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The Almighty Buck Entertainment Games

On Retailers And Videogame Pricing 62

Posted by simoniker from the money-honey dept.
Thanks to CNN Money for its article discussing the results of a retail survey analyzing relative videogame prices among "key game retailers." According to the survey: "Wal-Mart's prices were the highest, coming in 9 percent higher -- nearly $100 for a basket of 30 games -- than Amazon.com and 6 percent higher than Best Buy, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Tony Gikas." Other interesting trends were also observed, though: "The used game market has quietly been growing for the past several years and Gikas now estimates that more than 8 percent of all games sold in the U.S. are used games." The piece concludes by noting: "The survey indicated retail prices seem to be holding up as the current generation of consoles hits middle-age... Other analysts, though, say retailers they've talked to indicate while prices have not fallen much, the demand for games at higher price points is not as strong as it was a year ago."
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On Retailers And Videogame Pricing More

On Retailers And Videogame Pricing

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  • That's an aweful large round up to $100. From the numbers in the article I got a difference of $67.06 between the cheapest and the most costly.

    • Re:$100? (Score:2, Informative)

      by wheresdrew ( 735202 )
      Cheapest - Amazon.com $1,134.51
      Most Expensive - Wal-Mart $1,231.76

      That's a difference of $97.25. I'd say that counts as "almost $100."

    • Re:$100? (Score:2, Informative)

      by dickiedoodles ( 728410 )
      That's an aweful large round up to $100. From the numbers in the article I got a difference of $67.06 between the cheapest and the most costly.

      The difference of $67.06 is between the best and worst brick and morter store (Best buy and Wal-mart), the $100 is between best and worst (amazon and wal-mart).
      • Did they factor in Amazon's shipping? I'd think that would be rather relevant, no?
        • Not really. Unless your game is less than $25. They have free shipping on all orders over $25. Of course you *could* bump up to super fast speedy next hour shipping but... I don't think the shipping is particularly relevant.

    • Re:$100? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Some games are worth $40 or $50. For instance, Unreal Tourney 2004, Quake III, Half Life. These are games that will last a long time, have no finite life, experience massive content addition throughout its life via mods...

      But other than games like those, $50 is very pricey. Any non-multiplayer game shouldn't be $40-$50. Any game with a set point of completion should be much cheaper. In fact, games all around are really too expensive. Console games are usually around $70 to $90 from what I've seen (I don't

      • Re:$100? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by SuiteSisterMary ( 123932 ) <slebrunNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday May 06, 2004 @09:28AM (#9072588) Journal

        Faugh, I say!

        If you get ten hours of enjoyment out of a fifty hour game, you've just paid 5 bucks per hour. You'll pay a hell of a lot more than that to go to a movie, say.

        Books can be cheaper, as they're the result of one or two guys banging on a keyboard, somebody editing it, and somebody printing it.

        DVDs are an anomoly; it's often easy to find the full blown DVD of a given movie for less than the CD soundtrack. Also, consider that Laserdiscs tended to be $100+.

        • Re:$100? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by k_187 ( 61692 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @11:03AM (#9073519) Journal
          Well, what do movie tickets cost anymore? Around here they're $6.75 for regular shows ($4.75 for matnees) but I live in the middle of nowhere. I'm gonna say 9 cause I seem too remember that being about the price when I was in DC last year. So if a movie is 2 hours long, you're paying $4.50 per hour, and you get 5 different enjoyable experiences instead of one for the game.

          Anyway, its just a thought. I haven't payed $50 for a game in years. The most I've payed in recent memory was $35 for Soul Caliber for the Dreamcast, but that was 2 years ago, and nothing's been more than that since. And I don't even buy many used games. Unless you're the type of person that has to have it the day it comes out, there's no reason to drop that much cash on a game, give it two or three months, and it'll go down a little. I'm still waiting on Fzero GX and Viewtiful Joe to get down to $20. Hmm, maybe I should go check on them ;)

          Oh, and Cheap Ass Gamer is your friend too.

          • Well, I tend to wait for games to drop in price myself, unless of course it's the kind of game one JUST CAN'T WAIT FOR, but as far as I'm concerned, Ninja Gaiden, for example, was well worth 70 bucks CDN.

