Posted July 16, 2010
Looks like the folks in the gaming industry are once again chasing the wrong target. What they need to be focused on is not preventing piracy, but increasing sales. As it stands, people basically have three options when it comes to games: 1) pay for the game 2) pirate the game 3) don't play the game. Eliminating option 2 for people won't automatically send all those people scurrying for option 1, and my own estimate is that most of the folks would just end up going for option 3. Additionally, eliminating option 2 is damn difficult, and most efforts in this area have the nasty side effect of making some of the folks who normally opt for option 1 to instead opt for option 3. Basically the folks in the gaming industry need to be focusing on improving the value/cost ratio on their games in order to drive sales, and increasing the overall cost, decreasing the content included in a game purchase, and forcing people to jump through hoops for the complete game experience all work against this. 
bansama: Perhaps that's a given in your region. It's not here. Prices of new games go up. Old games rarely get a price drop. Even Activision's and Ubisoft's current pricing of $50 to $60 for a PC game is cheap by our current standards where the average price for a triple A title is $70 to $100.
My impression of the pricing of games has been that the pricing actually follows two distinct models. The pricing of new releases seems to follow a monopoly/oligopoly pricing model, where prices are set purely by what the market will bear with competition basically being a non-factor. This seems to be driven by the large number of people who want the specific game in question upon release, rather than simply looking for a game in some genre, or more generally just some type of entertainment. However, some time after release (around 6 months or so, by my estimate) the crowd that wants the specific game is overtaken by the crowd that is just looking for a game, and as a result the game prices shift to basically a free market model, with competing products having a large impact on the price. In general this seems to result in a very significant decrease in price for most games, although some of the particularly well-received games see less of a drop. Of course, there are also various things that can distort this, such as if games have a heavy multiplayer component, or regions that have limited distribution channels (restricting competition or the ability of pricing to respond to competition). However, my general observation has been that the discrepancy in the prices between these two pricing models has been what's been creeping upward, and I don't think this can be discounted when considering possible reasons for some of the lackluster sales claimed by some game companies.
My impression of the pricing of games has been that the pricing actually follows two distinct models. The pricing of new releases seems to follow a monopoly/oligopoly pricing model, where prices are set purely by what the market will bear with competition basically being a non-factor. This seems to be driven by the large number of people who want the specific game in question upon release, rather than simply looking for a game in some genre, or more generally just some type of entertainment. However, some time after release (around 6 months or so, by my estimate) the crowd that wants the specific game is overtaken by the crowd that is just looking for a game, and as a result the game prices shift to basically a free market model, with competing products having a large impact on the price. In general this seems to result in a very significant decrease in price for most games, although some of the particularly well-received games see less of a drop. Of course, there are also various things that can distort this, such as if games have a heavy multiplayer component, or regions that have limited distribution channels (restricting competition or the ability of pricing to respond to competition). However, my general observation has been that the discrepancy in the prices between these two pricing models has been what's been creeping upward, and I don't think this can be discounted when considering possible reasons for some of the lackluster sales claimed by some game companies.
