As consumers, we indirectly control many of the decisions that are made by all game companies including: what games are put out, how they look, how they sound, and even what voice-actors are used. Without us, the gamers, they would all go out of business, from the biggest game companies like EA to the smallest indie developer/garage-programmer.  So why do these companies continue to release games at such astronomical prices?

Well I realized they charge us whatever they want because we allow them to.

I remember being a kid, going to Nathan’s (you know, the hot dog place) because they had the sickest arcade around.  I’d beg and plead my parents or my uncle, whomever was taking me, to buy me tokens to play the games.  They’d spend 5-10 bucks on me, my brother and my cousins COMBINED, and man we would go to town for hours.  Between the pinball machines, Tekken, X-Men, The Simpsons game, and many more, it would have been impossible for us to get bored.

Nowadays, I have to contemplate for days, literally micromanaging my checking account just to decide whether or not I’m going to buy Assassin’s Creed 2 when it comes out, let alone pre-order it. As a broke college student I just can’t afford to spend big bucks on games.  So where do I turn?  Emulation, recycled and pre-owned PS2 Games, GOG.com, and the Indie Marketplaces of PSN, XBLA, and Online.  It’s the only place where I can find fairly priced games.  Even friggin’ Facebook has applications that are more popular than certain games that are out now. I mean go through your friend-list, I’d bet you almost all of them are either addicted to Farmville or Typing Maniac, or something similar.

I’m not saying that online marketplaces, and Facebook are bad; quite the contrary. They are great because the games are so diverse, and for the same 60$ I might spend on one new game, I could buy 6-12 games each starkly different than the next. Indie developers are forced to work inside a budget, therefore they take more time to create a creative and quality game.

Newsflash people, according to AOL Finance, in 2009 Electronic Arts made 4 BILLION dollars.  Seems like they did a pretty good job huh? 

WRONG.  Electronic Arts may have made 4 billion dollars, but how much of it did they actually get to keep?  They have such an enormous overhead that their net gain, (meaning the money which they actually pocketed after all of their expenses were paid) was NEGATIVE 1.08 BILLION DOLLARS.  Don’t believe me?  Check it out here.

So what is the goal here?  Is it to make money?

Of course it is, the goal for most businesses is to make money. And not to go on a tangent, but look at our current economic state. If the goal for companies is to make money it’s going to be a lot harder to do (obviously). If the goal is to make great, quality games, at FAIR prices, then they will make a killing; I assure you. 

Scheming, manipulating and focus testing is not the answer.  Hard work, ingenuity, creativity, and diligence are the keys to success, not only in the world of video games, but in any profession.

I mean, I will happily pay 60-70 dollars for a game like Fallout 3 or Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.  They are well developed games.  And when I say well developed, I don’t mean they are long games.  I mean they are games that make me want to keep playing even though they are very long.  I want an intriguing, thought provoking experience that is going to keep me mentally or emotionally invested for the entirety of the experience.  In terms of length, I just happen to think that for 60$ the experience should last more than 10-12 hours.  Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is a great game that I have thoroughly enjoyed, and I was definitely invested in the game for the entirety of the experience, but because that game was so short, I think it’s a little bit ridiculous to charge so much for it. Same thing with Army Of Two. There are so few local co-op games for PS3, that I am willing to shell out more money for the experience, but at least be fair about it. Army Of Two had huge problems, and was ridiculously easy to beat. I purchased it and beat it with my brother in one sitting. That’s ridiculous.

Think about it like this: if I buy an episode of a 1 hour TV show on iTunes, it’s roughly 3 bucks.  My Fallout 3 clock is past 50 hours, so to make a price comparison: Fallout 3, by iTunes pricing, should be worth about 150 dollars. I paid $60.

This to me is an extremely fair rate for a quality game that will keep me playing for hours on end.  If I am going to purchase Uncharted for 60$, I am going to want some more options, whether it be online play, free DLC, or just a longer game with a deeper story. 

It’s time to take games to the next level, and in doing so you don’t need to spend more money or time developing a game, you need to spend your time and money effectively and efficiently.  I’d rather wait an extra 6 months to a year for a great game to come out rather than a game that’s been rushed to the shelves just so it hits for the holiday-season (Remember what happened with Knights Of The Old Republic 2??). 

It is for this reason that I say Assassin’s Creed 2 better be one helluva a great game. They’ve spent almost 30 million dollars producing Assassin’s Creed 2, with collaborations from people all around the globe.  Rather than buy more staff and rent more office space around the world, why not cut your workforce in half, up their pay a little bit, and incentivize gamers with episodic gameplay like Penny Arcade or Half-Life 2.  That is just 2 of the many solutions there are to this epidemic of unfairly priced games.

Lastly, I must come back to the gamers. It’s not the corporations’ fault for charging us so much for games. They only do it because we allow them to. If we want higher quality games for less then we need to get up off of our asses, put our controllers down, and demand that they supply us with quality games at fair prices.

WUT!