14 DAY TRIAL // The gaming industry is huge these days, and it certainly is proving to be very successful in fending off the negative aspects of the worldwide recession. Even though most of the companies involved are recording losses these days, things aren't as bad as in other areas of the industry.
But this trend won't last forever, especially since the average price of a game stays at around $60 or around £50 in the UK. This is due to the fact that game development is costing publishers much more than what can be extracted from such a low price, at least according to Chris Deering, chairman of the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, who is also the former president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.
“Before there can be as many successful blockbuster games as there were in the past, games have to be produced in a more efficient fashion,” Deering said. “In order to price the games at a level where they would support an industry like they did ten years ago, they'd have to be sold at £70. But people just don't have that kind of money, there's a psychological glass ceiling. Consumers won't spend more, but to write the game, publishers are having to spend more than ever before. That's the key problem.”
In order to back up his speech, Deering said that the development of a high-end game for the major platforms cost roughly ten times as much as the last generation, where the PS2 reigned supreme, or almost 50 times as much as when the first PlayStation was popular.
But don't think that this will mean things will get out of hand anytime soon and that publishers will have to start charging a higher price for games in order to stay alive, as examples of lower-priced popular titles are plentiful. “Yet there are lots of things you can get for less than the relative value of paying 50p an hour for a very high end game.”
Perhaps the recession is causing publishers to think twice before jacking up the price, but in the near future it will happen, whether we like it or not. Hopefully though, games will still increase in quality.