Do you think the ever increasing number of heavily discounted game bundles will ultimately affect the gaming industry negatively?

[Whiterabbit-uk]

I've purchased virtually all of the Indie Gala as well as most of the other bundles such as the Indie Royale, Humble Bundles, SFI bundles, Groupees bundles 9Be Mine and Build a Bundle) as well as some of the more obscure bundles such a sthe Indiefort, Greenlight, Indie underdog, summerbatch, Indie buskers, elf squad, Quadtastic and Op Gratitude bundles. despite already having virtually all of the games mainly on Steam, but also Gamesgate, Gamestop, Gamefly (direct 2 Drive), Desura, as well as a few others such as Big fish etc.


Personally I think the continued and burgeoning release of these bundles where you can purchase virtually nothing for AAA games and Indie games of a high standard will eventually undermine many of the smaller developers and indeed the major ones apart from maybe those that release Battlefield 3 and Call of duty, both of which we so far have never seen in any bundles. As the bundles become more common lace and now with the release of the first AAA humble bundle we are going to see other big developers wanting to release their games onto the bundle market. Of course initially this is going to be big business for the developers. all the fans and hardened gamers will have already paid through the nose for those games. It's initially only going to be those that wouldn't otherwise purchase those games, but it will soon come to pass where many of those gamers who would normally buy as a pre release or soon after release will decide to wait for them to be released as a bundle for a fraction of the cost of the originals. (We'd be crazy not to). I remember spending a small fortune of pre release games last year between February and June 2011. when the summer sale started, I calculated I could have saved over £300 ($450) if I'd waited to purchase those games in the sale. Stupidly for me I'd hardly touched most of the games because I'd actually purchased so many games over the previous Christmas 2010 sale (over 250), I was still working through those. I vowed not to pre-purchase many more games simply because it wasn't good economics considering Steam reduced the price of new games relatively quickly compared to several years ago, where you could wait up to a year before games were reduced in price.

I remember that summer sale (2011) like it was yesterday as I was really shocked at how much I could have saved. There were games selling with 50% off that had only been released two weeks earlier. Crazy stuff IMO. I still do pre-purchase some games. I nearly pre-ordered Medal of Honor Warfighter from Origin, but held off, partly because I'd already pre-ordered Call of duty: Black Ops II plus I felt £50 was too much for the deluxe version. Less than three weeks after release I decided to go ahead and purchase it because my Call of Duty: BOII still wasn't working (so far I've managed to get it to work for one short session when I installed the NVIDIA beta driver), since then it minimizes to desktop every time I start it up. I was in the mood for a good FPS run and gun fix ( I actually prefer FPS games like ArmA II and Op Flashpoint, but sometimes the run and gun type are a lot of fun and great stress relievers) . Thankfully something got in the way of me buying the game on a particular day last week (YI think Origin had frozen on me); the following day amazingly Origin had their Thanksgiving sale and Medal of Honor was 50% off. I find that amazing as I think the MOH series is just as good as the COD series, but you'd never see the COD games with so much off so soon after release. in fact it takes at least a year before you see anything greater than 40% off. Another amazing bargain last weekend was Spec Ops: The Line. Okay it was always a budget title costing £24.99 when it was released about 4 months ago, but selling at less than £4 last week was just unbelievable (I think it was via Greenman gaming)

Anyway, back to the bundles (Please excuse my waffle. The opiate meds I take sort of make it hard to be succinct).

Just take a look at the Humble THQ bundle. You're getting over £200 ($300) worth of games (prices at release) for only $5 ($7.5), Some of those games have barely been released a year e.g. Red Faction: Armageddon (granted Armageddon was a bit of a disaster for the developer after spending millions it didn't sell very well, but that was IMO because it was crap compared to the previous release (Red Faction Guerrilla), and Saints Row the Third.


Considering games haven't gone up in price in real terms for many years, in fact they have dropped significantly over the last 15 years apart from premium games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor and Need for Speed, all of which retail at £40 for the standard versions and £50 for the deluxe versions (approx) most other games sell for between £24.99 to £30. I was paying £30 for AAA games back in 1995. In real terms £30 back then is approximately equivalent to around £80 to £90 now, which implies that games are a third of the price they used to cost. Granted a lot of developers now release loads of DLC's for their games. Just look at Train Simulator 2013; there's over a 100 DLC's costing in the region of £1400 if you purchase them all at full price. I actually have 90% of the DLC's for that game (coz I used to love trains when i was a kid, lol) but too be honest I think they are overly expensive and many should already be included in the game. If you compare train sin 2013 (formerly Railworks), to Trainz. The latest version of trains (2012) has as many trains and rolling stock as the equivalent of almost a third of the DLC's for Rail sim 2012. The only downside with Trainz is the graphics are not quite as good as Train sim 2013.

I really do wonder how long it will be before the bottom drops out of the gaming market?

I doubt games like Call of Duty and Need for Speed will see the inside of a Bundle, but I reckon most other games will be fair game from now on. Get ready for the cheapest deals yet to come. 2013 is going to be the year of the AAA bundles.

