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Press
Release: October 3, 2002
The gist of the astounding hate-burst from the videogames
industry on October 2nd appears to
centre around the frankly surprising view that, in the industry's
eyes, FairPlay apparently thinks that videogames fall fully-formed
out of the sky. The organisers of the FairPlay campaign have more
than 50 years' experience in the videogames industry between them.
We are already aware, it may surprise and astonish the industry to learn, that
videogames cost money to develop. Nevertheless, the FairPlay
campaign rests on a couple of extremely easy-to-understand principles.
The PHYSICAL MANUFACTURE of videogames is a very, very low-cost
procedure. The development costs of games have already been incurred
before the manufacturing process begins. Therefore, ANY retail price
which allows the sale of games to generate a gross, per-unit
profit
is potentially a viable route by which to recoup those development
costs and then generate overall profit. The only question is whether
a sufficient userbase exists to make a sufficient number of the
gross per-unit profits to overtake the development cost. With
games machines
such as the Playstation 2 having a userbase in excess of 40 million
consoles, it is obviously clear that this is so.
The second principle is the industry's circular, self-fulfilling
argument that games have a comparatively small audience so prices
must remain high. This is, amazingly obviously, bunk. Quite aside
from the fact that the most successful hit games actually HAVE historically sold comparable amounts
to successful
albums, if
music CDs cost £45 for one album, it's a fairly safe assumption
that they'd have a dramatically smaller audience too. Lowering the
price of games would, beyond any reasonable doubt, increase the size of the
potential audience significantly. This is hardly a contentious or
outrageous claim.
The simple truth is that it's
fear of failure which motivates most of the objections to the FairPlay
campaign. Until now, developers and publishers alike have been able
to blame poor sales of their games, and huge financial losses of
their companies, on an unbalanced, franchise-dominated market in
which 95% of games released lose money. Failure is the comforting
norm rather than the exception. With games pitched at
widely-accessible impulse prices,
though, that comfort blanket would be withdrawn. There would be
no excuse for failure. Good games (and companies) would make profits, bad
ones
would not. To FairPlay's mind, this is obviously a desirable state
of affairs. But to an industry weaned on failure and desperate for Government
subsidies - rather than, for example, better management or better
games - to bail out its 95% of
uneconomic and unsuccessful
products, it represents the dawn of a new, unfamiliar and frightening future.
FairPlay
gently urges the games industry:
Don't be afraid. Step into the light.
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