I'm sure that's a valid course of action to take.

But when you want a loaf of bread, how wise is it to start off looking at getting that from another country than it is to find a local retailer and see what the pricing is.

If the game is $40 or so over in the UK, I will definitely take that course of action and just purchase international shipping.

No if you wanted a PC game to cost $60 you would charge $60 for it.

How do you not understand this? It's not about your childish notion of fairness. You are going to pay $60 for Skyrim regardless of whether or not you think you should have to. That's their justification for raising the price.

Grow up.

There are usually preorder "specials" to be found as well on various sites more often than not (I picked up TW2 on D2D for instance for $35 prior to release). I also preorded DA2 last October when it was going for $39.99...and a month later they raised the base price to $49.99 for everyone else.



That's also far from average. You can't use an extreme example as something baseline. Sitting in a tavern "RPing" in a way that doesn't even have any effect on the game at all does not count towards "game time". I could turn on any game, go take a shower and somehow make the claim that the time spent in the shower is time spent with the game as well. You also have absolutely no idea whether or not Skyrim is going to have more replay "value" yet either. It seems to be about as much as Oblivion as long as you're able to make a character that's not a generalist build--which most end up being whether or not it's intentional anyway.



Yeah, you're definitely nowhere near the average person when it comes to Bethesda games. They aren't that exciting.

a digital copy IS cheaper to produce than a physical DVD/BLURAY plus no fees for Microsoft/Sony and no shipping, boxing costs.

They just sell it at the same price so that people that buy it at a higher pice dont gets mad and stops buying ( the physical copies ).

The OP was "What justifies the 20% price increase for PC? Looking to get official word from Beth/Team on this "

The answer is "It is not an official Beth policy, it is local pricing differences"

The next question was "Why exactly does Bethesda increase the price of the PC game from $49.99 up 20% to $59.99 without doing likewise to the console versions ($59.99 -> $71.99)?"

The answer is "Bethsada hasn't"

and finally "Generally, the game costs $50 across platforms, but then Microsoft/Sony require $10 in licensing fees per game. PC doesn't have any licensing fees similar to this, so I'm left wondering what justifies the price hike."

Answer "In lots of countries console versions still cost more, just not in your country"

Oh, and not taking special offers.

PC Skyrim on Amazon.co.uk ￡39.99
Console Skyrim ￡54.99

So even then the console version is ￡15 more expensive as opposed to only ￡11 more expensive when special offer is considered (￡27.91 vs ￡38.91)

And this is why gaming has turned from my most favorite hobby into a disgusting, mainstream exercise in decadence.
Publishers.

I wish they would all rot.
I also wish everyone who overpays for games would get slapped.

@Periodic-
You're being ignored now. Continue your inept banter if you want; it won't be seen.

@Pepspro-
I sometimes think that's more of an accurate assumption. EA started it, but now Beth is following suit. They test out just how many PC gamers are willing to pay more money for the same game. I guess the dev/pub is playing with a loaded shotgun by doing so; we'll see if they end up shooting themselves in the foot. Last thing they should do, IMO, is to follow EA's bandwagon in stating "PC sales for our latest game are down" without making note that they jacked up the price in the first place.

Amazon UK lists ￡27.91 for PC version and ￡38.91 for console versions

Because they don't exist in the first place for money. Because D&D isn't also a fabrication towards the same goal.

Anyways I presume not many of you were around during the 80s.

That was the real ripoff.

Price per hour is insanely low even at $60, this is really getting old it's only $10 people....

I just tried to add it and it states they cannot ship Skyrim to the USA. Would have been nice though!

Since when are they charging 20% more? Last time I checked Skyrim was originally stated as costing 59.99. That was what they said it would be from the beginning.

I've paid $50 for games that gave me about 12 hours of quality. That's $4.20 an hour. So with your logic, that means I should be willing to pay ~$500USD for this game.

Again, it's NOT about the difference in price. Of course I can afford the difference. The question at hand here is wanting to know WHY only 1 platform was chosen for a price increase.

No, it simply means you overpaid for that 12 hour game.

In my case I'm estimating Skyrim is providing a cost per hour of entertainment value around $0.02 - 0.03.

I might not have clarified. When I said $59.99 MSRP, I meant that's the price they put on the PC version, not the console version.

PC games usually cost $49.99 MSRP, so I'm looking into finding out why the PC version was given a 20% price increase. Sorry for the confusion.

I just paid 149.99 for my copy... and worth every penny!

Seriously :banghead: It is local pricing. Here in the UK it is not the case, therefore it is not a pricing policy of Beths.

Oh okay, well that's great. But last time I checked Skyrim wasn't other PC games, it was Skyrim. It was priced at 59.99 and hasn't changed, so it hasn't increased by 20% in price.. Regardless of what OTHER games MIGHT be priced at.

This isn't the first game priced at 59.99.. I fail to see what the problem is..

Without publishers, games wouldn't be made.

Also, the idea that paying more than a totally arbitrary amount is "overpaying" is nonsense.

But feel free to ignore me as well.

@Dreighton-
The only game I'd buy a collector's edition for is MechWarrior.

@lonemessiah-
Local pricing. Yup. So let's focus on what's local to me, the US. Let's look at pricing for the market on non-collector's edition games. $49.99. OK. What is this game at in my local market? $59.99. OK. Is this price hike in other local markets? No? Then all I want to know is why. I don't care if Beth says "We were being greedy and just want to see if we can get PC gamers to pay more for the same game" then boom, I have the reason; it's all I'm looking for. I'd rather hear something official though than speculation; but I don't know if official Beth reps participate on this forum.

@Chief Wiggum-
Skyrim is a non-collector's PC game, in this case, being sold in the US. So I look at the pricing in that market and it is $50 at most. So to see a $60 means they are changing the market. The market shows that if a game isn't that expensive, other markets (consoles) are respectively cheaper. So it's safe to say that pricing between the markets may not be completely respective, but they do vary dependently. If you fail to see the issue, there's nothing I can do for you in regards to that. I can't make the point any more obvious.

Is it normal for every US retailer to be selling the PC version at exactly the same price?
Doesn't seem to be any competition between them and I thought pricefixing and cartels would've been illegal in the US.

Right, there were never any games being made before publishers existed... just like music was invented by Sony and writing by Publisher's Clearinghouse.

/sarcasm

Not sure if this is sarcasm, but no, it's not normal for all retailers to be selling at the exact same price.

In fact, there was a time EB Games was releasing new titles at 10-20% off. For as long as they ran that, I was using them as my retailer of choice. Since there's still 3+ months til game release, I'm hoping we'll see better deals 1 month out from game release.

I really don't see what you're trying to prove. A game like Skyrim, or really any game with modern overblown production values, couldn't be made by a bunch of basemant programmers.

If you want to play indie games, you can play indie games. Big mean old publishers haven't stopped them from selling their games for under 20 dollars.

It wasn't sarcasm. I just looked at the 4 US sites that Bethesda link to and all had the game at the same price which struck me as odd since there are massive variations in price here.