Paying More for Less?

It’s probably something you’ve noticed if you play a lot of PC games, or consider buying the PC version of a newly released multiplatform game. For some strange reason even though the cost of console games seems to keep going up, the price of PC games seems to be going down. Significantly so. 

In the past it’s usually been about a $10 difference with PC games priced at around $50 and console games around $60, but there seems lately that this price difference is widening. Lately the PC versions tend to run for about $40, or in the case of the Ghostbusters game being released today, you can get the same $60 console version for a mere $30!

So what is going on here? I mean game publishers have been telling us for years that the cost of making games has gone up, which is why they’ve had to start charging more. But when  they go and release a game new for half price on PC compared to console it certainly seems like there is something rotten in the Kingdom of Mushroom.

Certainly at face value it does, but once you start to realize the factors involved the price gap can be mostly explained.

Much like the licensing fee factor, console makers sell development tool kits to game developers which they need in order to make the game for a specific console. These are usually quite expensive, but once they have them there is no limit to the number of games they can make with them. 

There is something to be said about the middleman. Game publishers don’t get to sell you their games directly in most cases, (especially console games,) they have to sell them to stores who in turn sell them to the consumer. As such they aren’t selling the games to Best Buy and GameStop for $60, they are selling the games to them for less then that (I’ve heard $55, but I can’t verify that.) That’s a pretty slim margin in terms of the profit these stores make on these games, but that mark up is still a fairly large percentage of the cost. 

 

Now with digital distribution through things like Steam allows a more direct sale from publisher/developer to consumer, which allows them to mark down the price somewhat since there isn’t a middleman in most cases, acting as a go between. Also distributing the game over the net removes any manufacturing, and shipping costs related to getting the physical game into physical store, but this is probably off set somewhat with the cost of maintaining the bandwidth necessary for the online store.

This is probably the leading motivator in the price discrepancy, since the PC is where game piracy is easiest and the most rampid. As such the lower cost could be seen as a concession of sorts saying, "we know you can get this for free out there illegally, but here is the same game fairly cheap and perfectly legal."

Even after accounting for all of this I still can’t help, but feel that in a couple of cases the console gamers is getting punished for owning a console and wanting to play games on it. If you look at Left 4 Dead it was $40 on PC, and $60 on Xbox 360. Even if all the above accounts for that $20 difference, the 360 player didn’t receive updates to the game as timely as the PC players did. In addition to the fact that it is an online multiplayer game, and in order to play online on the 360 you have to pay about $5 a month. While the PC player’s get Steam for free (and Steam is arguable as good if not better than Xbox Live.)

I still can’t help but feel like sometimes that the console player is really getting the short end of the stick by paying more for a game, and receiving an inferior product.