer people involved. But the income from those games was also tiny compared to today. A lot of those C-64's also weren't used as game consoles, so the market was even smaller than it might seem.
And most of the conversion of graphical work on the major platforms can be automated. That's a huge dent in the process. Once you start talking about "porting down" to a handheld, it's not really a "port" anymore, rather a different game based on the same franchise. As such, it has little to do with the sales figures of ported titles (which few would say are usually done very well).
As for production values, they make some of the games amazing, while others seem to use those "production values" to mask lousy gameplay. If 45 minutes of cinema-quality CGI cut-scenes, that gamers might sit through once, is driving the production costs to such high levels, I think much of the market would be willing to give that up for good gameplay at a more reasonable price.
DirtyDachshunds:
The 3 armed celebration of the kid needs to be made into a gif
...then added as my profile pic 8)