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Price of games


THC BLUNTED
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I was wondering if anyone here knew how game prices drop. Some games stay at $60 for awhile and others drop quickly. Just curious if there is some sort of time table or some other way of telling when a game will drop in price. I wanted to buy Batman AA and its down to $40, wondering if it would go down again or if $40 is my best bet. The more money I save the more games I can buy, any info on the topic would be helpful thank you.

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I worked in a game shop for a while and from the looks of it some games stay top end prices because they are still popular months after being released. Ones that suffer poorly and dont do well tend to be marked down for months so they can shift them and get more popular stock in.

 

Take Sacred 2, I managed to get it in the xmas sale, second hand and the price had gone down by £8. That game is like 2 years old isnt it? Maybe more and its still priced at £30 second hand! Now games like Batman will on occasion go down in price as the head offices know it will make more money when its cheap. but thats only going to be for a certain time only, then they chose another game to mark down.

 

I say get Batman now as its come down in price, chances are itll go back up soon. Its diccifult to pinpoint when drops can occur as its usually an email sent from the headoffice to management and then told to the workers.

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Batman will drop again as a GOTY 3-D edition will be coming out in a few months.

 

Anyhoo, as a retail employee, I'd agree with Sambuca. It all depends on popularity. Popular titles and evergreen titles stay high in price, while unpopular games don't.

 

Probably the fastest drop I saw was Beowulf. It took about 2-3 weeks for the price to drop from 60 down to 20. Sadly, it then became one of our better selling titles, as far too many people (at least where I work) buy games based solely on price, nothing else.

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It seems that games only turn into platinum hits once everybody that wants it already owns it. Only latecomers to the 360 or people that somehow overlooked it benefit from platinum hits. Anyway, most games don't stay $60 for long at all. A lot of online retailers have sales a couple of weeks after release for $40 or less. More permanent price drops seem to take effect after 2-3 months, or when so many people already have the game that sales are slow (MW2, Halo 3).

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It seems that games only turn into platinum hits once everybody that wants it already owns it. Only latecomers to the 360 or people that somehow overlooked it benefit from platinum hits. Anyway, most games don't stay $60 for long at all. A lot of online retailers have sales a couple of weeks after release for $40 or less. More permanent price drops seem to take effect after 2-3 months, or when so many people already have the game that sales are slow (MW2, Halo 3).

I didn't buy Fallout 3 until the Game of the Year edition so I could reap all the DLC for $60 with the game. However, I still can't get into the game! :p

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There's a bunch of factors that go into price drops.

Like if a game isn't well recieved they'll stop printing copies and thus make it rare and it will maintain a high price. On the opposite side if they print a lot of copies and it tanks then you'll see a price drop shortyly after.

Popular games vary, if it maintains sales for a long period of time then it may maintain a high price with the occasional sale because one retailer would like to sell extra units and pull away potential customers away from another retailer in the hopes you'll do other shopping there at the time or in the future.

 

MSRP is more of a suggestion rather then a rule or law, but they still help push prices down.

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My experience working at GAME was that prices remained high based on the amount of pre-owned in stock available. Single-player games like Batman and Assassin's Creed drop in price fast, whereas multiplayer games like Halo and COD remain high (until the new one comes out) because they have more longevity and replay value. Generally, a triple A singleplayer game will sell a lot of copies in the first few weeks and then all be traded in soon after completion. Mint sales drop off as people buy pre-owned and the distributor has to drop prices to the retailers to compensate. Normally retailers will offer half of what a new game is sold for in trade-in so you can pick up a preowned copy for just over half from classified ads.

 

Personally, I would rent a single-player only game, complete it and then send it back. Unless you often replay games or like to have a collection, it's never worth it from a financial perspective. A rough timetable from my experience would be that singleplayer, large release, mint games halves in price after 2 months (£40 to £20), about a third in 6 months (£20 down to ~£13) and a quarter within the year (bargain bin under £10).

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yeah the more popular a game is, the higher you can expect it to stay at a higher price. During the beginning of Summer 09 I saw Call of Duty 4 as high as $60 at best buy and $45 used at gamestop. The price didn't seem to drop until the end of the summer when everyone was starting to preorder MWF2

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I usually buy preowned and during my brief time working for GAME in the UK, prices for them were dictated by trade-ins. Lots of trade-ins = less popular = lower the price. Didn't work with all games, but for most it did.

 

AsDJ DEXTA said, thank the heavens for eBay!

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Time for an economics lesson.

 

At the core, the equilibrium (ideal, basically) price and quanitity sold of an item are dependent on the supply and demand curves for that item. Where they intersect is what it should be sold for in order to ensure maximum efficiency.

 

However, retailers don't give a crap about efficiency, just about profit, so it's all about something called elasticity of supply and demand. It's a little confusing to explain, but the idea is that the more elastic the demand for a product, the more sales will increase as price drops. If profit goes up with a decrease, the demand is elastic; if it goes down, it's inelastic. Supply is the other way around: lower prices mean less brought to market and vise-versa.

 

When games first come out, the demand is very inelastic. There are always tons of people who have no problem paying $60 (largely because they've been conditioned as such by every game costing that much), despite it being quite possible to save $20 or more if they wait a month or even less. As a result, there's no reason to lower it for a while. As elasticity increases, it becomes more and more profitable for the retailer to lower the prices. Remember that the investment has been made; this is a matter of getting as much money as possible, whether to profit or to minimize losses.

 

As you can imagine, some games have more elastic demand over time than others. Mostly, AAA titles will sell very well for a long time - Brawl, for instance, had barely dropped in price last I checked, because almost everyone with a Wii will buy it, while Brutal Legend, which is somewhat niche, is already $20 after 5 months.

 

As someone said, the style of the game is crucial: people play CoD and Halo multiplayer for years, but are likely to trade a strictly single-player game like Mass Effect in once they've beaten it (possibly gotten all the achievements). In this case, it's not a matter of elasticity, but simply supply: as supply increases, the price for the same quantity supplied goes down.

 

It's basically a matter of the retailers trying to clear out stock. This is why stores (especially online) will have a fantastic deal on an item shortly before it disappears: they were trying to get rid of the rest of them. Every department store has a clearance section founded on this idea; game retailers just don't organize them that way.

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I didn't buy Fallout 3 until the Game of the Year edition so I could reap all the DLC for $60 with the game. However, I still can't get into the game! :p

 

I probably should have waited for the GOTY edition. I bought Fallout 3 for $60 and 4 of the DLC's which ran me $40. So I pretty much paid $100 so far Fallout 3 (haven't downloaded Mothership Zeta yet) :(

 

But at least it's a long game and one of my favorites of all time.

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