Screw waggle controls and pony simulators and plastic peripherals. Make gaming affordable to the masses by lowering the price of games at retail, and gaming will become a mass market industry.

A very select group of enthusiast gamers drive a disproportionate amount of videogame sales. Those of us who can afford to invest the time and money into playing more than new one game a month shouldn't be the one's dictating the content of the marketplace, but we are.

Publishers continually try to cater to the relatively small demographic of hardcore gamers with heaps of same-looking content (hence the proliferation of FPS games on consoles over the last few years), while marginalizing their brand identity to the mass audience.

They create an artificial wall around their products because people who aren't already informed about their product have no idea whether or not the box in their hand at Best Buy is worth the $60 asking price, and nobody to help them make an educated decision.

If said game was at a $30-40 MSRP, people would be much more likely to take a chance in buying it. As things stand now, gamers have to wait 3-6 months for a game to drop in price, and by that time the marketing support has totally dried up and the casual consumer won't even remember the titles' name by the time it becomes worth the price of entry.

That's why I don't buy games anymore. It's too expensive for me to sate my appetite for games so I go Gamefly. I'd rather be buying games and supporting the developers I love, but the truth of the matter is that most game's aren't worth the price of admission, and I can only really afford to buy 5-6 games a year in this economy.

Hopefully publishers will figure this out. I think PopCap just undermined their own business model by revealing the intent behind this pricing experiment.

Wanna make a bunch of money off of your game? Price it in such a way as to make the consumer feel stupid for not buying it. Maybe not $1 per se, but something...

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