        • Books can be cheaper, as they're the result of one or two guys banging on a keyboard, somebody editing it, and somebody printing it.

          One or two guys banging on a keyboard... No wonder nobody learns to read any more.

      • It's been a long time since I've seen a console game that was > $50 for just a game. Probably since the days of SNES, or maybe N64, because carts were more expensive to produce.

        I see you've never owned a console, but have you actually played the games? Serious question, not trying to bash you. The games I've played, with a few exceptions, have superb quality with minor bugs at the most. And the exceptions I've had I've gotten from the bargain bin for $20. Well.... with the exception of Enter the Matrix
      • Generally at my local Gamestop new games go for $50, not counting stuff like FFXI which comes with the HDD and so is $100, or the Socom 2 that ships with the headset, which was something like $60? But for just the game it's usually just $50.

      • Re:$100? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by UrgleHoth ( 50415 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @11:01AM (#9073496) Homepage
        I mean, what kid (or even teenager) has the kind of money necessary to pay $200 for a console

        Teens have more disposable income than their parents. Read more about it here [govst.edu]

        Even if you are an adult without kids, you have much more bills to pay than your "average" teen with a job. When I was in HS and worked, I had close to 100% disposable income. When I moved out, that dropped to around 5%, as rent, phone, utility, car insurance, and food absorbed the great bulk of my funds.

  • Used games from Amazon? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by BMonger ( 68213 )
    The article doesn't really mention this but I find it hard to believe that Amazon is that much cheaper (I'd like to see what games they picked). In my experience Amazon and Best Buy are generally the same with Wal-Mart usually being a few cents to a dollar and some change cheaper. Except of course when you look at the used game market at Amazon. Then Amazon is by far cheaper but you typically aren't buying from Amazon.

    I'm not buying this article...

    • Re:Used games from Amazon? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      So you're arguing that this article is inaccurate based on what exactly? Your internal belief system?

      The fact is that Walmart takes a very long time to lower prices on their games. Games that came out a year ago or even more can often be found for their original retail price. While Best Buy, Amazon, EB, etc. all sell the games for ~$50 when they are first released, they are on a shorter timeframe for when the price of a released game is lowered.

      • I wouldn't call it exactly my internal belief system. I'll pick a random game... lets see... Ninja Gaiden for the XBox.

        Now I'll go find the prices. (Maybe I'll prove myself wrong).

        Best Buy - $49.99
        Walmart - $49.75
        Amazon.com (actually from Office Depot) - $46.95 (or $34.98 used).

        Hm.. well I guess I'm wrong. The point I was trying to get across however was I wondered if they went by the used prices for the games on Amazon or the new prices for the games on Amazon. I honestly didn't think Amazon was th
  • That's $4.50 and less if you're buying games that are less obvioulsy, which is an easily justifyable travel expense in exchange for convenience or (gasp!) company loyalty based on customer service, return/exchange policies, etc.

    And who's buying 30 games at a time anwyays?

  • Aren't costs supposed to come down? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mausmalone ( 594185 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @08:50AM (#9072320) Homepage Journal
    Now, I'm not an economist or anything, but aren't costs supposed to come down when the demand decreases? Most games I'm looking to buy are fairly old, not noteworthy anymore, and simply take up space on store shelves. Still, the prices stay up where they are and nobody buys them. Even used games rarely go below $20 anymore, and I can remember walking into FuncoLand when I was a kid and seeing that newspaper of game prices with things priced around $5-$10.
    • Yeah, that was in the heyday of the NES where anyone in a garage could create a game. There were tons and tons of craptastic games (anyone remember all the Super Mario carts you could get for $1?). Nowadays with budgets being so high, you dont see games for el cheapo anymore. At least they dont cost $80 like Phantasy Star 4 did when it came out for the Genesis.
    • Now, I'm not an economist or anything, but aren't costs supposed to come down when the demand decreases?

      Usually. You are refering to what is known as economy of scale however it doesn't really apply to games. The cost to produce a single game, after it has been developed, is nearly identical to the cost of producing 1,000,000 games. Thus no real cost savings, with the exception of shipping, as the volume increases

    • > aren't costs supposed to come down when the demand decreases?

