When a big game comes out, there’s often a big rush to get it. Diablo 3 is the latest example. Its servers were insufficient because it didn’t make sense to get enough servers for the initial rush (when nearly all players tried to play at the same time) only to have great overcapacity later on.
With Diablo3 and other highly popular games, why don’t we see higher prices? Sometimes, the market is segmented by adding extras, add ons, packs and customizaton options. But I’ve never seen a case where a publisher basically said “In the first few weeks we’ll offer the game for 90$ instead of the regular 60$ because we know a substantial segment of customers are willing to pay 90$”. Why don’t we see more of that? There’s substantial downward market segmentation by price (you wait a while and eventually offer it for less to people who are willing to wait to get it cheaper).
Piracy is one reason but isn’t the more restrictive type of DRM pretty effective?
$60 is the market segmentation price. In a few weeks, most games drop to $40. A few, like Diablo III, will stay there for a year or more. So $60 is the “grab as much money as we can price.”
For some games, it is the highest they can expect to charge. I’m not sure it is for other games. The fact that so many people rushed to get D3 at 60$ suggests that a significant number of people would have been willing to pay more, which could have reduced server load and been more profitable.
I doubt it. $60 is the price the market will bear right now. Someone will make the jump to $70 eventually, but it’ll be a long uphill battle. Maybe Diablo III could have done it, but I think selling the regular edition that far above the norm would have put a huge dent into sales.
Don’t forget there are a significant number of Blizzard fans who got the game for free by having a year’s pass to play World of Warcraft. Many of them are just WoW players who wouldn’t have been interested in playing D3, or in buying it for $60 or even $40. (My husband falls into this category.) So you may be underestimating the number of people who would shell out decent cash for the game.
The upper limit of $60 on video games (although you can get more for “Collector’s editions” with baubles and trinkets) is now so strongly entrenched as the New Game Standard that trying to go past it would probably result in more of a negative backlash than it would be worth.
Had Blizzard announced a $99 fee for Diablo III they would have been absolutely torn to shit by the gaming community for profiteering. $60 is just too well established now.
My thoughts exactly. Besides, Blizzard is the last game developer I would expect to try to pull something like this, what with their “keep hardware requirements low to move as many units as possible” strategy.
I think the way Bliz could have solved the early server overcapacity issues would have been to have a phased release. People who bought the collectors edition for 100 bucks get the CE packaging novelty stuff, and early access to the servers. One week later, the servers open for people who bought the standard edition.
Piracy is still a pretty big issue. The beefier DRM schemes are more effective in the sense that they might take a month to crack instead of a week, but the company is still going to try to get as many sales in as they can before that happens.
From what I understand, major video game titles are evaluated sort of like big Hollywood movies-- they either succeed or fail within the first couple of weeks, and any sales after the first month is either icing on the cake of a successful game or the silver lining on a failure. I’m thinking that under your scheme, they might make more money overall (assuming they sell the same number of units), but they’ll probably make less in the critical first weeks of release. Plus there’s always the risk that the DRM will get broken earlier than expected, causing piracy to look more attractive to the already-irate people waiting for the price drop.
The ever present issue of bugs could also rear it’s head. Look at one of last years biggest releases, Skyrim. Many players go, somewhat justifiably, apeshit over the number of bugs in some of the bigger releases.
Now tell them you’re gonna charge them a 1/3 more…
I know you could respond with “Well if they tested the game properly…” Well add in the extra time for this testing, plus the lower initial sales at the premium price. It’s doubtfull the makers would see any additional profit over the current situation.
Honestly, for a Bethesda game *Skyrim *wasn’t near “buggy”. It was pretty stable on most rigs and while there are tons of little bugs, glitches and annoyances (some of them remaining still) it was still playable from beginning to end.
Also, note that it’s good to have a perception of high demand – of hard copies being sold out and servers temporarily being over-subscribed. Perceived popularity can drive sales (and not just for sheeple reasons; it makes sense).
So sure, make money off the fans / early-adopters. But you mustn’t change the image of it “flying off the shelves”.
Skyrim is a bit of an anomaly; partly because of what you just said, and partly because its price on Steam hasn’t fallen after half a year. I imagine that good word of mouth has kept sales relatively high since release. Maybe some people who pirated ended up buying legit copies so they could do modding stuff via Steamworks.
