What’s Going On With The Price Of PC Games?!

 

We’ve talked about it in the past, several times. The price of video games has been going up. Driven by certain money hungry publishers who tack on subscription fees and “passes” to their games, gamers are now paying more for their games than ever before.

But then, suddenly, like a beacon in the night, the price of games starts to drop?!

Well, that’s true for many PC games.

This kind of came out of left field and hit me in the head like a ton of bricks. I’m not going to lie to you, I was never expecting to see high end titles like Primal Carnage or Ravaged selling for as little as $14.99 and if you would have told me a year ago that a triple-a MMO title from Sony Online Entertainment was going to release that wasn’t only free to download but would also force NO subscription fees on players, I would have slapped you in the face for being a liar-liar-pants-on-fire.

That’s exactly what’s happening, though. Gaming companies all over the world are offering up titles for amazingly low prices and here’s the kicker – They’re GOOD.

Some of the bigger publishing houses will swear, with their hands on 100 foot tall stacks of bibles, they simply can’t do business and continue to pay the bills if they don’t charge $60 for the game itself, then charge for DLC, then charge for expansions, then microtransact you into the poor house for small add-ons and tons of things that should have been in the game when it released (and, in fact, half the time the small stuff you paid for was on the damned disk when you bought it) and then tack on some stupid online-pass on top of it all. This new trend in PC game pricing, though, shows just how full of it they are.

Here are some examples:

Reverb Publishing has 2 new titles – Ravaged from 2Dawn games and Primal Carnage from Lukewarm Media- priced at $24.99 and $14.99 respectively. I reviewed Ravaged and gave it an 8. It’s a solid shooter with no real downside.

Sony Online Entertainment is finishing up Planetside 2 and will release it from beta in a month. This title will be free to acquire and free to play for EVERYONE. You never have to spend a single thin dime on the game if you don’t want to. A subscription model will be available which will give subscribers a few perks (like enhanced XP and resource gain) but those differences are slight and will have NO impact whatsoever on the end-game.

GOG has been doing “pay what you want” pricing on a large number of games recently, allowing people to pick up top quality game releases for next to nothing. Granted, GOG does this for titles which have been around for a while but when you can pay $8 for half a dozen games which would have cost you $400 after tax…well, you can’t complain, can you?

This is a trend I can seriously get behind and it is about time that the gaming companies stopped being huge, commercial, corporate machines which pay people $50,000 a year to pour coffee. Sure, people need jobs but come on…Let’s not be silly about the way we spend our money. If the smaller studios can put out high quality titles for peanuts then by god the big guys should be able to do it as well and I think it’s long past time they got on board and stopped screwing the little guy.

The little guy who holds the key to their coffers full of money, a that.

And a BIG bravo to the people who are finding success in release quality games at great prices. You guys keep up the great work and we will support you to the end of the Earth.