ElektrikRockR 2 - Pacman

Everyone's favourite pretentious douchebag decides to take a look at pacman and notices it's numerous drug references and social commentary. Enjoy.


Also, since some people thought this was a Moviebob parody at first, I decided to embrace that

ElektrikRockR 1 - Sonic

Since I have one follower (hi david) I thought I would post a youtube video I made making fun of pretentious conceptual artist types if they were to over analyse video games like they do with paintings. The end result, as expected, is finding shit that isn't there.

Enjoy david, or anyone else who happens to stumble upon this blog.

Game Prices and the Used Market, why Prices need to drop!!!

Well I got lazy after the first few days huh? Well now that I have a bit more time, I want to talk about video game prices and why they need to drop to help the industry and consumers alike. I started thinking about this when Cliffy B said this about games being released today:

“I’m going to go on the record and say that I believe the middle class game is dead,” he said. “It needs to either be either an event movie – day one, company field trip, [Battle: Los Angles], we’re there. Avatar – we’re there. The Other Guys starring Will Ferrell and Marky Mark? Nah, I’ll f****** rent that, I don’t really care, right?

“Or it has to be an indie firm. Black Swan – I’ll go and see that. I’ll go to The Rialto or I’ll go to the triple-A Imax movie. The middle one is just gone, and I think the same thing has happened to games.”

Now this is a huge problem with the industry, while something like Gears can sell a lot of copies and be profitable, others like Mirror's Edge have been considered failures. But this problem has been talked about before, in fact it was addressed back in 2002 with the FairPlay campaign:

http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/fairplay/front2.htm

Basically what they suggested even back then was that games prices needed to drop, as at the time 95% of all games were losing money and only blockbuster titles were making any money. Sounds exactly like the Cliffy B quote doesn't it? Amazing that in over 8 years nothing has really changed.

Now think about it for a minute. How many games have you looked at and said "I'll buy this game later when the price has dropped" and overlooked it entirely? Those titles are usually the Mirror's Edge titles, the ones that are risky for you to spend so much money on because you need to keep your money for other games usually being released at about the same time. If all games were cheaper do you think that would increase the likelihood of you getting those games? Of course it would, with more money to spend you would buy more games which would make video games less risky to buy and sell, which is exactly what the folks at FairPlay are arguing.

But why would the industry want to have such a risky business structure that is reliant on having 1 or 2 titles a year making them money while the others make losses? Because it benefits the blockbuster titles like Call of Duty and Gears of War. Pretty convenient that Cliffy B thinks this is a huge problem but doesn't offer a solution. But this isn;t a case of politics and all, it's more of a case of incompetence on the hands of the publishers, they are so damn conservative and stuck in their ways about what the prices should be that they are unwilling to take the chance of dropping prices. And they are aware of FairPlay all too well.

If you look on their site (Or World Of Stuart's, check out Driv3rgate as well while your at it), you will see that they organised a campaign in the UK for a "Don't Buy a Game Week" and it worked. Here is what they said about the result:

The big sales blip during the campaign week which saw Game, Europe's biggest videogame retailer, lose a massive 80% of its share value overnight in response to disappointing sales. When the campaign was over, sales shot up again.  

When something like that happens, you know damn well that the industry remembers that week like a woman remembers her wedding day.

While video game publishers have been resistant to change, what have consumers and retailers done to cater get cheaper prices since then. Something that the industry is hell bent on fighting, USED GAMES!!!

You've all seen how Gamestop in the USA makes most of their money of used game sales, and here in Australia EB, GAME and JB HiFi have massive sections dedicated to used video games, so obviously the consumers have declared that they want cheap video games and don;t care if they are new. Used games have increased dramatically in popularity wit many reatilers receiving tonnes of them from trade-ins so people can get new games cheaper than the full RRP as well. I haven't paid $100AUD for a game since 2003 because I refuse to pay that much for a video game, especially with importing being an option.

So how did the industry respond to this obvious demand in lower game prices? At first, with the current generation, SONY AND MICROSOFT RAISED GAME PRICES!!! In the US it went up to $60 and over here it went up fro $100 to $120. Way to ignore the consumer entirely. No wonder this generation is so reliant on sequels and established franchises, with suck high prices no one wants to take a risk.

This didn't stop used game sales, so how does the industry respond to that? By making consumers feel like criminals for doing so. You have EA charging people an extra 10 bucks to play their used copy of games online and we keep hearing talks about "Digital Distribution is the future". It is only the future  because they want to stop used game sales and keep all of the profit for themselves and dictate pricing. Never have I seen an industry get so angry and rebellious towards used version's of their product. Maybe if they didn't charge so much people wouldn't get it used, how often do you see used DVD's and used CD's being a major selling point for the Movie and Music stores?

Just take a look at the Indie scene at the moment. They charge no more than $20USD (usually less) for their games and often sell them on DD services like Steam, PSN and XBLA. Cliffy B talks about only Indie and Megahit being successful today, but looking at the price it is obvious why. The price difference is absolutely staggering and shows that a small, unique title in today's market can only be sold at a dirt cheap price in order to get any attention from consumers. THAT is how bad game pricing has become.

This has also resulted in consumers becoming reliant on reviews. While I will never trust game reviews anymore because they score games based on hype and what bullshit swag they get sent in the mail, when I ask people why they trust reviews, it is because games are expensive and they want to know for sure what to spend their money on. No one listens to film and music critics because the risk of checking something out in those mediums is low in terms of cost, but now consumers have become so paranoid and conservative because of price that they need someone else to tell them if something is good rather than trusting their own instinct. That is just sad.

Unfortunately, I don;t see this changing. Look a what Bobby Koteck of Activision has had to say about game development:

·         The games Activision Blizzard didn't pick up, he said, "don't have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million dollar franchises. ... I think, generally, our strategy has been to focus... on the products that have those attributes and characteristics, the products that we know [that] if we release them today, we'll be working on them 10 years from now."

While it is good that he wants to make money off every game published, being so fucking conservative and saying things like "If it were up to me I would charge MORE" is not helping at all and shows that his goal is to make money by charging as much as possible and releasing the same crap over and over again, relying on the same business model the industry has had for years. Shame that things aren't going to change, because the industry needs it.