I wonder how many big developers will be left standing at the end of it all?

Yeah I know I seem a bit negative. I suppose its partly because I've paid full price for most of the games in the bundles we've seen so far and then I see loads of users getting the same games for a fraction of the cost. I know its my own fault, but it still gnaws at me somewhat and it really does worry me that games are going to suffer in the future. Why would a developer put so much effort into a game if they know its going to sell for a greatly reduced price very quickly?

Does anyone else think the advent of the heavily discounted game bundles will undermine and ultimately destroy the gaming industry as we know it, or do you think it will help create more and better games? I truly hope its the latter and not the former, but I do think the former is more likely.

(Of course the whole landscape is changing with the advent of the ultra thin notebooks and phones that play games).

[Whiterabbit-uk]

Please excuse the disjoined post above. I didn't get around to proof reading it before posting and theres no way of editing it. sorry.

[Jordanzts]

whiterabbit-uk の投稿を引用：

Please excuse the disjoined post above. I didn't get around to proof reading it before posting and theres no way of editing it. sorry.

You can edit, actually. Hover over the top right corner of your post, you should see a delete button and a edit button.

[FlamingDeath]

You sir, are the epitome of consumerism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=MvgN5gCuLac

[Agent X ™]

Bundles or no bundles, these companies are making some nice side cash off of them along with steam xmas/summer sales. I think the THQ bundle made millions of of games that have been out ther for 1-3 years. It is a win win. The companies get to move units they they would have never moved in a while. If EA did a humble bundle and put BF2 collection with crysis 1 and a semi old NFS game or Dead Space1/2 with steam codes, I bet they would make a killing while still giving to charity. But also if people will not buy a game for 60, the companies are force to drop the price or be prepared to no move any units. Perfect case is Lost Planet 2 on steam. The game needs a price drop to 15 bucks or lower now. I think AAA titles should stay at the 5-10 dollar mark when they get old-mega old. Imagine if Sega was asking 20 bucks for sonic 2(sega genesis) for steam.....

[Satoru]

Personally I thought the Indie bundles did more to hurt the 'pricing average' of indie games than most other things. The discouted pricing on steam was not really much different than typical sales in retail. Its entirely different than the IOS model since games are not ACTUALLY priced at $1, which is a huge difference.

People will always try to get the best deal, some peole will wait years to buy until it goes on sale. But as an average, Valve has indicated that pre-sales numbers are good as well as 'normal' sales numbers. This indicates that there is little cannibalization of full priced items due to these sale events. If there was data, and they have LOTS of data, that salse were hurting the bottom line, they wouldn't be doing it.

[Wendschlag]

How would we know when Valve doesn't share numbers, nor their partners? I think you are reaching when coming up with this topic.

[Satoru]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/174587/Steam_sales_How_deep_discounts_really_affect_your_games.php#.UL6-s9clUuY

Valve's Holtman says he's never noticed any negative consequences from these promotions. Instead, most games still see positive trends in their sales numbers well after the discounts are over. At the very worst, a game's sales will just revert back to what they were before the promotion began.

Note that Steam promos are done with the publisher/developer permission. If they thought it negatively impacted them, they'd stop doing it. However with the vast amounts of extreme details that Steam gives all their customers, obviously they're not concerned since the sales continue.

[Τhe Rolling Cheese Wheel]

Game's were expensive back then because there weren't enough of them and the demand was sky high.

Today's demand are still relatively high but the supply of games is so ridiculous that the publishers and developers of unimpressive video games have to compete in price in order to sell. It just so happens steam came at an opportune time to open a gateway for developers and publishers alike to compete and make money.

Let's put this in to perspective. Your account has roughly 1800 games not including DLC's and other randoms. That is more than all the games on the snes and sega genesis combined. Keep in mind that this 1800 number is only on the steam platform and is only a small percentage of indie games and AAA games in existence that is playable with modern computers.

Be happy games are cheap these days, imagine if we had to pay 40-60 dollars per game. None of our accounts would've have a few hundred games let alone a few thousand.

Btw the majority of bundles are stacked with games that weren't selling at all on steam either because they were too old or they simply suck.

Good games that are marketed well will sell regardless of price. The only ones that have to worry about being forced to lower their prices are the developers and publishers that constantly push out garbage in to the market.

[jagd]

Big developers (AAA ones ) probably still will not release their games at bundles (with some big aid campains are exception ) , THQ is at a very hard situation they are trying to survive atm and activision does not drop price because they backed up by money from blizzard . If they had not ( =without blizard income ) they would as drop as other companies i think

[gibbousmoon100]

OP, you make some excellent and interesting points, wordy or no. ;)

That said, I think it's important to remember that Steam gamers are only a subset. Many gamers are not comfortable with the idea of DRM-only games, or having their entire game library dependent on the existence of a single company. If you see similar bundles suddenly appearing in retail stores (and they do exist, but to a much lesser extent) then your concerns would hold more water.