Battle of the Price Plans

Good Thursday all!

Today I'm here to discuss with you about the on going war between games, be them war games or video games, and my wallet.

So I read earlier today a tweet from someone comparing wargame miniature prices to video games, and how over priced things like the recent Diablo 3 is.

While I do believe the tweeter's argument is heavily flawed, stating that the price for only 7 hours of gameplay is a rip off, whereas I've been playing at least an hour or two every day for the past week, meaning I've already achieved around 14 hours out of the game and I'm still on Act I.

But anyway, I do believe that the tweeter has a point, for those who bought the game without a WoW Annual Pass, the game costs £40!

If we take a look at other big releases on PC there is a trend as there has always been for between £35-£30 for week of release. Then along came games such as Modern Warfare, and £40+ is not unheard of.

Personally I blame the consoles. I'm not saying that the machines are rubbish or anything like that, I personally own a PS3 and a Wii, and countless older generation machines. My gaming experience first started on consoles with the Commodore 128 and then followed by the Sega Mega Drive (or Sega Genesis for those across the pond), but for as long as I can remember console games have always been £45 on week of release.

Honestly I don't know where the justification for the extra £10 over PC comes from, perhaps it's for the luxury of never needing to calibrate your game like you do with PC.

But let's not focus purely on video games here! I honestly believe that wargaming is just as guilty.

Now you can't talk about wargames price plans without bringing up Games Workshop. Let's say you were a new gamer and you wanted to get into 40k, not including the additional extras, in order to have a basic battle force, I used to play Tyranids, so let's use them, this is the following pricing requirement:

Warhammer 40k: £55
Codex Tyranids: £18
Tyranid Battleforce: £63
Total: £136

This is not including your choice of leader and special units, plus paints and assembly materials. All in all your easily looking at £200-£250, and I don't even know how big that army would be.

With this in mind I would say that Games Workshop are the Activision of the Wargames world. They're the ones who think it's acceptable to put a heafty price tag on everything they do and continuously drop the quality of the output.

But that's not the case with every company.

Let's compare the slew of indie/part indie games getting released on Steam every few weeks: take Audiosurf for example, where at week of release was looking at £10! Or the many games released by Valve which are either £20- or free to play.

I would compare this to Wyrd.

For a game of Malifaux for a generic crew your looking at the following start up costs:

Malifaux Rules book: £9
Fate Deck: £4.50
Starter Box Set: £24.30
Totems: £9.00
Blister of Minions:£9.90

Total: £56.70

That's easily over £150+ cheaper to have a functioning crew.

With this in mind, I call out to all gamers, be them of the war or video type. Let's please stop this constant to and fro'ing!

We all have our hobbies we all like and love, and like wise, we've all been F'd in the A at some point by a fat-cat producer, be them Games Workshop or Activision, they both want us to bend over and empty our wallets.

So let's stand united, not divided, and tell these serial rapers "Yes we will let you anally rape us! And yes you can keep taking our money (because let's face it, we love what they make/produce) but we will do so as brothers! You can take our money, dignity and self respect, but you can never take our nerdrage!"


- Your friendly neighbourhood Doctor Loxley