AP's Stu Campbell resurfaces

[LaundroMat]

Check out this article in The Register. Apparently former Amiga Power's Stuart Campbell is fighting the game publishers for their exorbitant prices.

Edit after reading Frederic's reply:
"Exorbitant" implies a negative feeling on the pricing of games nowadays. I just wanted to mention the article, as I have to admit I have no opinion on the matter whatsoever; I'm too much of a layman on this subject.

To be completely honest, I'm more excited about reading about Stu Campbell than anything else (I always liked his style of writing, 's all )

[Fred the Fop]

Hmm. You now what? A few PC/Mac and console game prices are indeed priced a bit over what they cost in the halcyon days of the Amiga, SNES, Megadrive, or NES. But most are the same ($50.00 or so.)
The bloat of modern games, with the over the top advertising, multi-faceted developing regime, extra tweaks (read:junk), hi tech and demanding coding, graphics, sound, etc, seems to make one think the prices should be oer $100.00 per game. But it's not. Now, I am sure this Stuart Campbell guy can give m ean education on the development and marketing of games. But if you consider how much simpler and less demanding it was to code and package say, Turrican or Super Mario Brothers, and the $55.00 I paid for Mega-Turrican on my Megadrive, it seems the old days were a ripoff.
Read what I said carefully if you have issue with what I stated. I am not denigrating the quality of the old games. I prefer a bland Atari ST game any day over 95% of the garbage that spews forth from the sewers of gamedom nowadays.

[Twistin'Ghost]

Games have always been overpriced. I have seen original shrink-wrapped Atari 2600 games in thrift stores that have the original Sears pricetags on them and they were like $40-50!

The video industry did this same mistake and when the prices dropped, the sales went through the roof. The game industry are a pack of greedy morons.

[7-Zark-7]

And you think $55 is high, you should see the prices of games & PC software down here!
Average price for new release big-name titles here for Playstation 2,Gamecube,X-box etc. generally start at $90 Australian,& usually more likely to be $99. (eg: Final Fantasy X,& Resident Evil Zero.)
PC stuff usually will be slightly more moderate $60-$80.

Of course there is the cheaper Platnium range of stuff for Sony PSX 1 & 2. Usually around $40-$50.
And rereleases on PC will be around $25-$35.

But interestingly enough our Australian Competition & Consumer commision recently fought Sony over the sale of Mod chips in the courts & won allowing them to be sold & installed,arguing it was a market restriction not allowing all the US Playstion software,to be available here. Needless to say Sony is appealing...

And I needn't mention the prices of Application software & Windows,though Bill Gates manages to screw everyone the world over on it's price!

[P-J]

It just drives people to piracy, a common link with all manner of media, audio and games included.

If I ever buy a PS2, which I probably will (second hand), I'll most likely pirate most of the games.

[Twistin'Ghost]

Originally posted by 7-Zark-7
And you think $55 is high, you should see the prices of games & PC software down here!
Average price for new release big-name titles here for Playstation 2,Gamecube,X-box etc. generally start at $90 Australian,& usually more likely to be $99. (eg: Final Fantasy X,& Resident Evil Zero.)
PC stuff usually will be slightly more moderate $60-$80.

But isn't the Australian dollar worth about half of the US dollar?

[Ash]

Yes

[P-J]

It's all extremely pricey, but I think it's a chicken and egg situation here.

I think piracy is more commonplace nowadays than it was way back in the days of, say, for example, the Amiga in it's prime, since the advent of the net, and filesharing programs such as eDonkey, Direct Connect, or WinMX (the list is endless). Stuff spreads quicker and gets to 'end users' a lot quicker than it used to.

The chicken and egg?

As far as I'm concerned, high prices came BEFORE piracy, one obviously causing the other, and since the (to quote an earlier post) greedy publishers are hell bent on getting as much money as possible out of a deal/franchise they're blaming piracy for their greed, and encouraging piracy as a result.

To sum up : IMHO, piracy is caused by the publishers themselves.

I think many will disagree with me, as tends to be the case on this board (that I love so much)

Just to give an example, incidentally, I've had a PC since I first built one about 3 or 4 years ago, in which time I've probably bought about 15-18 games, budget or otherwise. I have over 300 games in my collection, so we can deduce I have about 280 copied/downloaded/ripped games.

However, I had the Amiga 500 as a main machine for about 6 years, in which time I bought well over 300 original games, full price and budget. This is due to two things :

1) Price was acceptable.
2) Games were actually good back then, see 1)
3) Wasn't in an area where pirated copies were freely available.

1) and 2) are the major reasons, 3) is a backup for laziness.

Any comments on this rambling?

[CPC464]

I have never agreed with the price of games, especially now when they are cheaper to make and the packaging is some what crappier, what really annoy's me is when they put the manual on CD in bloddy PDF format and still charge you the same price.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

But there again Applications are more expensive than games.

On a good note, there are alot of second hand Game shops here in York and good PC games can be picked up for as little as £6