Today, we’ll talk about price of a games software. Game industries is a big deal today. To create some great products with a good profit, developers and the publishers have to spend a lot of money. They’ll have to figure out how much they will spend the money and make a good profit from it. They have to think about their customers too, and the aftersales service, like technical support, bug fix, game updates, etc. Absolutely need bunch of money to make customer happy. Not only that, especialy for the publishers, they have to spend more money for the promotion campaign and other event that related to the product. We, gamers that buy your product, really understand that you guys spent a lot of bucks to create your games. Therefore, the game softwares are sold at high price.
Gamers definitely don’t like expensive games, not only gamers, everybody does, nobody likes to buy something at high price. But if the product is really good and it’s really worth buying, then we’ll buy it. The problem is, sometimes the developers or the publishers (mostly, the publishers are the evil) don’t care about the aftersales, they just preview the product with a good promotion and demo, but when it comes out, it’s just like an unfinished games, a lot of bug, hole, and other major problem. A lot of developers don’t care about it, they left it be just like that. Even if that games are in low price, that kind of games software are really not worth buying, they let the customer down, they aren’t doing their job correctly. As a software developer, they responsible for their own product, and serve the customer.
Modern Warfare 2 for the PC is a good example for this case, as we know COD series are born for PC, every FPS games does, except Halo series, or Black. But Activision change it, just because of the consoles make a better profit, they just port the console version to the PC, no other PC community support just like the previous games. And, they sell it at high price, that’s the problem. The problem doesn’t stop there, a lot of cheaters at the servers, and Activision do nothing to fix it. How come a game, with a high price and great expectation do that shit. That kind of game definitely not worth buying, even if we knew that a lot of money have been used to make the games. The games itself aren’t bad, it’s a really really great game, with a really really bad customer supports, that will make the software’s bad, because it makes the customer really really dissapointed.
But there’s another expensive games with a great gameplay and great customer support, the game is called StarCraft 2. It sold at $70, maybe you can buy 2 games with standard price with that money, but in fact, people still buy it, SC2 is the fastest selling RTS games in the world. Imagine that, a game with extremely high price can be a fastest selling game of all time. People know that Blizzard, the developer, never let their customer down, they really really responsible for what they make. Usualy, Blizzard will make an update for a bughole just for several minutes after they got the report. They done the job correctly.
COD series and SC series have an almost same background, they both are great game series, an award winning games. But the customer service make them different. That’s the different between good games and good price. When Valve asked about why are they delaying Portal 2, they answered “Making game is hard”. They surely got the point, making games is surely hard. Well, making games is really hard, but what if your products aren’t selling well just because of your poor customers services? All of your hard works will going to waste. Just like Ubisoft for their PC games, even their games are in low price, no one would buy it because the problem of their bad DRM, making people can’t enjoy the game easily, from my point of view, DRM is also one of a customer service problems.
Well, I’m a PC gamer, so I just can talk about it. As I know, console don’t have these kind of problems, because every games that release on each console are designed to work optimally with their own online platform like PSN, XboxLive and Nintendo WFC and mostly the first party take a really big major part for the responsibility of their product.
I don’t know if you guys understand what I’m talking about here, but I hope you get the point. The point is we customers only will pay for what its worth to pay, we don’t really care if your product spent a lot of cash for the developers or the publishers. We just want a great product, we’ll buy it if it worth buying looked at in every aspect even if the products are in a really high price. We want developers and publishers to understand us more.
Me & My Logic 