Valve: Games are too expensive

[LowRun]

Steam is ridiculously expensive in the EU - games are a lot cheaper in retail than they are in the digital format. It's unacceptable.

And you can't sell the game when you're done with it either. Steam game are not for sale, they are for rent and that sucks badly.

[Particle]

don't they have to pay for high speed servers?

Oh heck yes. Their content servers are generally kicking out 22-35Gbps depending on the time of day (and that's sustained bandwidth), and that's a lotta bits to pay for the transport of.

[Greg83]

I've purchased many games from steam due to these huge sales.
Bioshock $5, half life $1, Doom2 $0.99, Ultimate Doom $0.99, Red Orchestra $5, Stalker $5, Civ 3 (+ all expansions) $3.95, The ship $5 (and a few for friends)

I don't even care I've only played civ 3 out of all them.
Hope this leads to more $5 sales, its difficult finding games worth playing .

[saaya]

one more thing, if you buy a game you install it and thats it, enjoy it!

if you buy it on steam your downloading games, sometimes at a crawling 20kb/s, and have to wait hours if not days before you can play the game.
or you can play a part of the game since a part is finished downloading already, but then get interrupted in your gameplay and cant continue since your still waiting for the rest of the game to finish downloading. very frustrating experience...

[Psykocyber]

one more thing, if you buy a game you install it and thats it, enjoy it!

if you buy it on steam your downloading games, sometimes at a crawling 20kb/s, and have to wait hours if not days before you can play the game.
or you can play a part of the game since a part is finished downloading already, but then get interrupted in your gameplay and cant continue since your still waiting for the rest of the game to finish downloading. very frustrating experience...

Settings->Download Region->Set to some US location. Boosted mine from 300kB/s (sometimes only 100) to 1MB/s

[Greg83]

very frustrating experience...

and I feel the same when I spend hours going though boxes to find my discs.

Personally I only see low speeds when a hyped up game releases, during the first couple of hours.

Rest of the time, steam goes 1.5MB/s download for me which sure beats, connecting the usb dvd drive, finding the disc or going to the store and buying the disc.

[Vapor]

I'm curious how much of the "##% off" helped.

What I mean is this....surely selling a game for "$60 with 50% off" will sell better than just pricing it at "$30" from the beginning, no?

[Marvin_The_Martian]

Good point there

[Zaskar]

Funny how people think Valve is the good guys. Sorry, last I checked these guys who are preaching "cheaper games" are talking out of the other end of their mouth by charging full RETAIL price for the right to DOWNLOAD a new game.

I think its worth it, its the right to download it as many times as you want for forever. Doesn't matter how many times your reinstall your OS all you need to do is log into your steam account and double click the game from your games list and it will download and install it at almost the same speed as if you were using a DVD.

I find that more useful then getting a CD/DVD. Not to mention in most cases they auto patch with Steam on games that normally require going to the games web site and downloading and manually installing a patch.

[Cuthalu]

So Valve is also responsible for others publishers prices? And isn't €50 standard for retail in € using countries?

Everyone are responsible? And no, 50€ is not a standard retail price.

[SKYMTL]

Frankly I prefer CDs / DVDs. Why? Because I like to play Devil's Advocate.

What happens if sometime in the future Steam and Valve as a whole cease to exist for whatever reason and they have to close down the servers? Basically, all of the games you bought would be useless overnight.

Granted, it isn't likely to happen within the next while but Valve has finances to look after while my CD / DVD based games don't.

[Easybeat]

Games are too expensive?

I wonder how much more expensive they are going to get when Steam effectively kills the resale market.

[tajoh111]

what he is saying is that it is more profitable to sell the game cheaper since u sell more units, its not a good or bad guy thing its a macroeconomic thing, it seams like a good thing to me since they had more profitability then they were carrying a dead weight loss making the market less efficient through artificial means of forcing a higher price than the demand and peak supply curves called for

and retail prices have gone way up, when i was a kid they were $20 for an snes game and even back in 04/05 games were only $30 for PC and $40 for console and now they are $50-60 for the pc and $60-80 for consoles

and u can pirate WOW there are plenty of private servers

Frick your memory must be bad. Snes games, during intial release were never twenty dollars. Unless you bought games when they were in the bargain bin, they could never be that cheap. Final fantasy, Chrono Trigger were a 100 dollars in canada. Street fighter 2 was 84.99.

I just bought street fighter 4 for 59.99.

PC title never were released at 30 dollars unless they were budget titles.
http://pc.ign.com/articles/554/554651p1.html

Half life 2 pricing on steam initially was 50 dollars.

Games 40 dollars for console, again either a budget title or something on sale or clearance.

The business plan everyone follows is this, sell high initially and as time goes on reduce the price to get lower end buyers. Because 50 dollars is not really that high a price(people can definitely afford this, considering the pc people are playing these on). the margins on these units are much larger.

Sure sales might have been up 3000 percent, but the game has been out for 4 months, the sales would have probably slowed down to a trickle. Add in the publicity that a sales makes and advertising by other gamers on this product and you got a reinterest and reinvigorated sales.

[GeorgeStorm]

I much prefer having an actualy CD/DVD of a game, I know tend to no CD patch them due an unfortunate instance with my KOTOR 1 CD, while it will still paly the game, it will no longer install,
However, I still prefer having the game itself, as most will let you install as many times as you want, where ever, even on non internet computers, its only recently that games have really started restricting installation options....
I also dontl ike the idea that I dont actually have the game, so, as SKYMTL said, if they go out of business, you would lose everything, which would suck,

[Bradan]

Funny how people think Valve is the good guys. Sorry, last I checked these guys who are preaching "cheaper games" are talking out of the other end of their mouth by charging full RETAIL price for the right to DOWNLOAD a new game.

