Quote:
Originally Posted by TheEditor
................. PC games cost too much to make with little audience to fund them. ...................
|
Perhaps true, but you know what? I'd pay £100/$160 or perhaps more for a combat sim that delivers everything CoD/SoW was supposed to (and still may).
After all, I spent ten times that much on a new rig just to get it to deliver on CoD's promises (and better FSX etc). It would be daft to resent paying a significant price to actually get the software. One of the ironies is that people
are prepared to pay so much for hardware but perhaps not the software. These aren't console games although the same market price is targeted. The developer's quandary is trying to meet high-end expectations with a low wide-market price and trying to make it all things to all men in order to make sales. Many console players want £30 max and low play-realism because anything else is too hard to learn and will lose their attention pretty quickly anyway. Some of the rest of us want high fidelity and will dedicate our time to it because quick-fix console games aren't what we're looking for.
In the full blown professional simulation world the software is a huge cost and a large percentage of the overall. 'Game' simulation isn't in the same bracket but we seem to expect top-notch simulation, as far as is possible on a PC, for the price of a console game.
In fact, and by popular agreement in many threads here, this simulation is much deeper than a simple console game, many of which appear to re-gurgitate the same core software for further cost recovery. If a narrow world of, say, 5,000+ hard core simmers worldwide were prepared to pay £300 for a fantastic combat simulation the market might still be attractive to more developers. At the current price they need to sell over 50,000 copies for the same return (which I know copuld still happen). I have no idea how large the market is in copy sales so perhaps the sweet spot is somewhere else.
Would I pay £300? Possibly, if it was
everything I wanted it to be and it would sit comfortably alongside my hardware investment. And yes, that would make it another market altogether.
Who else expected CoD to be at least £50? I did.