14 DAY TRIAL // Olivier Comte, vice-president of Namco Bandai Partners, shared his views on future business models for the video-game industry in an interview with MCV. This occurred during Namco Bandai's latest Level Up advertising event in Barcelona, Spain. He expressed his belief that the way of selling software entertainment at that particular moment became too expensive to the average consumer and that this needed to change for publishers to survive. Too many games at too high a price were being released and this made the recoupment of development investments a very hard aim to achieve.
“If you compare [games] to music, music has two ways to make money – sales of disc, which is decreasing, and concert tickets, which are increasing so there’s another source of revenue for the artist. Film has a similar situation, there is the disc and the cinema. Games just have one model, the sale of the product either as a box or a digital download. So we need to think about how we can develop a secondary business model,” Comte in the interview said.
The industry needed to come together, he thought, and rethink the way it was selling its products or the revenue would start to decline because of the over-saturated state the market was in.
Downloadable content was Comte's solution to bringing down the price of software and making it affordable for the customer, while keeping the business profitable for the publisher and the developer.
Five-hour-long cheaper installments should be the norm for retail releases, while the rest of the game should be made available in an episodic form that users can buy when they feel they have the money to do so. Comte also urged platform holders like Microsoft or Sony to be open to reducing licensing costs, another reason why retail prices have grown so much in recent years.