ok, I assume that the cost of heating that air at bottom is already calculated in.
No.
Not helpful, AC. You may be correct but you should still cite your source, provide otherwise constructive material for your comment or GTFO.
Regardless of whether the beef was minced or not, it could be recovered. The beef could even be smashed into a pulp and still scraped from the bag, the bag itself could be wrung for the juices or inverted and hung to drip if it was watertight. In the analogy, there are options for recovery and definite measurement of quantity to ensure value is achieved.
The problem is that there is no way to verify the accuracy of provided figures from the merchant to ensure that they are measured in a fair and standards-compliant fashion so we know that we're getting what we paid for.
Let's take the beef in adolf's example, but now that beef is invisible (yes, I know this is getting strange - just bear with me). Now, your butcher takes this theoretical beef (bagged, minced, mashed, whole or otherwise) to the back room to measure the weight on an industrial scale kept under lock and key and he expects you to take him on his word that is actually 1,000 pounds of beef. Again, as with adolf's analogy, he has only given you 750 pounds. Many people would not protest, or even notice the difference; it is rather a lot of beef after all. Others might painstakingly take it to a home scale and measure it chunk by chunk, but how many people keep scales for such occasions? How can they be sure that they have all of the beef or that they measured correctly? It is hard to measure invisible beef. Perhaps a meat-enthusiast might dabble in the equipment necessary and have a scale sufficient to measure it in whole, but the butcher does not expect this to be an issue.
In the end, we're left frustrated about a suspected lack of product but an inability to concretely prove it. In short: "Where's the beef?!"
Misspelled Tolkien's name in the subject...
AltaRock will dig too greedily and too deep. You know what they will awaken in the darkness of Newberry.. shadow and flame.
I've been saying this for years - If they'd lower the prices they would net more sales at release and lessen the sales of resellers.
$40 would be a much more approachable entry level price. $30 would be amazing, but will probably never happen. This $60-$70 business has got to stop or it will drive sales into the ground. Why would anyone want to spend that much money on something they can't guarantee they'll enjoy, may not work properly, and can't even return to any sane retailer?
If they present games in a more impulse-buy friendly fashion, they will see sales increase.
It would also help if they would get back to making games worth playing, but that's a whole 'nother topic...
The root of the problem with reselling has never been the company doing the reselling - it's the pricing of the product that allows, and even encourages the purchase and sale of used products.
A new game will set the consumer back on average $60-$70, regardless of whether it is single player, multiplayer, or moddable and any combination of these two. Why do we pay the same price for a single player game as we do for one with technically unlimited gameplay? Or for one with multiplayer that allows potentially unlimited permutations of unlimited gameplay?
Feature-based pricing with a far lower base rate would benefit everyone. Even just lowering the standard price on games to around $40 flat would allow them to -almost- be impulse buys, would easily cover packaging and shipping, and still allow a healthy profit margin that would encourage greater sales. If packaging is really that huge a concern, why not take efforts to reduce cost of packaging, like the smaller format boxes we saw appear recently, reduction of included inserts in favor of digital documentation (I read the manual, but how many of you do? I'd give it up gladly for a drop in price), or maybe even (yes, go ahead and groan) included advertising inserts to generate revenue to counter it?
$40 also gives a whole lot less "wiggle room" to the used game market, and resellers would be making $10-$30 less profit per title at the new release stage. The temptation to wait for a title to drop in price or hit the used game store's shelves at a lower price would likewise lessen greatly at a more accessible price point. Length of time before a significant price drop would, likewise, increase which would encourage further sales at the initial release price. Even so - only twice the cost of a movie for interactive entertainment? Sign me up.
It would, however, be -more- intelligent to set a standard price at something like $30 and then do feature-based pricing. Cars do it - more seats? Costs more. Convertible? Ditto. More powerful or newer engine? Same deal.
Apply to games: Multiplayer? Costs $10 more. Built-in mod support? Costs $5-10 more. Brand new game engine? Costs a little more.
You'd get a market with varying prices and incentive to make games last longer and be more interesting. It would probably even encourage innovation.
Don't get me wrong - I actually want the developers to get -more- money to better support the industry. I just think that charging more and netting less first-purchase sales is the wrong approach, and restrictive DRM is a draconian approach that avoids addressing the real problem.
"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra
