5th Cell CEO Says Current $60 Retail Model Is Broken

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There’s no denying it – being a video gamer is an expensive hobby. Sure, there’s always some sale going on and at any given point in time, there’s some awesome game being offered at a discounted price, but if you like to buy your games new and support the developers that are responsible for you entertainment, you’re probably going to pay somewhere around $50 or $60 per game.

The cost of playing video games builds very quickly, and the bitch of it is that you’re always running the risk of spending $60 on a piece of crap. Shovelware is everywhere these days, and spending that much money when you could have more fun hurling yourself off of buildings is enough to make any gamer jaded. Luckily, there’s some developers and publishers out there that are reconsidering the way they sell their games.

Take 5th Cell, developer of the Scribblenauts series on the DS, for example. 5th Cell’s CEO, Jeremiah Slaczka, recently sat down with Game Informer to discuss what he thinks is a “broken” retail system:

The $60 boxed game is a broken model. It was always broken, it’s just more broken now because games cost so much to develop, produce and market. Before the model was tolerable, because the cost was reasonable enough to allow mediocre selling games to make money. Now it’s just insane. If you aren’t going to be a mega hit at $60, you might as well give up before you even try, because it’s tens of millions down the hole.

To help explain what he was trying to get at, Slaczka picked on THQ’s recently recently (and painfully mediocre) FPS Homefront:

Think of it this way: Homefront was an okay FPS – not great, not terrible, just okay. But as a consumer, why would I want to play an okay FPS when I can play a bunch of great FPS titles for the same price? And that’s what the consumers did. While over 13 million people bought Black Ops last year in the US alone, smashing records, less than just 1 million people bought Homefront in the US. The consumer voted with their wallet, right?

But what if you could rent Homefront for $4.99 for 24 hours from your console? What if Homefront was only $30 dollars upfront for the single player and if you liked it you could buy the multiplayer for an additional $30?

Slaczka went onto say that by doing something like this, purchasers won’t feel like they’re taking such a big risk, and publishers would probably see more people interested in their games. As he says, it’s win-win, and I agree wholeheartedly with the man. I also think someone should give him a medal.

Looking at just this autumn alone, there were tons of great games to buy – too many for most gamers out there. As a result, games like Skyrim, Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, and Batman: Arkham City sold boat loads of copies, while other games that were priced the same didn’t do that well. I can only buy so many $60 games in such a short amount of time and still feel good about it, but if some of those other games were priced at $30 or $40, I would have definitely checked them out.

I’m willing to bet many other people would have too. But now, it’s all up to the publishers and developers out there to look past the $60 price point and try out some different models. Doing so could get their games in the hands of more consumers, but the only way to know for sure is if they take a risk first.

Will they? Only time will tell, but for the moment, we’re seeing some smaller studios experiment with different pricing models for their games, which is definitely something refreshing. What do you think? Would you buy more games if they weren’t all priced at $60? Do you think there are some games out there that deserve that $60 price tag? Head down to the comments section and share your thoughts!