      Depends on the goods. Video games--especially video games on CD/DVD--are like movies, music CDs and software. They cost a bundle to initially create, but once they're created, making additional copies is dirt cheap. The result is the more you sell, the lower the price, because you can spread that big upfront fixed cost over more copies.

      Chris Mattern
    • You can still find old games priced around $5-$10, depending on where you look. I had wanted to buy Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic despite knowing it was a mediocre game, so I kept an eye out for it. MicroCenter still had Starship Titanic at $40 five years after it came out. Seriously, I saw it there for $40 in 2001 and thought it was kind of strange. I saw it again in 2003 (probably the exact same copy) at $40. I bought it for $10 at some other store a few months later. If you're looking for specifi
    • The simplest way to figure something like this out is to draw a graph. Since I'm always complaining about a general lack of economic understanding, I decided to take a minute and actually teach you something (I hope). this [xshots.com] is a little paint graph I sketched. Line D1 is the demand line for a video game. A manufacturer could affect demand and move the point the game is at on that line by adjusting the price. If they reduced the price, they'd sell more units.

      But what's happening here is that demand is increas
      • Well, the graph didn't help explain much. :P But your explanation did. I was most definitly thinking of the wrong economic priniciple, and I was also forgetting about the large upfront cost of development.

        I was mostly referring to used games, though, where the development cost was already paid by the first user and the prices are set by the reseller. I personally hold the belief that resellers are artificially inflating the prices of used games to (A) increase profit margins and (B) encourage people to

  • Do you need to have the "latest and greatest?" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wheresdrew ( 735202 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @08:53AM (#9072336) Journal
    I know a lot of gamers have to have all the newest titles right when they come out, but if you're not just totally itching to play a new game, why not wait a while? There are plenty of games I'd like to play, but am not willing to pay $50 for. Wait for the price to drop or the title to get a "greatest hits" release.

    You can save plenty that way. For example, I just picked up Wave Race: Blue Storm for Gamecube in Akihabara today for 500 yen - for a new copy. I'd never have paid $50 for it, but I'll buy just about anything for $5-10.

    Holding off on the "iffy" purchases makes it a lot easier on the wallet to pick up the occasional "gotta have it" game at $50.

    • Walmart (Score:3, Informative)

      by Hythlodaeus ( 411441 )
      I think part of the higher prices at Walmart is that they don't mark down older games, or wait much longer to do so. New games go on the shelves at similar prices to EB or Gamestop, but when the others have long since marked down titles to $20-30, Walmart still has them at $50.

  • Prices are just fine (Score:5, Insightful)

    by transformer_dp ( 725430 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @08:53AM (#9072340)
    Whether you're shopping at Walmart, EBX, Best Buy, Amazon, etc... We should all be happy that the prices of games haven't risen proportional to inflation. In the mid-80's a single Nintendo game would often cost $40 - $50. The 16-bit SNES and Genesis offered games in the $50 - $70 range. Of course the media used to create games has plummetted in price (cd/dvd as opposed to cartridge), but the production cost and complexity of the software have both increased dramatically. There is no reason to complain about the cost of a game, regardless of where you buy it.

    • I have reason to complain (Score:4, Insightful)

      by antin ( 185674 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @10:33AM (#9073158)
      Buy it in Australia and pay twice the US rate, even though our dollar hasn't been that low in years. We are paying roughly 50% more than the converted price ($100 AUD for a $50 USD game, which at the current exchange should be $70 AUD).

      You can count on the fact that if our dollar had gone down they would have adjusted prices... they didn't lose any time adjusting it when it slid.

      I think I have good reason to complain about the cost of a game (although I appreciate the article was focused on US sales).

      Anyways I think your argument regarding the increase in game cost and complexity versus the sale price is flawed - there are vastly more games being sold today than previously, so although it might cost more to develop them, the costs are recovered as more copies are sold. Ask EA if they mind their $500 million profit margins...

