Dear Future Gamer

You recently stated in response to a query about the outrageous size of game boxes, "The thinking behind really big and useless boxes is what's called 'perceived value'. If it's big and shiny it means it's worth more and the game's going to be better. Crap, isn't it? But that's marketing for you." With all due respect, if I were a publisher and a marketing bod suggested that to me, I'd sack him. It takes (ummm) about a second to come up with the reason this doesn't work in videogames.

With pretty much every consumer item you buy - cereal, washing powder, biscuits, whatever - a bigger box implies more of a product, even if it's actually sold by weight. This is why cereal boxes are 25% too big. With computer software it simply isn't possible to think that way because the product you're buying doesn't actually exist in the real world - it's data on a CD. A crap game might take up a CD's worth, just as much as a good game will. There's no cognitive link between product size and product value of 'non concrete' products - if it were true, for example, broadsheet newspapers would sell more than tabloid ones do. I've never seen any evidence to suggest that this idea actually holds in any other case than when buying 'amounts' of things, and you don't buy 'amounts' of video games, any more than you buy an 'amount' of news in a newspaper.

What makes it even worse is that the developers/publishers are conning themselves out of money by doing this. These breeze block-size boxes must cost something to make and they'd probably sell 99% of the same number of copies if they packaged them like PlayStation games - in a CD-sized case with a mini manual. Apart from anything else, does anyone really wander into Game or EB with no idea what they're going to buy? "I fancy buying a game today." At 30 quid a throw? We're not talking about hamburgers here.

The whole concept is fatuous. It's a myth propagated because no-one will stop for a minute to think how stupid it is. I'd really love for some PC game publisher to bring out their game in two different sized boxes and see which sells most. I think that would break the back of the whole outdated, pointless idea.

Jonathan White

FG: An excellent argument, Jonathan. You'd think in these natural-resource conscious days that some marketing bod would have come up with the idea that, "Hey, let's save money on packaging and tell the public we're doing it because we're saving the planet." That way the publishers save money and we see a reduction in the size of ridiculously huge boxes.