I realized today I am completely insulated from the video game hype cycle. I am free! Normally by now I would be really deep in Dragon Age: Inquisition (I am a huge fan of Origins, and got through the second one for the sake of it) or I would be levelling in Warlords of Draenor for my regular “back for the expansion” trip.
I am not doing either. I know I will do both (eventually) but I am free from the need to get the game at the time the developer wants me too. At full price. I have argued in the past that the cycle of huge hype then huge discounts is hurting the industry and I believe where I am right now is proof of that. I was always a launch day buyer (even pre order) for big, major AAA titles. Now that has changed.
All that has changed is that I realize if you wait you get the same game (sometimes more, if DLC is out), that works better (patched) and is less crowded (if online). In short, you get a better game. You don’t even have to wait to that long, typically the hype train has left a new game 30 to 60 days after launch (since new games are on the hype train) and you can get a discount. Hell, if you wait a year, you can get that $60 game for $5 now. Depends if you have that patience.
The humble bundle and steam sale phenomenon has given gamers huge libraries of games that they can’t even get through, let alone think about paying full price for a new one. This, and the F2P landscape, gives so many options that the need and desire to buy on launch day is dwindling. It’s a race to the bottom on price and all new games have now is launch week. Once they lose that (and they will) the industry will need to have a correction.
We have seen this in the food industry where most major QSR brands raced to dollar menus to get people buying and looking for frequency and volume purchases. They have spent the last few years trying to undo this as the move has trained customers to expect a full meal for a couple of dollars. Initially they were hoping to (and often successfully) translated those dollar menus as lost leaders to the big items but consumers are pretty smart. And we are getting smarter. Games hurt a bit less on cheap “menus” because once they are done there are no more hard costs. To sell a Bic Mac you still have to pay for the ingredients and the labour to build it. To sell a game you just need a website and an internet connection. Regardless, the industry is training consumers the things it doesn’t want to.
I have a lot of disposable income for gaming and love gaming, and normally I would happily pay full price and support game makers – but now I know I don’t have to, and if I look at their actions they are telling me they don’t want me at full price either if I can resist the hype. I am the same guy who gladly pays $5 for a Starbucks because I like how friendly they are and how they treat me as a return customer, not because they have the best coffee. Most industries out there focus on building customers and loyalty and studies show time and time again people will pay more for a better experience. So why is the gaming industry sending a message that their efforts aren’t worth what they have been telling us all along?
Hell, games are being discounted BEFORE launch day now, because developers are realizing if they don’t sell before launch, they are going to lose boxes. I could have bought Civ: Beyond Earth for 25% off before launch day. (Thankfully, it will be 90%+ off soon..). All of this is very confusing. To everyone. Customers, developers, digital distributors – no one really understands what is going on and what the long term effects will be. It just feels like a gong show!
Gaming as an industry is very young, and they are making a lot of mistakes that more mature industries have already learned. There will be a correction at some point (there needs to be) and it will be very interesting to see what that looks like when it happens. In the meantime, I have a catalog to play and sales to wait for.
Some of the correction seems to have occurred already with Founder pricing, Early Access and paid Alpha/Betas.
In other words, game companies are going for their early adopters and hoping to entice them with the experience of being part of a community, possibly in discussion with devs, feeding back to each other on how to make the game better and reach a polished state. In return, they are asked to pay a little more for the “pre-game” or “pre-launch” experience.
It’ll be interesting to see if game companies in the future will start cultivating this audience in a more systematic way, through intentional design. After all, these are the people that will sell/market the game to their friends for them.
That early access is actually similar to the theory of diffusion (which I made a post about here not too long ago. It is interesting. I don’t see the reason to abandon retail entirely though – they just need some confidence in pricing models.
I’m a little reminded of the ET crash in the 80s. The pricing model didn’t make sense and companies were more worried about pushing quantity than quality.
I can’t think of any non-indie game in the past 5 years that didn’t have a day 1 patch. Or in some cases, multiple patches. Unity, call of duty, dragon age, Sims, are all examples of people paying near full price for squat.
What the heck is worth 60$ today anymore?
Exactly. The rush to hit a launch date and get the most cash they can at the most opportune moment is trumping any sort of Quality Controls – oddly enough. the same QC that we would gladly pay $60 to get in the past (bigger and better, worth the price tag).
It’s just not true anymore, and more and more people are aware that if they can just stick it out past the hype cycle, they’ll get a better deal.
In publishing price cuts always happen at or even before launch. Only failures that retailers can’t shift go down in price later in the cycle. If you want to get the best price on a new hardback book you need either to pre-order or buy in the first week it goes on sale. After that the price will only rise, stabilizing at full cover price from the point when the book is no longer considered “new” until it goes out of print.
It’s been like this for the approaching-two-decades I’ve been in bookselling but customers rarely seem to understand it. I’m often asked if a brand new hardback isn’t doing very well because it has money off. The opposite is the case – the better a book is doing, the more urgently it will be discounted as everyone jockeys for market share.
I wonder what would happen if games did it this way – would be the death of Steam, that is for sure (or at least the changing of Steam to an indy only platform).
How comfortable do we think publishers are with Steam?