    • I am mad that I can't find Chrono Trigger for less than $50 most of the time. I have seen it at $30 before, but that is rare and usually an auction. Chrono Trigger(for the SNES) is a great game, but these are used, usually no box, usually no instruction manual, and only about ten years old now. Come on. I can see maybe $20 for the game and I may even break down and pay $30 one of these days, but the same price I could pay for a brand new game, that is a bit ridiculous.
      • Not a troll/flame, but you might want to look at the Final Fantasy Chronicles set. The PSX port is a fairly straight adaptation of the SNES version, and its much cheaper, and has the advantage of no built in battery to die. =\

  • Who's still surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hal2814 ( 725639 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @08:57AM (#9072366)
    I'm getting a little sick of people being surprised that WalMart is no longer the cheapest place to get some things. Once upon a time if you wanted it cheap you went to WalMart. Now that is no longer the case. They are still the cheapest on a few things, but not on many of their products.

    If you watch their low prices commercials you'll notice that the smiley face is lowering prices based on WalMart's original price for the item. WalMart is now in the game of convenience. You go to WalMart because you can get pretty much everything you need in one trip and it doesn't cost too terribly much.

    WalMart is not the place it used to be. Notice that "The customer is always right" is no longer their policy and that "Always the lowest prices" has been replaced with "Always low prices".
    • "Always the lowest prices" has been replaced with "Always low prices".

      They changed that because they were taking too much flak from the various consumer protection agencies. They don't have any sort of price-matching policy so it was misleading for them to claim they were always the lowest.

      • Just so you know, they do price-match in a few limited areas. I know their automotive area will price-match tires. I've gotten them to do this several times with tirerack.com. Not every store will price-match off the internet but some do so look around.
        • Yeah, I have had them price match on six packs of coke and the like with other stores that had them on sale. In fact, once I was asking the lady to match a price from a local grocery store and she pulled out all the ads for the other stores in the area and found an even lower price from a different grocery store that had them on sale. Very nice of her.


    • > WalMart is not the place it used to be. Notice that "The customer is always right" is no longer their policy and that "Always the lowest prices" has been replaced with "Always low prices".

      And did you notice how their "BUY U.S.! MADE IN THE USA!" flag-waving has sort of... disappeared?

    • That's not exactly true up here in Canada, at least. Most products (not including electronics - much more competitve) are *much* cheaper at Walmart than elsewhere. For example, a 2L bottle of pop is $0.84, whereas you can jack up that price to $1.33 (if it's on sale) to $3.00 (at a local convenience store). A huge tin of Good Host Ice Tea (which I consume on a monthly basis) is $7.83 at Walmart, but $10.00 or more anywhere else. The same holds true for beauty products/cosmetics (I'm married), toys (yu-g
    • Wal-Mart was forced to change Always the Low Price ( not prices) because it was found that there was no way it could claim the lowest price on EVERY item 365 days a year.
  • is the MAPs. Retailers must agree to not advertise the game for lower than a certain price, usually MSRP, if they want to sell it at all.

    I think there's more to it than that though because no one routinely sells cheaper games. There's no low-margin discount place like there is for most other things. It has to be artificially controlled because quite often the exact same game for the PC will be discounted almost immediately. Really the only way to get games less expensively is to track the deal sites an

    • Discounted or simply lower priced? After all, porting a console game (especially Xbox) to PC is fairly straightforward, so marginal costs will likely be low. However, no royalties will be owed to Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo. Generally, multi-platform PC games are $10 cheaper than their console brethren. My estimate of console royalties is... lessee... carry the five... $10. The corresponding disadvantage, of course, is the lack of secondary markets for PC games.
      • Both. One game I was watching recently was Freedom Fighters. Looking now, it turns out to be a bad example, though. It started out $10 cheaper than the console version, as you say, but the PC version dropped very quickly to $20. The console versions dropped to $40 after a couple months, but they stayed there for a very long time. I say it's a bad example because in checking for this reply I noticed that BestBuy actually dropped FF to $20 for Gamecube. That was really surprising. Good for me, though.
  • back in the day of windows 95, I went shopping for games and saw the Warcraft 2 expansion at an Electronics Botique in the mall for $29. Was thinking of buying it, but I delayed the purchase. Later in the day I went to both Fry's and another computer mega store (CompUSA, I think). Fry's had it for $19. The other megastore had it for $9. Nine dollars is a price you really can't pass up, particularly when it's one-third the price somewhere else.

