Why Games Cost $60 -- A View of the Pie

eldavojohn writes: "Crispy Gamer is running a very interesting article on why games cost $60. Many games start out at this retail price but why? Did the makers of The Beatles Rock Band game just happen upon $59.99 as did — by coincidence — the makers of Batman Arkham asylum? After all those two titles surely took different amounts of man hours to develop and result in different averages of entertainment time enjoyed by the consumer. They interview a director at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research who breaks down the pie as $12 to retailer, $5 to discounts/returns/retail marketing, $10 toward manufacturing costs and shipping. That leaves $30 to $35 in the hands of the publishers. Though lengthy, the article looks at three forces of economics on why game publishers continuously end up in lockstep for pricing: sensible greed, consumer stupidity or evil conspiracy. David Thomas collects several interesting quotes in this article from organization leaders to lawyers. When asked about the next step up to $70 or $80, Hal Halpin (president and founder of the Entertainment Consumers Association) says, 'I'm not sure that we'll see a standard $70 price point at all. To my mind, emerging technologies, subscriptions and episodic and downloadable content should all enable price drops — increasing accessibility to a much wider audience. Free-to-play, ad-supported models, too, diversify the price landscape.' For those of you PC gamers that catch deals on Steam, you may be all too familiar with the change that Mr. Halpin is forecasting — will we see this on consoles?"