EPTIf you were selling pies it would be quite easy to set a price. You can add up all the costs of the ingredients, cooking costs, packaging and transportation and lastly the labour costs. Add a profit margin, and there you have the price of your product. Since every other pie maker has these same costs and nobody will sell for a loss, the price remains pretty consistent for everybody. Selling software doesn’t work like this. The price of games is almost entirely arbitrary, and is set and maintained both by the major games publishers, but also a public perception of what they are worth. Obviously there are costs that can be added up in the production of a game, but the point is that these costs are only loosely connected to what the game is eventually sold for.
Now, what actually got me started thinking about this in earnest is Street Fighter X Tekken. I would like to buy it but I just can’t bring myself to buy it at full price because it seems to me that it just isn’t worth it. Right now you can buy Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition for £11.83 from Amazon. This is the complete version of the game with all the characters available, and all the latest patches up to 2012 edition. It’s THE fighting game that brought the genre back from the brink of death, and right now it is amazing value. Alternatively you can buy Street Fighter 3rd Strike on XBL. It’s the final edition of the classic game, which many people say has more depth to it than any other fighting game since. I bought it and played it for the first time when it was recently released on XBL. It’s still a great game even by modern standards. It costs about £10. Street Fighter X Tekken costs £37.90 right now on Amazon. It is not the final version of the game, with DLC and future “Ultimate” repatched versions of the game inevitable, it’s only likely to be the up to date version for 9 – 12 months. I know that in 12 months time I will be able to either buy the full version of the game for the same money or I can buy the current version for a fraction of the price.
So why is this a problem, I can just wait and buy it when it’s cheaper right? Well part of me thinks that if it is a good game, then it will still be being played in 12 months and if it is bad and not being played then it’s not worth buying anyway. Another part of me knows that the way games work is that they all have their time in the sun, and that you kind of just need to buy into it in order to be part of the scene and THE HYPE. This is really what gets people to buy new games for 3 times the amount they are probably worth, it is hype, which is essentially nothing. I suppose what I am saying is that I want to be part of the hype and the scene, but I just can’t buy into what Capcom are selling, especially when the previous games are, when you take away the hype, just as good and just as much fun to play right now.
If you knew me you would say to me “well you buy the new Call of Duty every year, and you even forked out for Elite, HAHA suck at the teats of Activision more!” I see people always saying that one CoD is the same as another, but I tell you, for someone who plays the game it is not the case, and the game is very good value, even at full price. The single player campaign is reasonably sized, and is the reason many people buy the game to this day. Horde mode comes in different guises, but it’s always fun, and has it’s own following. Then there is Spec-Ops, which are quite difficult missions that I have still to explore completely. I think anyone would have to admit that these modes are all very different in each of the CoDs.
For someone who actually plays the game the multiplayer is also quite different from CoD4, to MW2, to Blops and MW3. The maps are obviously different, and the weapons and equipment within the game are also different. Is the gameplay actually the same? Well, you know an FPS is always just 2 teams of people shooting each other much like a MOBA is always lane farming and team fights, but that doesn’t mean to say that DoTA, LoL and HoN are the same in terms of gameplay. If you played each of the CoDs since CoD4 nowadays you would see that CoD4 is a basic version of the game we know today, with few weapons and no choice of killstreak rewards. You would also notice that the graphics are quite a lot worse than modern versions. MW2 was characterised by the amazing choice of user controlled killstreak rewards such as the AC-130 and Chopper gunner, as well as the introduction of deathstreaks. Less commented on is how different the sound effects are, personally I don’t like it as much, but many people say the sound is best in MW2. After the insanity of MW2, Black Ops was characterised by a return to basics and decreasing randomness. In Black Ops you have more health so good players can win gunfights even if they start at a disadvantage. Random deaths from equipment and noobtubes are almost entirely avoided by using the flak jacket perk. Black Ops is more about gun skill than any other CoD. I write all this to tell you that, for someone that actually plays, one CoD is not like another at all.
Is it fair that I buy Elite, but then complain that SFxT is not the full version of the game? Well, to be honest I did not buy Elite when the game first came out, as I was extremely sceptical about the whole thing. A lot of people had a downer on MW3 when it was first released for some reason. It seemed that coming from Blops, everything was more random again and you didn’t feel in control of your own fate. As it turns out MW3 is a good game, especially now it has been patched a few times. After playing the game for more than 100 hours and assuring myself that I would play it some more over the next year, I decided that I would like to buy the extra content. It is because I see the game as good value overall that I see the extra maps and other DLC as extra, whereas I kind of see the future DLC of SFxT as just stuff they should have put in the game from the start. Fighting games don’t have a single player to speak of, and they certainly don’t have co-op, so the only thing they really have to offer is online multiplayer. In my opinion SFxT could be offering a lot more in their online multiplayer for the premium price they are charging.
Another way to look at the value of a game is to look at how many hours play time the game provides, and also how fun that time is. A good online multiplayer game is going to score high on both these fronts, but so often single player games don’t do so well here. I thought that Skyrim was great as I enjoyed many hours of very fun times, but for example Portal 2 was really fun, but only for quite a short time. I knew that Portal 2 was going to be short so I didn’t buy it, I rented it instead. I’m also going to rent Mass Effect 2. With no competitive multiplayer (I can miss out on horde mode), and a linear storyline, the game is unlikely to justify my £40, and if I do want to buy the game then I can buy it and get the rental charge back anyway so I can’t really lose. I am aware that there is extra content to be had if you insert a code found when you buy ME3, but I’m willing to not play that part of the game, because I can play 95% of the full game for 10% of the cost of the game. If I couldn’t rent it I would wait for the price to drop, because it is single player there is no “time in the sun” for these games.
How about SC2? Well I am actually quite positive about the upcoming DLC for SC2. I think the game as it stands is good value, and it provides many hours of very fun times. I especially found the custom game types to be an unexpected pleasure when I first bought the game. I believe that the expansions will be priced at a fair price, and it will provide good new additions for multiplayer and single player. I am hopeful.
Anyway, I guess this has been a bit more of a ramble than I thought it would be. Basically I’m annoyed because I can’t justify buying SFxT. I don’t think that Call of Duty deserves half the shit it receives simply because it is popular. Single player games really have to provide a lot of content if they are to persuade me buy them instead of renting them.
