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The interesting thing about this protest is that it's not just consumers who want the price of videogames significantly reduced. Many of the people who actually create the games - the designers, the artists, the musicians - agree that videogames are overpriced. They're sick of seeing interesting, innovative, creative game ideas fall by the wayside because people are scared to take a risk buying something new and different when it costs 40 pounds. They're tired of having to spend all their time making the same games over and over again because the high price means that people will only buy things they already know.
 

"At £40 for a game people are very cautious. Now films usually cost £20, and at £20 you're prepared to take a risk and buy a film that you've heard is good... you're not sure, but you'll take a chance. But £40 is too much to do that" - Charles Cecil, head of Revolution Software, creators of games like the popular Broken Sword series.
 

"It's just not worth producing original product any more. Research and development  is just so staggeringly expensive. I'd encourage anyone who's planning on setting up a development company just to do loads of derivative shit - it's cheaper to produce, and easier to sell. To succeed with original stuff, you've got to be good, and you've got to be lucky." - Jon Hare, director of Sensible Software, producer of the smash hits Sensible Soccer and Cannon Fodder.
 

"In my 17 years of designing games, I've never known publishers to be so resistant to original game ideas. This creative stagnation is directly related to the polarized, hit-driven market caused by high prices. Repositioning games in the impulse-buy price bracket would make the hobby accessible to a far greater audience who in turn would be more likely to take chances with new original games and genres. The Fair Play campaign is exactly what the industry needs - cheaper games will be good news for gamers, developers and publishers alike." - John Pickford of Zed Two, successful developers of games on countless formats for almost two decades.
 

And what about the rest of the videogames industry? The magazines who cover it, for example?

"Gaming's utterly rigid price structure, where all new console games cost roughly the same, is harming the industry. It is harming the industry because casual browsers can't be sure what's in the DVD box they're buying and because, at over £40 a throw, it's difficult to justify a purchase with a question mark over it. Easier to go for a couple of DVDs with pointless featurettes and unwanted extras. You know exactly what you're getting." - Edge magazine, October 2002
 

"The price of games is crippling innovation - with people buying so few games, they take very few risks, so publishers play safer and safer, so sales slip further downwards (how many driving games and beat-'em-ups do you need?), so games get more expensive to recoup the losses, etc etc." - Computer Trade Weekly
 

It's pretty clear, then, that there is only one section of the videogames industry that believes prices should be as high as they are now, and that's the besuited businessmen at the top of the publishing companies. "Well, fair enough," you might say, "they're in business to make money and they must know what they're doing, who are we to tell them they're wrong?" Which would be fine if they actually did make money. But, as we noted on the front page of this site, the videogames business is actually a financial disaster area.

Roughly 95% of all games released actually lose money, and publishers only survive by raking in massive sums on the few successful games they manage to produce. Taken as a whole, the industry loses hundreds of millions of pounds every single year, which is why its trade body ELSPA is continually going cap-in-hand to the government asking for huge subsidies of taxpayers' money like those granted to the movie industry.

Yes, not only is the videogames industry happy to rip you off by charging far more than videogames ought to cost - and far more than they cost anywhere else in the world - they actually want you to hand over your tax money so that they can keep doing it.
 

So if games lose money, why do we think they should be cheaper? The truth is, were the price of games to be reduced, a wider spectrum of software would be successful, people who currently quite rightly feel ripped off would buy more games instead of resorting to illegal pirate copies - which the industry insists help to fund terrorism, drug-dealing and pornography, by the way - and people who currently don't play games at all because of the prohibitive cost would be brought into the market. Sales would soar by more than enough to make up for the price reduction.

Every time the industry has seen significant price reductions - such as in 1997 when a price war reduced the nationwide price of Playstation games from £40 to £30 - sales have rocketed by far more than the relative size of the price cut. Unfortunately, the fat cats can never resist the temptation to force the price back up as soon as possible, because they don't want people to get used to cheap games. (If they did, the next big blockbuster might make less money, you see. They simply fail to grasp that with lower prices, the 95% of unsuccessful games they also publish might not be unsuccessful, so they'd actually make more money overall, and by not putting all their eggs in one basket they'd be running a much less risky business.)

Fair Play doesn't want to destroy the videogames companies. It's the belief of almost everyone in the industry, from consumers to journalists to game developers, that significantly lower prices would ultimately bring MORE money and profit into the industry. The only people who don't believe that, the only people who insist on the high prices, are the people whose incompetent management of the industry have caused it to lose billions of pounds and tens of thousands of jobs in the last few years. So you'll forgive us if we don't have too much respect for their professional skills. But these people aren't, sadly, smart enough to listen to simple arguments.. So we want to persuade them using the only language they (even vaguely) understand - money. If we hit them in the pocket, they'll listen.

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