It's always irritating reading posts and comments like these for the simple fact that they're almost always completely oblivious to any sort of context. The comment by az was the only one that made any sort of reference to reality. The rest are just going off on bizarre hypotheticals, thinly veiled in some pathetic personal agenda. Which is fucking awesome because, like az said, that's what most software pricing is based on.

L4D itself is a quaint example. A multiplayer game (i.e. lucky to have a lifespan longer than 2 months, the value largely supplied by the customers themselves) containing an extremely lame amount of maps? Oh, and it's over STEAM where the cost of packaging and delivery is nothing, and we don't even own our copies in Valve's eyes? Well, that sounds like a good fucking deal at $50. With the PC game industry in particular, the notion of supporting the developers is now synonymous with supporting self-important, ungrateful fuckups who'll demand more and more while delivering less and less, and brow beat YOU for having a sense of entitlement if you make the slightest murmer about it.

It's actually the ultimate irony. The industry will do whatever it must because it can, to steal a line, and cite massive risks as the reason why they go for franchises and other "sure bets". Yet there's no consideration that things have become too expensive and disappointing for the customer to bother with anything other than what THEY perceive to be a sure bet. The less of a risk it is to buy something sight-unseen, the less disincentive there is to do so. And the fact is that with STEAM, and digital distribution in general, there's nothing BUT risk since we can't even pop it up on eBay. Hence, i bought Orange Box when it hit $20 over a year after release. And that's with it including a game i love and want to keep in my library (Portal) and a game i'd been dying to try (TF2).

There are a lot of us who've long since been burned by that sort of risk. We just leave "hardcore gaming" quietly instead of saying anything because we also know that bringing it up on any gaming forum is going to get us labeled as repetitive curmudgrons by every fucking furry faggot there when we dare to interrupt their repetitive teaparty threads.

"It might be risky to generalize from this. Left 4 Dead has a single-player mode and a multiplayer mode. Presumably, a pirated copy can run single-player mode, but cannot run multiplayer mode (too many people using the same keys).

If this assumption is correct (I have not played the game - I am relying on Wikipedia's description), then the thousands of new purchasers might simply be people with pirated versions who've learned to like the game and decided to spend $25 to play online. These people would not have purchased the game on the first day for $25." -- Jonathan Levy

This assumption would suggest a certain boon to sales created by the ability to demo a game. And yet the industry has created yet another self-fulfilling prophecy in not creating demos because chrweuv;reh. I can't type a real word there, because there's no rationale to go with it. It's not even circular logic, it just stops dead after a certain point and the media is too incestuous to dig.

"Excellent comment Mike. The unfortunate thing is that the FOSS movement has convinced an enormous amount of devs that making money from the fruits of your labor is evil. Couple that with greedy executives that stupidly believe that all developers are interchangeable cogs in a machine and can simply be replaced with sweatshop workers with little to no skill and a toxic environment of low quality and expectations begins to set in. It's going to be *very* difficult to reverse the damage they've caused in both developer and consumer expectations about the price of software." -- o.s.

All the FOSS movement has done is foster what i like to call a "post-usability aesthetic" in terms of software design. It's like post-modernism, but for software! Throw off those shackles of progress, people should have to think through 3 drop-down menus and a slider just to draw a fucking rectangle!

Actually, the biggest sense of entitlement always comes from the developers themselves, who tend to conflate how much effort they put into something with how good the end result is, and then make completely erroneous assumptions about how much they deserve to make. Not from the contract, of course. From us. The whiny ones put themselves in the position of being screwed by suits, then they get off on acting like martyrs in a perverse attempt to ignore the fact that they ARE interchangable cogs. In non-game programming at least, the competent ones also tend to be smart enough to not desperately grab the first sweatshop position they can find.

"These high prices will only encourage piracy. On campus there are a lot of hacked Xboxes! I didn't even know one could change the firmware on your 360 to play burnt games." -- Brandon

This is something most people aren't aware of, since in the world of game journalism the best we have are douchebags from MTV who write industry apologetics in the guise of "interviews", failed actors who wish they were movie reviewers, and editors who conveniently find themselves drawn to jobs with publishers in departments they have zero experience in.

Console piracy is just as prevalent, just not where anyone wants to look. Mostly because it'd mean acknowledging a more nuanced set of correlations.

My favorite example is still Poland, where when i checked a couple of years ago, the average income was around USD$14,000 before taxes. This was fairly decent, actually, because the economy there was healthy and the cost of living was low. Now, PC games are, for some reason beyond me, decently priced there, and the piracy rate was not high enough for the IIPA to whine about it in their bullshit reports. Instead they went on about CONSOLE modchips being on the rise, which later made perfect sense to me; at the time of release, the game-only version of Guitar Hero for the 360 was the equivalent of USD$107, and CoD 4 was the equivalent of USD$98.

"If customers are aware of the future price drops (they observe the behavior and learn the pattern, or the manufacturer states it explicitly), then customers who would have paid $40 will wait around a month for the price to drop. So the numerous price drops actually convert higher-paying customers into lower-paying customers." -- Mark

OH LOOK! Another blatant assumption magically turned into absolute certainty! Haven't seen those before when dealing with this subject, should do wonders. Because you know what? That's what we do. All day. Just sit around infinitely, waiting for the price of things we want to hit their lowest point. It's like "well, i was GOING to keep my life on track by continuing to do things i need to do, but fuck it i'll just wait around a month to save $20 on something i actually need or want now".

Clearly businesses need a way to remove need from the equation, thus sidestepping another natural part of that whole "supply and demand" thing. You know why you were the first one to bring this up? Because you are an awesome mind at business, as is evident by the way you've made it so simple to understand.