    Although most stores sell things at about the same price, E
  • About a month ago, i was looking for a new shooter to play on LIVE... i went to wal-mart, and found that they had Return to Castle Wolfenstein for only $24.99 (Canadian), much cheaper than EB, who was selling it for 39$.

    And its consistent -- Last week I went to go buy Ninja Gaiden -- the guy at EB said that they didnt have any used copies in, but suggested a new copy, at the canada-normal price of $69.99. Meh, i said, i might as well see what price it is across the street at wal-mart, considering the deal

  • Wait a week or two (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 06, 2004 @10:59AM (#9073462)
    Ever notice that Best Buy or Circuit City will have a good price on a game a few weeks after release for like a week then the price goes back up? Return to Wolfenstien was like $50, then on sale for $29 then backup to $50.

    Obviously Ebay is a great source. Funco land is almost as bad as a college book store - they give you practically nothing for your game and then give a very minor discount to a buyer.

  • Armchair Economics (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kallisti777 ( 46059 ) <TimWalker@@@gmail...com> on Thursday May 06, 2004 @11:36AM (#9073921) Homepage Journal
    I'm no great fan of Wal-Mart, but I wouldn't be too quick to judge them based on the limited data in this survey. According to the article, 30 games were price compared between seven shops. The highest price for this basket of goods was $1231.76 at Wal-Mart; the lowest, $1134.51, was at Amazon.com. Does that mean Wal-Mart is evil and overpriced? Not necessarily....

    First, we have no idea how the games were selected, other than that they were a presumably random mix of "recent and older games from all platforms". If we picked a different set of 30 games, or sampled another set of 30 games, we'd likely get a much different result.

    A second point to consider is what is called the "grocery store paradox": store A advertises lower prices than store B, and vice versa, and a check of the receipts shows that both are telling the truth. Were we to break out certain categories of games from the sample (such as all PS2 or XBox games), Wal-Mart might have the lowest prices on these categories... old N64 cartridges that management won't drop below cost might be keeping Wal-Mart's average prices high, but most game buyers wouldn't care. We don't have the data, so we can't say for sure.

    My last point (because this is getting too boring, even for Slashdot) is that the differences presented by the survey likely won't matter to most consumers. The difference between best and worst was $97.25, or just over three dollars per game. If I only want 5 out of the 30, and I want them now, then a $16 convenience fee might be worth paying... and, who knows, Wal-Mart might have better prices on those five.

    To sum up: Amazon rocks, and Wal-Mart does in fact suck, but not for the reasons stated in the article. ;-)

    • Re:Armchair Economics (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dR.fuZZo ( 187666 )
      I'm no great fan of Wal-Mart, but I wouldn't be too quick to judge them based on the limited data in this survey.

      I wouldn't be quick to disregard the survey, either. My informal observation is that all games commonly sold at a set price point ($50 for most new games) can be had at Wal-Mart for basically $50, but they shave off enough that, technically, Wal-Mart is the cheapest store in town.

      However, what Wal-Mart has much less of, is substantial price cuts on any video games. You can sometimes find
  • It's interesting that they list BestBuy ahead of EB in this list. In my town EB is almost always $5-10 cheaper than BestBuy. Of course I'm not in a major metropolis, so YMMV. I suspect that the BestBuys in major markets are more price competitive in general...
  • Wal-Mart always has the highest prices on video games around here. A good example is Halo for the Xbox. After the "official" price cut to $29 Wal-Mart still continued to sell it for $49.

    I've also noticed all of Wal-Mart's GBA games are $5 more than anywhere else. I believe they are still selling Beyond Good and Evil for $49 at my local store as well.

    Cheap Ass Gamer has good deals sometimes but I've found the best place to get new games is Half.com

  • I generally have to keep a pretty close eye on pricing of PC games, as I run the computer department of an electronics store with a "lowest price" guarantee. Generally, most titles are all within a buck or so of each other when I actively compare. Some stores will undercut by as little as a nickel.

    Where the big differences come in is when the big box stores use a title as a loss leader to get people into their store/website, or when they work out some kind of deal with a publisher for a bargain price,

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