Playstation 3 games costing between $59 and $99?
 

Wow. I am sure that development cost for games on the PS3 would not be earth shattering compared to the XB360 as many publishers intend to go multiplatform. Are blue-ray blanks that expensive?

Blu-Ray discs are hand crafted by god, so yes, blanks are that expensive.

This could end up being bad for UK gamers, OK i'm only thinking about myself at the minute, but they basically replaced the $ for the £ on the console price. £30 is what we are paying for all brand new titles right now, so £60 is.....ugh! ;_;

Should have known this was coming, after the PS3's outrageous price, the games have to go up as well. In a long run, unless prices drop, Sony is gonna lose alot.

God its gonna be difficult to play the games I want on this thing. This is a system that needs to be chipped in with another friend or something...

Hopefully it will be like Xbox 360 where even though the games are $60 standard, you can buy most of the games on the internet for half-price.

I am sorry, but there is no way that they can cite disc expense as a reason for a $40 increase in price. There is no way that a blu-ray disc can be more expensive on the each than a cartridge was. Get serious Sony. An increase of $5 to cover an increase in disc expense would seem silly, much less a $40 increase.

Please share info on where we might be able to find below $60 on XB360 games. :)

Quick search on Amazon shows $20 for a Blue-Ray disc with a MSRP of $28.

Between £30 and £60.
Well, £30 isn't too bad, that's what we pay for new games for the PS2. But £60? Holy crap. Who is going to pay that sort of money for a game? I think I'll stick with my PC.

so thats
$499 £275
$599 £330

Well. The price of the PS3 doesn't seem to be too bad.
I know that it is still a fair bit of money, but I was expecting it to be at least £100 more.

It will be at least a hundred quid more, going on experience of every console launch ever. The price in dollars won't simply be converted. There will be additional profit margins built in, same as always. It will end up, as Randomwab said, being the same number, but with a pound sign instead of a dollar sign. The console companies have all done this to us before, and they will again.

...What? Where do you go to buy brand new 30$ games? Most new releases I have purchased are always 40-50$. DQ8, Final Fantasy, Ace combat 4/5/Zero, Kingdom Hearts I/II, GTA, SC3, and on and on.

EDIT: okay, I'm a fucking moron. I misread that currency symbol as $. Ignore me. ._. £30 is the same as 50-55 if I did my math right.

Only the hardcore geeks are gonna go for this. Sony is shooting themselves in the foot.

Just imagine if those stories about "rentals and pre-used games not working on alternate sytems" was true.

PS3 flops. WHY LIE.

$99, what is this. Australia. (sup Pacific Fair in Brisbane).

Actually, if this is the case, then top-tier PS3 games Downunder will be...hell to pay.

Ouch....so...you're picking up a PS3 on launch day for $600 (assuming you're picking up a premium package) and then have to drop another $100 for a game (in the most extreme case).....ouch for your wallet. $60 isn't that bad, but $100? That's way too much. Personally, If I were to pick up a PS3 any time near launch day, I would not pay more than $75 for a game.

Actually he said in the interview that games WON'T bee 100 dollars so more like 59-89 is the range we have so far.

Watch as only 1 PS3 game will need more than 9GB.

Blue-Ray will be a waste.


Nothing against Sony fans, but seriously, Sony is making some horribly bad decision making.

GG, Sony. Have fun with the 3DO in Console Hell.

Really, is anybody going to buy this shit system now? Nothing can save it now, not even doom music.

You realize this is coming from the same company who will tell you that the PS3 is a replacement of the home computer, the same company that claims the lack of rumble is due to gyroscopic interference (sup wiimote), and the same company that introduced that retarded CD DRM thing, right? I wouldn't believe anything sony says right now. They keep pulling shit out of their asses, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop any time soon. Oh, and also, he can only speak for first-party titles (which are not in abundance). If a 3rd party developer wants to charge $110 dollars for a game, they can do so, and I wouldn't blame them after paying 5 billion dollars for a bloated piece of shit PS3 DevKit.

