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Namco Bandai: Games Are Too Expensive
Next time you grumble at the checkout line about the cost of video games, take solace in knowing you’re not alone. You’ve got an ally in Namco Bandai Partners’ vice president and head of sales and marketing, Olivier Comte. Speaking to MCV, Compte says the games industry is suffering from the way games are sold. As he puts it, unlike the music and film industries, which can make money from concerts and album sales or theatrical and home releases, games take more of a single-minded approach. “Games just have one model, the sale of the product either as a box or a digital download,” Comte told the site. “So we need to think about how we can develop a secondary business model.”
“I am convinced that in the future we must change the price of video games – they’re too expensive for the audience,” he added. “With the cost of development and the retail margins, £40 [about $60] is a fair price [to us], but for the consumer it is too much.
“From September to December there are three new blockbusters every week, and consumers just can’t afford to buy all that.
“A good price of a game should be around £20 [about $30] – but for this price we can’t make a 10 to 15-hour adventure. So for £20 we should offer consumers four to five hours of gameplay, then after that we can make additional money with DLC.”
It should come as no surprise that a Namco Bandai representative would say this, considering how aggressively it’s pushed DLC for some of its games. Are the savings consumers would get from a cheap (and short) initial experience worth it in the long run if players have to pay more money for downloads to put a game on equal footing with a traditionally priced release? And while Comte dances around the subject, DLC and other paid content is a great way to recover money lost from used-game sales, as EA, Ubisoft, and THQ have apparently noted.
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