The pricing of games is a particularly sore subject in the gaming community at the best of times. On the positive side, the growth of studios and publishers alike in the last decade means we should have seen a hike in the retail price (RRP) of your standard games, yet we’re paying the same prices as 15-20 years ago, often less so. Perceived value has changed a significant amount however as games expand, so you can see why the complaints arise, even if you don’t necessarily agree.
The problems now tend to lie in the content you get for your money, and how much it costs elsewhere, and while the former of these issues is often a case of subjectivity, the latter is a touch more troubling in recent months, especially where ports of mobile games are concerned.
PS4 mobile ports are too expensive
PS4 has seen a good number of ports with jacked up prices. Usually low-end, low quality PC titles and rather lean mobile games that go for around twice the original rate. A recent example was Kitty Powers’ Matchmaker, a reasonably decent mobile/PC title that goes for around £2.49 on app stores and originally released a couple of years ago. That exact same game came to PS4 this month for the price of £9.49. Now I’ll happily say Matchmaker is a daft bit of fun, but it’s more than a little cheeky that a two-year-old mobile app comes to PlayStation at almost four times the price of the phone version that’s identical. In isolation, you could ignore it—extra costs for publishing on the store and all that—but the consistency with which this happens means we come to something as audaciously greedy as Warhammer Quest.
Warhammer Quest is a tabletop-style strategy RPG that came out on iOS May 30 2013, nearly four whole years ago. You can regularly find it today for under three quid. It slunk onto the PS Store today, nearly two years after the PC port, and there’s a £2.99 in the cost, but someone appears to have added thirty pounds to that.
No matter what way you look at it, that’s a frankly horrendous, almost fraudulent price for something that should, regardless of perceived quality, be far, far less. I’d hope it was a mistake, but then there’s this shitshow coming out later this week.
Warhammer 40k Deathwatch is also a port of a cheap, old mobile title: this one to be exact. Notice the difference in price? Again, price hikes on mobile ports to PlayStation are ten a penny, but if a heinous jump like this is allowed to continue unopposed, then the precedent is set for some ludicrous, disgusting practices from even more publishers.
The sneering counter to this sort of thing is usually along the lines of ‘well if people did their research…’, and while that obviously holds some weight, it doesn’t excuse the attempt at conning folk out of their cash. Make no mistake, a markup of this scale is a con. Not a cheeky attempt to recoup some costs; it is a decision taken to sell these older, often relatively shallow, titles at an eyebrow-raising markup and exploit an unwitting audience.
Sure, Sony should be questioning such practices (not to mention putting a closer eye to the slew of low-rent garbage that has begun to appear on the store for a brief period before flitting off into the night, but that’s another story), yet the blame ultimately lies with the publisher. They of course have the right to charge what they wish for their product, but when you can buy said product elsewhere for a sliver of the cost, the consumer’s right to challenge and question it is far more important.