Don't worry guys, they'll keep them at fifty or sixty bucks for America and just jack the prices up even more for the rest of the world.

Another reason why the PS3 isn't appealing for me. For me right now, the only thing that the PS3 has going for it is Metal Gear Solid 4. I've already been tempted to just go ahead and buy an 360, but I've failed at the console war twice before (I owned both a Saturn and a Dreamcast [and while my Gamecube has been fun it's not the most popular console in the world right now]).

Presumably, after the system bombs massively due to its price, such a game will be ported to the 360 so fans of the series can actually play it without paying $700.

I wonder if next-next-gen will be even more expensive than this one.

Probably if everybody bombs this generation.

No game should cost more than $50, unless it has an included accessory. Pure and simple. $40 is good for me, but I only honestly consider buying a $50 game if I intend to pour 60 hours or more into it. Really a ratio of $0.50 per game hour is a good rule of the thumb and even at $60, >75% of all games would be a waste of money at that price point.
Sony better be pushing the devleopment studios to make 60 hour games, or I'll be looking to Wii for my next-gen needs (and yes I'd be awesome for Nintendo to be on top again).

Am I the only person that's amazed how low game prices have stayed when everything else's price has gone up due to inflation? I remember shelling out $70 for SNES games more than 10 years ago, yet I can pick up a game like San Andreas which certainly cost much much more to create than, say, Harvest Moon, for $20 less (not to mention that the $70 of yesteryear is worth more than $70 today).

If my calculations are right (and they most likely are not) then games are gonna cost 117.83 dollars in Denmark. IF the price is $70. The price's likely to get higher, but I sure hope the price'll stay more or less unchanged...

well I doN,t relly mind the high cost of the ps3 itself, but that the cost of the games that go as high as that, well now it's start to bother me... a lot!

you know I buy game really on a regular basis and that they cost that much will probably make me think twice to buy a game now. Like will i really enjoy it that much and will it last long enough to justify this expense...

and I don't really know why they should cost that much ( I don't remember if a ps2 game cost more than a ps1 games...)

I think it's premature to get overly excited about this. It's not like he said "games will cost over $59.99" though everyone seems to be acting like that is what he said.

Wait until games actually start coming out and we get some prices. It's silly to do otherwise. But for the record, I wouldn't be happy with PS3 games costing over $60. But I'll wait until some actual PS3 games are priced over that amount before I start complaining.

Hmm the point of most of the movie industry backing blue-ray apparently flew right over your head didn't it? And saying the biggest game will probably be 9gigs shows how little you comprehend of next generation.

I don't think it's the discs themselves so much as the expense Sony has gone to to get Blu-ray up and running. Apparently it's been a bumpy ride, so they don't want to take too big of a loss on hardware that has likely cost them a pretty penny.

I realize a lot of that can be made up with the system's price, (OMG price so hueg like Xbox) but then you're paying for blu-ray capability as well as a game system, and they're selling that at a loss. I'm just talking out of my ass here, but I'd like to think there are other motivations than pure greed.

Seeing that the first standalone blue-ray players are in the $1000-1500 price range. And we get the first one with hdmi version 1.3 spec aswell as being an console and a media PC. I'd say the price is cheap. But if you want to look at it just as a console its pricey. But Sony has always said they wanted the PS3 to be more than just an console.

Jus thinking, i'm not sure about how this went in America, but when PS2 came out, brand new PSX titles were sold at around £30 too, and PS2 games were selling at £45-50, so if this does come out at around £50-60 I wound't be suprised. At least by then I will have a job in a store that can get me 30% off software!

Seeing as I only play £39.99 for all my Xbox 360 games, (just shop around Tesco's is ace) paying £70 - £90 for a game equates to roughly 1/5th of the cost of buying the system; ouch. So far it seems Blu-Ray has been more of a hinderance than a fantastic god send feature with those sorts of prices.

