Will these bundles affect future game quality?
There are too many deals going around now, and the only ones really making a profit are the middle men (i.e. the distributors). I'm sure the bottom is going to drop out of the bundle market in the not too distant future, and I hope it does, as the quality of released games is already starting to deteriorate. Despite graphics technology steaming ahead, there's still no beating the 2007 game Crysis for graphics quality (apart from maybe those games using the Frostbite engine such as Battlefield 3 & 4) (IMO)
The bundle sales are almost akin to pyramid selling.
When the bundles first appeared, the bargains were amazing and the developers actually made quite a lot of money, for example, THQ sold off most of its recent releases in a bundle worth over $400 for $5, and it was reported that they made a couple of million on sale; unfortunately that wasn't enought to save the development house and soon after the release of the bundle the company was broken up. Now bundles are spread so thin, with many different bundle names, profits are starting to waver. Dev's spending months, even years on a project can now expect their work to go on sale within weeks of it being released (and in some cases on release), and which soon disappear into the mists of time (can't think of an appropriate word/phrase so early in the morning, lol).
With so many games being released virtually on a daily basis, you'd be very lucky to have a game that's going to be super successful unless you are part of one of the big AAA franchises, and even these are under threat. With yet another more big developers going under recently (Irrational games, the developer of such titles as Bioshock, System Shock 2 and Tribes Vengeance as well as THQ games the developer of the Red Faction Franchise, Company of Heroes and Warhammer 40 000). It's worrying to say the least.
Scary
I hope we see some balance soon.
Personally I don't mind paying £30 to £50 (or even more) for a decent game (I've paid a lot more for some games, for example, well over a thousand pounds for Train Simulator 2014 and am still buying dlc for it), and I still pre order most of the AAA games that are released each year even though I know most will be half price within 3 to 6 months (or even less sometimes). I still compare them with the first games I ever purchased, all of which cost in real terms a lot more than any game you buy now (apart from Train Simulator 2014 and other games like The Sims 3, Rocksmith and maybe the Duels of the Planeswalker Series). One of the first games I ever purchased was a text based adventure called The Island of Artuan. It had about 6 hours of gameplay and cost me around £25 back in 1982. That's equivalent to over £100 now. When I compare that with basically any game released now, I see them all as massive bargains, even at full price. I realize back then we didn't have digital downloads, which have reduced costs immensly, but still, we are getting games cheaper than at any other time in history. It still amazes me how most of the indie developers can make a living, especially the bigger indie developers who have to pay staff a decent wage out of the profits they make from selling games.
There will always be success stories for example the creator of Minecraft. Paypal actually froze his PayPal account within a few months of his alpha release of the game because almost a million pounds had been deposited in it. They though some sort of fraud was occuring. Within a year he was a multi millionaire.
Here endeth my rant for the year. :)
