Are gaming fans being priced out of playing?

There’s big business, and then there’s mega business. Of the two, gaming definitely fits into the second category. The figures speak for themselves, there’s an estimated 2.7 billion gamers all round the world who are set to spend a total of over $159 billion on games, gaming and other associated items this year. It’s also a market that’s growing at an astonishing rate with predictions that it will exceed $200 billion a year by 2023.

That said, there is a feeling that the games industry itself may be starting to over-price the products it sells to players, forcing them to seek out cheaper ways to play. It could even prove more damaging than that as it may create the perfect environment for even more games piracy than ever before, a scourge that has done huge damage to the music and film industries in the past.

It all also has to be put into the context of a gaming industry in transition. The previous dominance of PC and console games has been changing for some time now with more and more people starting to play on smartphones and mobile devices. This has also led to a shift in players’ expectations about whether they should start getting their games for free.

If we look back at the history of games and gaming, it’s obvious how very far we have come since the early days of the industry. Back then, games were relatively quick and cheap to create, and market and player expectations were reasonably low.

Return on investment

But now, when a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 takes not just months, but years, to produce and involves the work of hundreds of people, the economics mean that the prices have started to rise. Add to this the extensive marketing campaigns which treat a new game like the release of a major movie, and it all starts adding to the cost.

So, while the previous generations of games may have come in at $30-$40 the latest major games are more likely to be approaching the $70 mark. By anyone’s reckoning, this is a considerable sum to spend on a game, especially one that has a finite amount of entertainment value, no matter how complex and multi-layered the plot and narrative action might be.

Any gamer with an interest and appetite for perfecting their skills in more than one game at a time will find that their budget is being severely tested, and that’s even before starting to invest in any necessary hardware on which to play the games.

Console wars

This brings us neatly onto the question of console gaming. For some, this is still the preferred way to play. But, just like the games, the costs of these are increasingly putting them out of the reach of many and they are unlikely to indulge in any of the free giveaways that other hardware providers like Apple sometimes offer.

This has been brought sharply into focus by the impending battle between the Xbox Series X and the PS5 for market dominance. There was a great deal of speculation about how much these were going to cost when they were eventually released and now, we know that both will retail for around $500. Add in controllers, maybe a new UHD screen and a sound-system to really do justice to the games’ soundtrack and you’re not looking at very much spare change from $1,000.

Free to play, at first

So, when we start to consider figures like these, it’s easy to see exactly why the many free games available on mobiles are steadily gaining in popularity. There’s also no shortage of them to enjoy with more and more becoming available every year.

Then there’s the freemium business model in which players can start by playing for free and then start to buy-in game purchases. There are now many games available on mobile devices that are classed as ‘freemium’ allowing players to test out a game before using their own money. An industry that has utilised this method well is online casinos, who offer free versions of their games to players to trial before they deposit their own money. This is a great way of acquiring new players who want to try before they buy. Usually, when players can trial the game and see the variety on offer, they are more likely to feel confident and continue playing. Online slots providers use this technique by offering a free version of their game for players to test the slot machine to make sure it is the right one for them. These types of providers also offer a wide range of sign-up bonuses and promotions to attract new players to their sites with the competition being fierce.

For the game developers, the opportunity to profit from in-game purchases may mean that they need to wait a little longer to start seeing a return on their investment. But if the game is good enough, then those rewards will start to roll in as Fortnite has only gone to prove.

Streaming ahead

Recently, both Google and Apple have sensed that the gaming market is due for a shake-up and are approaching it in slightly different ways. Through their Stadia platform Google offer players who are paying a monthly subscription the chance to enjoy free trials of games before they go on to buy them.  This echoes a time when all games came on CD-Roms and free sample disks giving a flavour of the game were distributed in the hope that players would go on to purchase.

Apple’s Arcade, on the other hand, needs just a monthly subscription, in the Netflix style, for unlimited access to a constantly growing number of games. As original pioneers in gaming who had turned their back on it for quite a while, this is a refreshing move for the tech giant.

It could also be a blueprint for the games developers themselves to create a sustainable new business model that would rely on the global nature of the sector to generate huge revenue.

A radical idea, maybe, but one that many may soon be forced to take if they are to continue to survive.