But lets see what happens Sony have to make the majority of the money lost on the PS3 back from the software if games simply fail to sell in huge numbers they would consider putting the price down.

It can't make a difference of 30 bucks whether it's a 'Blu-Ray disc' or an ordinary DVD =/

A price of 99$ per game would be lethal, nobody's gonna pay that.

Oh dear.

Let's say $US80 for your predictable NBA 200*/Call of Duty 7. That's $AU109, and of course Myer and DJ will jack it up as per usual.

Look forward to shelling out $135.95 a title, my fellow Strayans. Console gaming is fast becoming the one pastime where you get much less than you pay for.

Well hey, we're pretty close. Need for Speed Seven Hundred Million on Xbox 360 already costs $120. YOU CAN TASTE THE VALUE.

XG2, Myer: $119. Years and years ago, it feels like.

BUT IT'S YOUR STORE. IT'S YOUR STORE, MYER. YOURS. GIVE US YOUR MONEY WE'LL PUT IT IN YOUR STORE.

Quoted for truth.

I paid £60 for Killer Instinct on the SNES back in 1996 which is about £90 or so by modern standards. Kids these days just don't realise how lucky they are. I wouldn't object to paying £60 or more for a game that was worth it and had a decent lifespan. That's about the same price as a gram and a half of coke and that would generally only last you a couple of hours...

Anyhow either suck the price up and get some quality games. Or just buy another console. Not hard people whinging and flaming the maker will not make the games cheaper. And if you can't afford it you aren't in the group Sony is targetting with this console. And honestly I think many of you can honestly afford it you just don't want to pay more than you do today well though luck kiddo.

That's why my SNES game collection was a quarter the size of my collections from the PS1 onwards. I wouldn't want to return to those days, because it would mean that I'd only buy about 2 games a year, per system. Not because I only have that much money, but because I'm only willing to budget that much to gaming.

I wouldn't know about coke, but sixty quid will get you at least a half-ounce of good skunk, and that would last me longer than most games... :-D

SNES games > PS1 games. I'd hit it. :p

Also in Norway games cost £75 already. I have no problems paying that nor have I ever had. And I've been pretty strained for cash many periods of my life.

I don't know about that at all. The very best SNES games are better than the very best PS1 games, in my opinion, but the average standard seems to be higher on the PS1.

I actually disagree on that. I can pick out much more dung from the PS1 era than the SNES era. But perhaps that has something with me being less picky about my games then.

I'm very picky myself, and I was aware while writing that post that it was an oversimplification. Allow me to express my thoughts more clearly.

There is a greater volume of games for PS1 than for SNES overall, and it's true that there is a huge, honking great pile of horrdendous, pathetic, abysmal games for PS1. However, due to the greater size of the overall catalogue, this still means that there are more titles of a worthwhile nature than on the SNES, in my opinion. The quality bell-curve peaks a little lower on the PS1 than on the SNES, but the gems are there, if you want to look for them.

You're right, though. The average standard is not higher, it's just that with more games overall, the yield of quality titles can be good, even with a poor ratio of weak to strong titles. Some of the best titles for SNES never got translated into English, officially at least, so they were never really available to English-speaking gamers. I tend to not count those, no matter how good they were.

True enough, but still I find the SNES liberary to be an surperior one in queslity than PS1. Only category that I say is just as good on PS1 and SNES is RPGs. While PS2 has been kind of a dissepointment in the RPG category with a few exceptions(modern RPG = interactive movie).

I really think you're not looking hard enough. I'd list some titles, but I don't know your taste. Bear in mind, though, that the PS1 was home to the first popular rhythm-action games, and dancemat games to be available for the home console. Of those two genres, only Vib-Ribbon really does anything for me, but they are well-regarded by many. It was also home to the first popular 3d fighting game, and some of the major driving games.

