Video Games are a rip off! They're way too expensive. So there's a big campaign going on to not buy video games from the 1st to the 8th of December to try and get prices lowered. For more go to fairplay-campaign.co.uk

Oooh, it's in December, thats gonna be hard, what with all the ignorant parents buying kids the games they want for christmas.

 

It'll fail, but i'll be part of it, seeing how I won't have enough money to get any games around that time.

yes games are too expensive (espically GBA games) but unless there is no game of intrest that is released between those dates or i don't need a game- then there's no way i'm gonna stop buying games...

then again it's is just one week...guess i'll save a fair bit of money

Games are far too expensive. GBA games should be £25 at most, I refuse to shell out £35 for a game I will get little out of. I also don't like paying £45 for new PS2 games, although some are worth it. (MSG 2 & GTA 3).

Can't see new games going down in price just yet.

 

Eventually, PS2 games will turn to £30 for a new game. But right now, it won't happen.

 

While the discs themselves only cost a few pound, when you consider taxation, marketing, advertising, delivery, storage, profit margin etc, the costs pile up.

 

Maybe in a year or so we'll see cheaper games. but just like the 3 million other petitions on the internet, this one is bound to die.

Yes Russ but this petition is reciving more publicity than anything ever like it. And also I think you don't really know just how much money we're getting ripped off for. Playstation2 games could be sold at £15-20 pound a go and Games company's would still make enough money. The only problem is huge licencing fees from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Just look at this...

 

 

Why are games so expensive?

Because the industry believes that people are prepared to pay the current price (the fact that most software publishers are currently losing fortunes because not enough people ARE prepared to buy their games is something they tend to quietly ignore). If we make it absolutely clear that we're NOT prepared to pay that price, the price will fall. That's the fundamental law of all business - what games cost is something that rests entirely in the hands of us, the consumers.

 

So who get's all the money?

It's a complicated equation, unsurprisingly. But most of the slices of the cake are arrived at in percentage terms. Retailers pay a wholesale price based on a percentage of the RRP (typically around a 30-40% discount, which is the retailer's profit margin). The Government charges VAT at 17.5% and so on. What this means is that nobody's cut is a direct obstacle to a price reduction, with the exception of the hardware companies (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) who charge a flat rate fee of several pounds per game to the software publisher for the privilege of publishing games on the hardware companies' consoles.

If the price of games is to be reduced significantly, it's ultimately the hardware companies who will have to lead the way, either by cutting their fees (which is unlikely) or by changing them from a flat rate to a percentage of the retail price

 

But dont games cost millions to make?

Yes, they often do. (The average figure for a game these days is around £1 million, and can rise much higher for certain titles.) But the cost of development has nothing to do with retail price. Albums can cost tens of millions of pounds to record, but you can still buy them for £11. Movies can cost hundreds of millions of pounds to make, but you can still see them for £5 or buy them for £15. Movies which only cost a few thousand pounds to make (like The Blair Witch Project) aren't any cheaper to see or buy than super-expensive blockbusters (like Titanic, which cost literally hundreds of times as much as Blair Witch). Books cost almost nothing to write, but sell for similar prices to albums.

What does all this show us? That the cost of development has no bearing whatsoever on retail price. Videogames publishers will tell you that music, say, has a bigger potential audience than games - but why is that? Could it be because games are four times as expensive as albums? It's a meaningless, self-fulfilling argument. If you make games much cheaper, more people will play them, and the audience you can sell to will be much bigger.

 

How much should games cost then?

Pick your own figure, basically. Because 99% of the cost of making videogames comes in the development of the game's computer code, which is an up-front cost. Once the game is written, the cost of producing more copies to sell is tiny - a few pennies each (except for the licence fee mentioned above). So there's basically no limit to how low the price can be set, as long as each reduction brings about a proportionate increase in sales. It's not a matter of cost, it's purely an economic policy decision by the publisher. Fair Play's belief, supported by most of the industry, is that there's no reason whatsoever that games should cost more than, say, DVD movies, ie £15-£20. Any figure above that is still a con on the public.

 

Who'll loose out if the price of video games comes down?

Nobody. That's the beauty of it. It's Fair Play's core belief that if the price of games were cut in half, sales would - at least - double. Because games are very, very cheap to physically produce once you've actually written them (duplicating a game disc and putting it in a standard DVD box costs mere pennies), there are next to no manufacturing costs to worry about, so if prices halved and sales doubled, everyone would make - at least - the same amount of money, but we'd all have twice as many games to play. Everybody wins.

 

 

Click here for an equation

if this works- sweet! i'm gonna save a huge amount of money.

if not then it sucks but i'm still gonna buy them no matter hwat

 

best of luck to the pentition :xyx