What's the most you would pay for a computer game?

27col

SueBee wrote: »

Prices are clearly going up with the next gen games.
Hopefully they'll drop, but if not, what's the most you would pay for a game?
£55? £60? £70?

Answer. I'd pay nothing. Never played a computer game in my life.
Seems a pretty moronic past time to me.

Mercenary

I try never to pay over £30 for my PC games. If there are no offers or discounts before release, then I don't mind waiting a while for the price to begin to drop, or even a Steam sale.
I always buy online after doing a lot of price-comparisons and I also make use of Tesco Clubcard vouchers if possible

@ 27col
I used to think that too, a long time ago. Then I found a genre of game that actually interested me, which led to another...... then another.... and so on.
It's not as 'moronic' as gazing bovinely at a tv screen. Playing a challenging game makes your brain think about strategy and spatial awareness as well as quickening reflexes. Fighter pilots these days (to name only one group of the military) have often been good at computer games before their training. Something to think about?

bluenoseam

Counting out the obvious hardware costs involved I think my record tops out at £150, but in my defense that also included a fully functioning guitar with a retail value of £90 in its own right.

For a special edition of a game I have almost touched triple digits - two CoD biggies & GTA 4 immediately spring to mind as does Halo 3. (Nightvision goggles, remote control car, safety deposit box & the Master Chief helmet respectively) I've also been known to drop £60-70 on collectors editions of World of Warcraft and it's expansions as well as a similar amount on Starcraft 2.

Way I see it is that I don't drink or smoke, so gaming's the token "vice" (well, that football & music!), so I don't have any qualms on spending money I have for something that I want. The truth is though that for 7 years I never paid retail price for a game as I worked in games retail - the shock the first time I had to pay £40 for a game was tough! Today I don't have a problem with £50 for a game if I believe it's worth it, but I have to believe it's worth that money or I'll wait for it to drop in a sale/preowned.

Nilrem

SueBee wrote: »

Prices are clearly going up with the next gen games.
Hopefully they'll drop, but if not, what's the most you would pay for a game?
£55? £60? £70?

Not really going up much, back in the day you could easily spend £50-70 on one of the FX based SNES games and often about £30-40 for a PS game.

They've always seemed to hover at about £40-50 for a top, new console game, and between about 30-50 for a PC one if bought at the RRP's.

The most I've paid for a PC game was about £75 for the collectors edition of a MMORPG, which came with a couple of books and a collectors miniature.

The most I've paid on a console game was about £50 on a SNES game back in the day, normally about £25-40ish at most (£40 being the average RRP).

Normally I tend to wait for games to appear at the reduced prices a few months down the line, and get them at massive discounts, for example I just got a Saint's Row pack on Steam a week or so back with 3 full games including the latest and all the DLC.

As with most forms of entertainment if you buy when the item is first released you tend to pay a premium (be it films, books, or games), if you can wait 3-6 months the price drops, especially if it's a popular title that has reached nearly market saturation.

Nilrem

SueBee wrote: »

Prices are clearly going up with the next gen games.
Hopefully they'll drop, but if not, what's the most you would pay for a game?
£55? £60? £70?

Not really going up much, back in the day you could easily spend £50-70 on one of the FX based SNES games and often about £30-40 for a PS game.

They've always seemed to hover at about £40-50 for a top, new console game, and between about 30-50 for a PC one if bought at the RRP's.

The most I've paid for a PC game was about £75 for the collectors edition of a MMORPG, which came with a couple of books and a collectors miniature.

The most I've paid on a console game was about £50 on a SNES game back in the day, normally about £25-40ish at most (£40 being the average RRP).

Normally I tend to wait for games to appear at the reduced prices a few months down the line, and get them at massive discounts, for example I just got a Saint's Row pack on Steam a week or so back with 3 full games including the latest and all the DLC.

As with most forms of entertainment if you buy when the item is first released you tend to pay a premium (be it films, books, or games), if you can wait 3-6 months the price drops, especially if it's a popular title that has reached nearly market saturation.

PenguinJim

SueBee wrote: »

Prices are clearly going up with the next gen games.

If you literally mean the next-gen games, then I'm not sure if that will be true when inflation is taken into account by the time the PS5 and Xbox Two have been released. I wouldn't be surprised to see a tiered pricing structure by then - perhaps £20, £40 and £60 tiers. But that's still five or six years away, and as others have said, SNES games used to cost as much as £70 - what's that in today's money?

If you mean the Xbone and PS4 games, then the prices have been fairly stable since launch - but the HK trick with the One has meant that pre-orders have been around ~£30. It's only really the PS4 that has the "£45 for a new game" issue. On PC it's (still) not rare to get pre-orders for £20-25, and Titanfall was £16 for a pre-order. (I was surprised to see Shadows of Mordor didn't go below £23 for a pre-order.)

Perhaps a clearer definition of "next-gen" is required, but I still regularly turn down £20 pre-orders, because you'd have to be utterly mental to gamble £20 on a completely new release without knowing the quality of the game. Wait for the reviews, wait for ten weeks, and grab your quality-assured bug-patched game for ~£12.

Of course, while I usually spend £0.13-£10 on my games, I'd be prepared to spend far more if it was worth it. I imagine my cap would be around £50-60.

There are so many tricks to getting PC and Android games for near-free that it's definitely the MSE way to go. Certainly better than being charged £40 next year to be able to play "your" games again.

Idiophreak

27col wrote: »

Seems a pretty moronic past time to me.

Life is moronic. If you sit and play video games for an hour, what do you achieve?

If you run for an hour, what do you achieve? I guess you might make yourself fitter, allow yourself to live your moronic life for a couple more years.

Read a book? What's the point.

Be all selfless and dedicate your life to charity work?....yeah, because that will totally be remembered in a couple of million years, won't it...which is just a blink of the universe's eye.

Or let's have kids...because the world needs more morons, moronically flailing through their moronic existence right?

Face it...life is utterly pointless, utterly meaningless and utterly utterly moronic....but you have to spend it doing something

Cycrow

Nowadays with steam i dont tend to spend much on individual games, a select few i might spend £30 on, but for most, i wait until the sales.

in the past i have spent alot on individual games, especially in the Snes/N64 days

DKLS

Usually I won't pay more than £30 a game and am happy to wait for the second round of price drops, but If I look at my current playing hours on GTAV, and works out at less than a penny an hour for something I find entertaining so a damn good return on my investment.

@27col, thanks to my gaming experience, it made it a doddle when "gamification" became the buzz word in my work sector, and led to a significant pay rise.

There are other benefits from gaming you may not realise.
I have a friend who teaches key hole surgery techniques, and he can spot non-gamers from a mile off, one of the first tests is if you can peel a grape, using the surgical hand tools whilst viewing the grape on a monitor the non gamers tend to damage the grape as they don't have the hand to eye co-ordination skills and his recommendation is for them to buy a console or gaming PC.

If I ever need keyhole surgery, I will be asking the surgeon at pre-assessment if he/she takes part in this moronic activity.

Shambler

I nearly always wait for a game to come down in price before buying, I don't like paying £30-£40 only for 6 months later to find the game is now £10 or less.


I would pay £35 tops I think but it would have to be exceptionally good and something I love to play like Oblivion/Skyrim sequel.