I'm not trying to convince you, not in any way. Your opinion is your own business, but I am saying that from an objective viewpoint, the PS1 has been home to some important titles. It's not as though I even scratched the surface.

I'm not going to talk about RPGs, because you are already convinced. One area in which in really loses to the SNES, though is platformers. There realyl weren't that many. I'm a big fan of platform games, and the lack of them on PS1 really annoyed me for a while. There were a couple of nice ones, just not enough.

The higher cost of SNES games was party due to the cost of the media. Cartridges are considerably more expensive to produce than CDs or DVDs. Accounting for inflation, $50 for Grand Theft Auto is right about where it should be, as negligible as the price for the physical media is.

This is also why Sony is blatantly full of shit here when they start claiming that PS3 games are going to be so expensive because of the blu-ray discs. While I have no doubt that the hardware to burn the discs is a pricey investment, the physical discs themselves cannot be much more than a standard DVD. It's just a thin wafer of plastic and metal; the magic is in how tightly they can pack in the laser grooves.

For Sony's sake, let's hope their rep here is talking out of his ass. They've already nearly killed themselves with their $600 PS3. Charging $60 on the low end for games on top of that really WILL turn this into the 3D0 2.

Remember how when DVDs came out they were $5+ for one, while CDs you could get for free? It's the same thing with blue-ray. They don't have nearly the facilities pumping those suckers out as they do for DVD, so of course it's going to be more expensive.

Also, with inflation, $50 for a video game today isn't right when compared to $70 for a game 15 years ago. Money gets less valuable, not more. =\

Also, I never really go into the Nintendo forum, but what was the general response to them upping the release price from $30 for a Gameboy game to the $40 I see in stores now?

I don't know about anybody else, but I generally don't see $40 games. Not like I really look, because you can buy a good GBA flash cart for $100 and put on whatever you want (except the NES Classics. For some reason those don't work).

THIRD-PARTY CANCELS PS3 VERSION OF GAME DUE TO DEVELOPMENT COSTS!

LINK

Did you even read that link? They said it was never a PS3 title to begin with.

No, of course I didn't read it! I pressed ENTER and then came a link out of nowhere!

Even if the game WASN'T in development for the PS3, the fact that they didn't go forward with that version, as stated in their post, makes it so that the development costs were too much for a regular Third-Party studio.

Did you even read that link?

Considering companies like NIS, Cave, Treasure and many other extremely small developers are already making PS3 games I really don't think development costs are as big as an issue as they are made out to be.

Look at the company history of the Theseis developers. The actually don't even have a company history. This sort of thing is so common that normally it isn't even news worth. But digging up any amount of insignificant information on the PS3 and typing up a half assed article is what sites like Joystiq love to do these days.

Regular third-party studio? It's 12 people or so with no experience.

HAY GUYS I THOUGHT OF MAKING A PS3 GAME (IT'S JUST ME FOR NOW) BUT DECIDED IT WAS TOO EXPENSIVE. THIS OBVIOUSLY MEANS PS3 WILL FAIL

Not at all.

But companies need to start somewhere. This company has no experience and there are dozens of them. Sony isn't making it easy for them to jump into the industry.

Also, the PS3 won't fail, as you wrote, it's just showing how higher development cost can affect young companies.

It has never been easy to jump into the console industry and it never will be. You can't just decide to develop a game, have no publishing contracts and have no method to get your game licensed. Young companies must be picked up by a larger publisher in the console industry if they want to make a game. This goes for ANY console, be it the PS2, PS3, Gamecube, Wii, Xbox, whatever.

I'm willing to bet these guys simply could not pitch their game idea well enough for a PS3 publisher to pick up the game. More than likely this is due from the game or concept being pure shit. This is something to remember, while young developers might bring in fresh ideas once and a while, they also tend to bring in pure crap more often than not. And if this is the case, you can bet they aren't going to give this as the reason they aren't making their game for the PS3.

We'll have to wait.

If 'Theseis' turns out to be a sleeper hit or some sort of a mega success, which seems unlikely, then we'll know.

