When I was in middle school CDs were a new thing. I remember talking in school about CDs and how they cost about a penny to press and because of this insanely low printing cost, CDs would be ultra cheap compared to tapes or records. Imagine a world where the printing cost led to ultra low prices! Imagine that world. I can, its great. It would be awesome to pop over to Best Buy and get the latest album for $1. Or $3. At that price I wouldn’t really think about it, id just buy it.

And that is the topic of this blog post. The disconnect of digital pricing.

I buy games, music and software in a box from the store. I know this makes me a dinosaur but I am actually getting a better value and in most cases its cheaper. I want to live in a world where I download everything for a lesser fee, but I don’t. The idea WAS that when we went to the point where we download all our games or software online the price dropped because the cost of producing a physical product was circumvented. Ill give an example.

Modern Warfare 2 on PC costs $51.48 on Amazon. Now, since thats a physical box and manual product the digital copy should be cheaper right? Well on Steam its $59.99. Why the hell is it more expensive to download on Steam? Why does it cost me MORE TO DOWNLOAD IT? I have no idea but the disconnect between the download/physical product is absolutely nuts.

Same with music. The Book of Eli download on Amazon/iTunes is $11.99. The physical CD costs $11.99 as well.

Simply stated, I believe digital goods should cost a significant share LESS than their physical counterparts. However it seems the physical product actually costs less. OR in the case of music, you can get a better value if you buy a album for the same price because you can rip it long after MP3 is dethroned. Adopting a pricing model like the iPhone where apps are mostly $0.99-$5 means people dont think about buying stuff. They just buy it. I am not saying AAA game titles should be $5 but how bout $25. How bout $30? $60 for a digital download? No thanks.

I always I buy the physical copy these days unless the digital price is so low it doesn’t matter. Digital pricing needs to improve or I will always buy the physical product, because most of the time its a way better deal.