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Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

February 20, 2012 – 12:39 pm | 3 Comments

Tiny Diggers has just been released on the iPad and soon the Mac computer. Here’s the details on this fun, educational game from TouchTilt Games.
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Home » Industry, Podcasts

Should Game Prices Go Up?

Submitted by on March 12, 2007 – 8:00 am3 Comments

CAGCastIn CAGCast 65, CheapyD interviewed Jesse Labrocca, former owner of an independent New York City game store. All in all, Jesse spent ten years in gaming retail, and in the interview he shares number of insights about the retail gaming scene. It’s a tough, tough business for the little guys, and CheapyD asks Jesse about DVDEmpire’s recent public exit from the retail gaming industry. Along the way Jesse mentions a possible solution that really deserves a closer look. But let’s take a look at the problem. What makes game retail so tough?


First, the games themselves earn very little per copy for the retailer. Jesse maintains that just like with personal electronics iPods and mobile phones, the real money is in accessories. The incredibly big money is in used games, but even then there are risks. The biggest problem games pose to independent game stores comes in the form of prices.

We’ve all seen the price of a hugely hyped title tank after terrible reviews come in. The big retailers get price protection from publishers, where smaller retailers do not. Price protection means that if Wal-Mart buys 1000 copies of Super Hyped Game 2008 and the game gets a 2.8/10 review and never sells, they hand it back to the publisher and get their money back. If Mini Game Retailer buys 10 copies of Super Hyped Game 2008, sells 4 of them on day 1 from hype and then the terrible reviews show up, the $20 made on those four copies is more than erased by the game being stuck in your inventory and never, ever able to move at even the $45 cost paid for the title. Mini Game Retailer X is forced to sell the dud at a huge loss, down to the $20, $15, or sub-$10 range.

Jesse’s suggestion? Make game prices go up instead of down. The game should start at maybe $30, then change with demand. That way the potential loss for little shops buying preorders of a game that fails isn’t so high, and the gains for the publisher reappear if the game gets good reviews. This not only rewards the customers who pre-order — these are the people you want to thank for coming to you instead of the competition after all — but it also puts more of an incentive on publishers to put out good games.

What do you think?

Via CAG.

  • Scott

    I worked in an independent video game store for over 5 years, and I have seen my share of low margin high hyped game…. GUN anyone? This game was hailed as being the second coming of christ in early previews in mags and the internet. Sure it was pretty cool, but it was only 4-6 hrs long depending on how you played it.

    We more money on a pack of $2.99 AA batteries than we did on this game (most games actually)… then we had to deal with the fact after 2 or 3 days everybody sold it back, so we were stuck with 20 something copies of GUN and since they were used you don’t get copy protection, so after a few weeks the publishers slashed the price of the game to $29.99 ($30 drop) so we were stuck with a tonne of used games, we payed the same for as they were selling new.

    Now, wether or not people believe it, but the 2 reasons games yield such a low margine for retailers is because of Piracy and Wal-Mart.

    When the PS1 mod chips were selling like crazy on the internet or what have you, publishers took notice and raised the price of the games to retailers, and Wal-Mart not wanting to have an unfriendly price image, decided NOT to raise the price of the games to correlate with the increased cost. At one point, a retailer could make $10-$20 on a single game, but after this and independent retailer could make anywhere from Negative revenue (sold at a loss) to $3-4 if they were lucky.

    Now the other reason margins are to be getting smaller and smaller for independent retailers is because of Wal-Marts strict policy on suppliers for their goods. In the 5 years I worked at the store, Wal-Mart caused THREE video game suppliers to file for bankruptcy (2 during my time at the store and 1 just before) because they would demand so much at smaller and smaller costs, expecting the supplier to eat the losses. Thus the high priced for independent stores, in an effort to make its lost revenue back from the Wal-Mart sales they would raise the cost to smaller retailers, then A LOT of independent retailers would go and buy their games and/or DVDs from Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart sold them cheaper than the suppliers did, because of this, Wal-Mart demanded more copies of games and Dvds and since they were ordering more they would expect them to be at a lower and lower price, until the supplier couldn’t eat the loses anymore and went under.

    End Rant.

  • sifer2400

    walmart will be the death of retailers in general if more people knew this then maby they would boycott it by not going there like me
    i remember in class they showed us how much walmart hurt other businesses.
    Death to walmart stupid hicks always go there

  • Nathan

    First off, they should ONLY offer deals to the specialty retailers. Not Wal-Mart. There is way more risk and way more reliability from small stores that the companies don’t see. You know your customers and your customers trust you. They don’t come to the store because it’s the only place they can buy it. It’s the reason why we all used to go to Babbages and EB. It’s the same reason we don’t go to Gamestop and EB now. The people are the business. In essence the game makers are the ones destroying small business.

    I don’t think game prices should go up. I think the retailer deserves a bigger share and that share should change based on demand. It should go like this.

    EA sells all retailers a game based on a flat price. No kickbacks for large purchases. It should be fair across the board. If the game tanks, the retailers keep the whole profit. If the game sells huge then the retailer pays a kickback to EA. We all know EA makes really bad games but makes a lot of money. This would stop that. EA can’t make money off a bad game like this. Even if the retailer only gets 15% after the kickback… they at least are assured that whether the game tanks or not they will make some money with less risk. However there should be an extra clause. If the average score between the largest game media companies review the game as lower than 5, the retailer should get full reimbursement. If it’s a huge hype game, it should get at least an average of 7. That should be a given. No more bad games. You can easily sell a game with viral marketing. I mean Halo 3 could all out suck but they could make millions on it easy.