They're already making X360 and PC ports.

Not being able to develop for Sony is not the end of the world for any developer, last I've heard anyway.

£500 for a PS3? Ouch. Sounds about right though. :(
And we'll be the last to get them as well.

Blu-ray has some super-science coating technology that allows it to be cartridge-free. The data layer itself is very close to the read surface. The coating is called 'durabis', if I am not mistaken. It is highy resistant to scratches and other perils. Perhaps this has something to do with the high cost of blu-ray discs?

Everytime a bit of new info on this PS3 piece of garbage is released, it pushes me that much closer towards purchasing a 360 now, and totally writing off the PS3...

I expected a price hike since blue-ray is still new. PS3 being blue-ray playable is shoving new technology to us. This will kill their rival hd-dvd.

Well, the XB360 is a good console and will continue to be no matter how the PS3 turns out. It's worth picking up for the Xbox live network alone. :)

I am very pissed at Sony at the moment but I will have to cave eventually. I can sit on not playing FF12 for a year or two but damnit if Suikoden 6 comes out shortly for the system I'd have to buy the game and then buy the console that runs it. :/

What is Sony's track record for introducing new media types? Betamax and UMD bombed. Stupid me for getting a PSP, the DS completely owns Sony. :(

I just hope that if games really are more than $59.99 brand new, then people won't cave in and buy lots of them, no matter how good the game is. I'm used to seeing $69.99 as the absolute highest price in a video game store, not counting uber rare games. If we just give in and buy the games at, say, $99.99, then the price of all games might eventually spike up, and it'll be highly unlikely that game prices in general will ever go down from there. Inflation = Enemy#1!

I can't say the same for Betamax, but was UMD supposed to become the "new" media format? I don't think any media format released strictly in a handheld is going to take a place in the flow of things. The PS3's Blu-Ray capability may have a shot at it - mainly because Sony boasts this as a home entertainment system altogether not just a handheld to compete with Nintendo/iPod/Portable DVD players - but comparing Blu-Ray to UMD is a big no-no. I don't think UMD ever had any hope of toppling DVD. Blu-Ray, at least, being introduced in the PS3, has a chance.

On a side note, having just bought a DS, I'd have to agree that the DS owns the PSP in terms of the volume of good games. (At least good games in my opinion, nothing on the PSP interests me).

I don't believe that a layer of highly stratch-resistant coating to a technology would cause the same technology's price to get higher.

That said, I mainly concur to what others said here. I'm not paying about 120 Canadian for a single game.

Ok, NO!. I hate it when people say this. Just because prices were incredibly shitty in the past, it doesn't justify shitty pricing for today, and it certainly doesn't make a craptacular $70 pricepoint the average standard for this gen or the next.

You can't just factor in inflation when looking at pricing in the past and suggest that, in comparison, an increase in prices now wouldn't be so bad. That'd be inacurate. What about other circumstances that warrent cheaper prices for games now that weren't the case back then? Circumstances like today's much, much larger and actually mainstream market for gaming.

To make an accurate comparison would be quiet a task since there's so much to take into consideration. It doesn't really matter though, cause the bottom line is that regardless of what it was like in the past, any pricepoint above $60 per game (which is already pushing it) is just ridiculous.

Maybe you just don't realize how good of a deal we've been getting the past few years.

Personally, I could never believe that they were putting out new games at a $40 price point for major releases and have been waiting for them to go up ever since (especially with the size of games that are released nowadays and the sizes and budgets that are required to make top of the line titles).

Also, You must realize that the average Joe will not be taking any kind of inflation into account. Hardcore gamers will, of course, notice this, but I don't think the entire Sony fanbase is too keen on the inflation issue. For the most part, your average customer has no idea of this inflation crap. All they see is the price tag sitting at $60+. You've got people who have no idea what it was like way back because there's also a younger age group who doesn't exactly go back past the PS1/N64 era. When seeing games at the $30-$40 price was as high as it got. We, here discussing this issue, probably see inflation and its effects, but those guys out there buying games blindly because they heard it was good, will be completely oblivions of any comparisons made in the distant past. They'll just gawk at the $70 price tag. Compared to their old generation PS2 which will still be on the shelves sitting at a comfortable $40-$50 for new games.

