JFD
Kathigitarkh
$36 NZ on Steam. $50 from NZ online stores.
$36 NZ on Steam. $50 from NZ online stores.
Thankfully I got $20 MightyApe vouchers for christmas, brought it down to $30. Disk copies are always better IMO anyway
£13.99 on Play too now I see. They tend to ship far quicker than Amazon in my experience.
Why would you think that?I thought digital downloads were meant to be cheaper than physical boxed copies.
Why would you think that?
Digital downloads have never been cheaper. Just like buying a cd in the shop is cheaper than buying it on iTunes.
Why would you think that?
Digital downloads have never been cheaper. Just like buying a cd in the shop is cheaper than buying it on iTunes.
True, but production cost is only part of the equation in a free market situation. At least as important is the willingness to pay that consumers have. The ease of use of buying a digital product goes a long way.Boxed copies are actually more expensive to produce because they have to pay for the box costs, CDs, printing, distribution, and retail staff's wages.
Digital copies skip all of that and all you buy is a code to the game. Theoretically, digital copies should be cheaper because they cost an awful lot less to distribute than boxed copies do.
As has been said, online distributors have to sell games at the same price as shop retailers because most of the sales are still made physically, and you don't want to anger the big shop retailers selling games at half the price online, unless you want to sell less than 40% of what you expected. And the video game industry, especially with AAA titles, requires a much bigger initial investment for the development of the game than for the final distribution of the copies, so every copy sold counts.
The online preorder is just a nefarious device that those companies have found to make back a part of the initial investment sooner than they should. To sweeten the deal, they usually give a token bonus to those that preorder. Unless you are preordering the day before the game is released, there isn't any real reason to do so (1$ now is worth more than 1$ in three months...).
"Instant gratification" means that you can start playing the game at 00AM, instead of going to the store, doing the line, buying the game, going back home, installing the game, then finally play it, which can take a couple of hours depending on your situation.
And claiming that online distribution is the same as piracy is nonsense. The millions of lines of code are worth something, the same as a song or a movie, and they have a right to make you pay a fee to enjoy them. I wouldn't call movie theatres "pirates" because they are showing you time and time again the same movie :/