It's hardly a controversial statement, is it? Nobody likes paying £40-£45 for a
new videogame, especially when the disc you're buying only cost 40p to manufacture. And the truth is, you're being ripped off. Compared to videogames, replica football shirts are a bargain - as we'll show you here, there isn't a single reason that games couldn't be sold at £20, or even less. But what can you do? Well, you could always help us achieve exactly that. Here's how.
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The videogames industry is largely run to a standard of financial competence that would give any businessman worth his salt nightmares. The industry persists in perpetuating high prices even though they're a disaster for the industry as well as us. (Though the headline revenues from game sales get larger every year, more and more game publishers are going bust, more and more money is being lost, and thousands of jobs are vanishing.) The games industry, taken as a worldwide whole, actually lost in the region of £1 BILLION in 2001. (Source: Computer Trade Weekly) Right now, "Developers and publishers are in (dire) financial straits all over the world" (Source: Gamesindustry.biz). If you're waiting for the industry to drop prices voluntarily purely out of economic common sense, you'll have a long wait.
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But there's one thing that even the stupidest business can't afford to ignore - consumer power. If you hit the games industry in the pocket, they'll change their ways quickly. Look at Microsoft - earlier this year, they released the new Xbox console at £300, insisting that it was a fair price and couldn't be sold any cheaper. Consumers, though, refused to buy it, and Microsoft swiftly slashed the price, first to £200, and then to £160. In less than six months, the price of brand new game technology was halved, through consumer power alone. We aim to do the same to videogames. There is NO REASON WHATSOEVER for games to cost more than £20.
If you want to know more of the reasoning behind this campaign, read on here. But if you just want to know the plan, here it is:
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The weeks running up to Christmas are overwhelmingly the games industry's busiest and most lucrative time, accounting for a vastly disproportionate amount of the industry's entire annual revenue. If you want to get their attention, this is the time to do it. So we're proposing that for just one week, NOBODY BUYS ANY VIDEOGAMES. |
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You don't have to disappoint your kids at Christmas. You don't have to give up on that game you've been looking forward to all year. We're not saying "Don't buy a game ever again". All we're saying is, if we all demonstrate our power as consumers by refusing to buy anything in one particular week, the industry will have no choice but to sit up and listen. They've already lost the argument over pricing. They know that games are a rip-off just as well as we do. But unless we threaten the thing they care about - money - they won't do anything about it.
So that's it. That's all you have to do. If you want to buy a game, don't do it between the 1st and the 8th of December. Get it on November 30 or December 9 instead. It's not much of a sacrifice, but it will serve as a warning shot to the videogames industry at the time they care about it most. If you're happy to continue being ripped off, then don't listen to us. But if you'd rather pay £20 for the next game you buy than £40, then you know what to do. |