That line of reasoning is why a lot of people are predicting a video game crash soon, because of the overemphasis on outragous production values.

The masses demand bigger, prettier, more time-intensive enhancements to their games, but at the same time there's only so much they're going to be willing to pay for said games, no matter how much development costs are. The budgets for these big ticket games are eventually going to spiral out of control, and either they charge outrageous prices for them, or gamers wind up disappointed at the lack of graphical advancement and quit buying games.

And meanwhile, in a distant land, Satoru Iwata is cackling madly.

Even though the PS3 will come at this outrageous price I plan on buying it (someday, never on lunch day).
To be honest, most of my games are pirated but every once in a while, when there is a game that I feel like it is worth all the money I buy original.

I guess Sony won't have that provilege anymore, not if they charge US$99 for a game. Unless I wait something like 4 months to buy it used from someone who would charge half price.

Sony lost their mind. I don't even want ps3 now, the prices are ridiculous.

If you think that those prices are horrible, you must be happy that mostly all here lives in USA, here on Latin America you need to multiplied the price x3, im very sure that "normal" games will be cost more than $100 US dollars...

So from the three pages of reading, I gathered this much: not many people are able to read very well. :(

That Sony rep clearly said ..."I don't expect it to be $100." Taking in the knowledge of the past, there are some games (sup Magna Carta, PD0 Coll. Ed.) that are released with higher price tags. But that has little to do with anything regarding the console itself, but more with the developers. They chose to add this extra content or make it a little more expensive, not Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo.

Next, about that third-party shying away. In a fairly recent interview with Gamespot, Sony announced they had sent out 10,000 dev kits to 208 developers, more than the PS1, PS2, or PSP. See brief article - http://www.mozlapunk.net/homepage/?p=773

From what I've read, Sony has more developers on hand than any previous console iteration, they've shipped out more dev kits than any previous launch (in another article, I read that at this time last year, Microsoft had not sent out nearly the same amount of dev kits to their developers, and I don't even know the Wii's position on this), and the games are not gonna be $100 anywhere in the near future. The preorder list at Gamestop has two or three dozen PS2 titles, none of which are higher than $59.99.

Doesn't every company ship dev kits to all developers. You know to get a feel for the system to see and hopefully develop for it in the future. Doesn't mean that they WILL develop for it. Am I wrong.

Not that it matters. PS3 heh.

Not really. They have to order them and buy them from Sony. And with PS3 dev kits costing around $10,000 I really doubt Sony is shipping them out for developers to play around with. They went out so developers interested can make games.

Here in Australia, XBOX 360 games are gernerally $120 upon release. I hope the PS3 game prices don't really exceed this :(

damn, a 100 for a game, this will limit me acquiring games, i think this is too much, lets hope that when blue ray becomes more popular the blanks would drop in price.

The $100, according to Hirai, isn't something he expects, so the standard Sony puts out would probably NOT be $100.

All games for the PS3 have already been set at $50-$60. Retailers already got the word from Sony and you can see that PS3 game pre-orders from any store reflect this.

Sony will have the greatest hits lineup going within the first couple of months, so its not like all the games are going to be that expensive. Plus you have to figure how much longer and more interactive the games are going to be now. It's going to be a pain in the ass to pay that price when its first released, but you gotta let them make some money before they announce a price drop. Alot of people will probably just wait it out until the prices drop anyways.

Highly unlikely unless sales of some games grind to a halt really early. I can see it after a year, but since Sony themselves are taking a cost hit per unit on the PS3, I doubt that any of their first party games would go GH right off the crack if they wanted to make that money back.