Dear Future Gamer,

Game prices.

No, hang on, there's still something left to say. Recently, I bought War of the Worlds for £20, at Game. The game's only been out since, what, February or March, but as usual Game's already knocked a tenner off the price.

Now I know this probably sounds like an ad for Game, but my point is, if a game can be discounted this heavily and this quickly, why don't publishers just make their games a bit cheaper to start with? At £30 I'd never have considered buying War of the Worlds, but at £20 I was tempted into an impulse buy.

I understand that the original developers need to recover the money spent in creating the game, but don't they realise that even splitting the difference and knocking a fiver off the initial price of the game would significantly increase the sales, keeping their profits up, and maybe even recapturing those people who specifically wait a year for the game to come out on budget? It makes sense to me.

John Hatton

FG: It's an interesting idea, John. Of course, the software houses would argue that the "significant" increase in sales wouldn't be proportional to the money they'd lose through discounting; and that Game, as a large high-street chain, would pretty much be able to do what it wanted with prices. But returning to Richard Brook's point ("Crowd Over a Few Pints"), aren't games just hugely overpriced anyway? Who knows - maybe what we're fighting against here is simple greed. And that's a powerful foe.