I see you keep bashing valve in threads about this. You have an indestructable copy, no cd keys to worry about, and unlimited full speed downloads.

What's the problem?

[Easybeat]

I see you keep bashing valve in threads about this. You have an indestructable copy, no cd keys to worry about, and unlimited full speed downloads.

What's the problem?

In 30+ years of gaming I have never broke,damaged or lost a tape, cartridge or disc it is called looking after one's own possession's.

I would rather trust myself to look after my possession's than a 3rd party if you don't mind.

[cantankerous]

I see you keep bashing valve in threads about this. You have an indestructable copy, no cd keys to worry about, and unlimited full speed downloads.

What's the problem?

Are people forgetting that you can actually backup a downloaded game from Steam, onto a DVD-R, right from within Steam itself, for an easy installation later, without having to re-download it?

[zanzabar]

Frick your memory must be bad. Snes games, during intial release were never twenty dollars. Unless you bought games when they were in the bargain bin, they could never be that cheap. Final fantasy, Chrono Trigger were a 100 dollars in canada. Street fighter 2 was 84.99.

I just bought street fighter 4 for 59.99.

PC title never were released at 30 dollars unless they were budget titles.
http://pc.ign.com/articles/554/554651p1.html

Half life 2 pricing on steam initially was 50 dollars.

Games 40 dollars for console, again either a budget title or something on sale or clearance.

The business plan everyone follows is this, sell high initially and as time goes on reduce the price to get lower end buyers. Because 50 dollars is not really that high a price(people can definitely afford this, considering the pc people are playing these on). the margins on these units are much larger.

Sure sales might have been up 3000 percent, but the game has been out for 4 months, the sales would have probably slowed down to a trickle. Add in the publicity that a sales makes and advertising by other gamers on this product and you got a reinterest and reinvigorated sales.

i used to save up all of my money to buy SNES or SMS (genesis) and they were mostly $20 except for donkey kong that was $30. i still have boxes with receipts, and the CAN dollar used to be bellow 50c USD

[revenant]

when I worked at Software ETC like a jillion years back.. ha, well.. 15 or so.. the full price of the avg PC game was between 39.99 and 49.99... so I would have to argue that since they have not grown with inflation too much (or at all in some cases) they are indeed cheaper now.. console titles (play station and xbox) were $60 new minimum... and I remember thinking to myself back in those days.. "damn, I can buy mad weed for 60 bones" . so again, not a lot has changed and with inflation, the price is actually better now to the consumer..

[Syn.]

Funny how people think Valve is the good guys. Sorry, last I checked these guys who are preaching "cheaper games" are talking out of the other end of their mouth by charging full RETAIL price for the right to DOWNLOAD a new game.

That only applies to third party games.

Frankly I prefer CDs / DVDs. Why? Because I like to play Devil's Advocate.

What happens if sometime in the future Steam and Valve as a whole cease to exist for whatever reason and they have to close down the servers? Basically, all of the games you bought would be useless overnight.

Granted, it isn't likely to happen within the next while but Valve has finances to look after while my CD / DVD based games don't.

Valve will provide you with physical copies of each game you bought, and no that's not wishful thinking.

[tajoh111]

i used to save up all of my money to buy SNES or SMS (genesis) and they were mostly $20 except for donkey kong that was $30. i still have boxes with receipts, and the CAN dollar used to be bellow 50c USD

I am going to look for an old egm and look for a chips and byte ad.

30 dollars for a new game upon initial release impossible.

Especially with the old excuse cartridges are more expensive than cds to produce.

So would you rather be called a liar or someone with bad memory.



Pwned

Chips and bits is a US company obviously because EGM had no canadian advertisers.

Even your PC games are in the 50 dollar range.

This ad is from 1997.

[initialised]

Maybe they should tell EA that cheaper games mean more units sold and less piracy and resulting DRM licencing costs, flame wars, bad press and bad feeling.

[zanzabar]

I am going to look for an old egm and look for a chips and byte ad.

30 dollars for a new game upon initial release impossible.

Especially with the old excuse cartridges are more expensive than cds to produce.

So would you rather be called a liar or someone with bad memory.



Pwned

Chips and bits is a US company obviously because EGM had no canadian advertisers.

Even your PC games are in the 50 dollar range.

This ad is from 1997.

maybe i just bought not new ones, but $50 back int he day seams ridiculous, im going to go and look for boxes

[tajoh111]

maybe i just bought not new ones, but $50 back int he day seams ridiculous, im going to go and look for boxes

I have an ad for used games prices, and most newer released used games are in the 40+ dollar range.
You buying used games for 30 dollars does not even relate to this topic because it is a illogical comparison. New games shouldn't have the same price as used games. What the point of mentioning I can buy used games for 30 dollars?

Thats beyond the point those, I brought up this ad to show games have not gone up in prices for the longest time.

People saying games are too expensive are simply trying to justify piracy.

I would rather pay 50 dollars on a game, compared to 30 dollars for a bluray movie.

[XSAlliN]

I love Valve... I'll never forgive them for ruining CS with 1.6 (don't get me started on that turd of an update...), but they're good people it seems.

I don't get it, CS 1.5 and CS 1.6 where the best versions of CS I ever played. They ruined it with CS Source, yes it has nice graphics compared to older version, but the gameplay... Let's say you don't need skill to play CS Source, just the hardware.