Why Do Games Cost $60?

I was bored with Minecraft after 30 minutes. I enjoy a more liner type of game. 

Plus, $50 for 2 weeks worth of entertainment is a great deal. You can easily blow that in one night out drinking with your friends or going to the movies with your SO.

Well, that's assuming that you're buying brand new. Personally there are very few games I get on the first day specifically because of this problem that you're presenting. I'll wait until a sale or until the used price is low enough. Granted it doesn't help much, but it's better than piracy and the overhead on digital is lower so the discounts tend to be more frequent/larger anyway.

Why are you acting like you can't replay a story focused, linear game? By that logic why would someone buy a movie? It might be more epensive, but even if you remove stide stuff you're getting more content then a movie will give you.

It's all a matter of perspective and how much each person personally feels they enjoyed their experience. If you do even look at it as compared to the costs of movie tickets, or tv shows, then the cost/hour of entertainment is significantly lower for even a linear game with no replay value, than it is for the majority of other forms of entertainment you can spend your money on.....

Part of the cost of marketing is likely caused by the things such as the high cost/second of advertisement on television, as well as limited window/display space in stores making the cost higher for those advertisements. Online advertisements, payed sponsorships with Let's Players, ect all end up costing quite a bit as well. As for what the publishers specifically do, is determine which types of advertisements to put money into making, and what will get the most awareness for the games. The problem is that if they don't pay such advertisements, then unless the game becomes a viral success like the most popular indie games in recent years, the games risk not having enough customer awareness to make enough money off of sales to cover even the cost outside of advertisements. It's kind of cyclical, in that they have more sales for every advertisement they pay for, but if they don't have enough advertisements, then they won't have enough sales to begin with....

All of this would theoretically be less of a problem for games in a series, where the series was already popular, since they already have brand awareness in their previous customers. At the same time though, they have to spend more to advertise in a way that both draws in new customers, and makes certain that the previous ones are aware that the new game is coming out......

Not everyone is s student

Pie charts are less visually interesting, so it might drive some casual viewers away. A dumb reason for some to stop watching the video, but I'm sure it's present unfortunately.....

As for the hurting the publisher's profit part, you are right in the per sale amount from that retailer as they are payed before hand. What would actually hurt it is likely that one retailer reducing prices would cause others to have to reduce their prices to keep from losing sales. If they lose sales, they buy less copies of games from the publishers, and the publishers lose money. The ability to freely lower profits also runs the risk of making it so that one company will reduce the prices to the point that they are losing money on sales, but other companies can't keep up because the loss in profit isn't acceptable, and as such will stop buying copies of games to sell because no one is buying from them. Before too long, the distributor who was losing profits will have a monopoly on the sales of the product, because no other company could afford to keep up, and no one would pay more for the product. Then, the one that was losing profits can begin setting whatever price they want on the product, making back the lost profits by overcharging drastically. All of this also does hurt the producer's profits, because it means less distributors buying product, and reaching less costumers in general because there are less places for said costumers to go to buy the games. It's lose/lose situation for everyone involved except the distributor who was lowering the prices, (and in the very short term, the customers who bought the games at the lower rate)......

Australian? Then you still sort of are, just currency exchange rates

@BillyRage With the current exchange rates it would be around $80 not approximately $95, the reason Australians pay so much more is because of price gouging by the publishers and distribution networks, it has nothing to do with currency values. I remember when 1 Australian dollar was buying 1.25 American and we were still paying nearly $100 per game, If it were exchange rates we would have been buying them at $45

@darkflame8 While I'm not Australian, if I'm not mistaken it's also due to the high taxes imposed on imported technology within your country, compared to others. Not as much just the publishers and distributors, as it is the government charging those people even more than other countries do, meaning that they have to increase the prices to offset the costs of the additional taxes, as well as the losses such taxes create when a copy doesn't sell. Still definitely not caused by the exchange rate, however.....

@Gamer3427 While it is true that we have what is commonly refereed to as the GST, it only adds an extra 10 - 11% to every item that is not food. That does not equate to a difference of well over $20 dollars in most cases. Unfortunately the real problem is that if you don't count steam or GOG there are only two major physical outlets that sell products in Australia, and since most people will pay for whatever the price is, there is never any real need for changes to the price of games.

You are correct with the so-called Australia Tax and yes in order to be more competitive it would be better to remove it, but the tax is not the reason that publishers and suppliers charge exuberant fees for their products in the Australian Market, it is because most people will simply take what they can get and thus the system never changes.

I think they keep the extra $4 on the price because they would theoretically undercut their own sales from stores. It would make sense if only because if they don't sell physical games then they're technically losing money because they've already produced and distributed them?

I belive the retailer then becomes  Microsoft/sony and distribution is just added to that so that digital doesn't phase out physical.

and if the retail position is taken over by sony/microsoft then it is safe to assume that a small charge is posted for the the people, time, and hard/software it takes to code the game into the online store. maybe it is the $4 maybe a little less. but even if the $4 is not charged to the publisher it makes sense to charge it anyways so debts can be paid off faster so the producers and developers are given instinctive to create more games.

The distribution and retailer costs most likely go to whichever digital distribution platform you are buying from. These costs likely help to fund things like keeping the servers running that allow people to download the games in the first place, which isn't cheap by any means. Distribution also applies to "digital distribution". You also have to include storage space for the games themselves, and for who owns what games, which even if minuscule, does add up when you have millions of people owning different things. In actuality, the one thing that might help offset this digital distribution cost being higher to maintain is that the cost of "unsold copies" disappears because there aren't any unsold disks when it's digitally distributed. Even with that though, in the short term the distribution platform likely doesn't make as much money per sale as physical retailers, since the cost of maintaining the system only increases as time goes on, rather than the one off purchase that physical retailers make for things such as shelf space. There is likely more money to be made digitally in the long run, since the game can be sold a theoretically infinite number of times, but the prices vary more as time goes on due to sales and such. What doesn't make sense is that the actual price of a game doesn't slowly drop more over time when it has been on a digital distribution platform for an extended period of time, and has paid for it's share of costs. The permanent price decrease for games physically is far greater, depending on sales of that particular game, which makes sense because they need to clear shelf space, but the gap shouldn't be quite so large in most cases....

They still give us the full game, DLC is option additional content. You don't need to buy DLC so if you don't like it don't support it

What if DLC is kept as a way to keep supporting the game for longer like in the PC market?