Natal aside, one of the big developments I’m watching from E3 is the future pricing schemes being kicked around by different companies. As Namco-Bandai VP Olivier Compte perfectly put it, “I am convinced that in the future we must change the price of video games – they’re too expensive for the audience. With the cost of development and the retail margins, £40 [$60 US] is a fair price [to the developer], but for the consumer it is too much….From September to December there are three new blockbusters every week, and consumers just can’t afford to buy all that.”

Compte continued, “Games just have one model, the sale of the product either as a box or a digital download. So we need to think about how we can develop a secondary business model.” On the heels of EA’s successful launch of the Online Pass, there’s little doubt about the inference, and Namco-Bandai is not alone in the industry in watching the new trend toward heavier DLC.

While Compte envisions, “A good price of a game should be around £20 [$25 US] – but for this price we can’t make a ten to 15-hour adventure. So for £20 we should offer consumers four to five hours of gameplay, then after that we can make additional money with DLC,” video game retailers seem to disagree.

One of the most outspoken critics of the move to paid DLC is indie gamestore owner Chet Muzzalupo of Level 1 Games in Columbus, OH. Through a series of online petitions, Facebook and MySpace campaigns, and YouTube videos, Muzzalupo has been very vocal in his opposition. In one such statement he said, “When [EA CEO] John Riccitiello makes $8 an hour working at the food court down the hall from me, he can come in and tell me that he is going to punish gamers for wanting to save a few dollars. Until then he’s just another rich guy, an extortionist, motivated by pure selfishness, preying on the rest of us.”

GameStop CEO Dan DeMatteo disagrees, citing EA’s move to the Online Pass having not [yet?] affected game sales. He then added, “We will turn this into a positive with our ability to sell DLC through our investments made in technology to market and sell this content in our stores.”

While this seems like a measured short-term solution, it underlines one of GameStop’s (and, indeed, all video game retailers’) biggest problems: the platforms and publishers are leaving them behind. While it might make sense for a gamer to go to GameStop to purchase Call of Duty, the 16-hour game with 14 maps, it will make much less sense to do so when the game is hacked apart as Compte envisioned. A 4 to 5-hour game can move to exclusively downloadable, which then begs the question about the future of video game retailing.

The answer to that may be found not far from GameStop’s front door, at minority owner Barnes & Noble. In the 1990′s, many called the move to internet and digital content the death of the book business. Yet through the onslaught of technology that has slammed against the book retailers’ doors since, none has yet corroded the foundation of the business, and it yet thrives today, long after many “experts” thought it would be gone. Perhaps most telling is this forum comment by Neeneko, “Oddly enough, this whole ‘online pass’ thing would probably encourage me to buy used games even more. One can think of the cost of a new game being ‘game+pass’ while the used game is now just ‘game’. Since I never use on-line play, I can think of this as finally having a way to not pay for a feature that gives me no benifit.”

And that is where the future of video game pricing will ultimately lie: can the game be carved and delivered in a targeted method so players can purchase only want? Can publishers create online content consistently compelling enough to force players online? If they do, will Microsoft maintain the $50 per year Gold Membership program, or will new pricing schemes be constructed to capitalize on the increased traffic? And, finally, all of this relies on high-speed internet service, and with Comcast fresh from its Supreme Court win against Net Neutrality and the FCC seemingly powerless to intervene, what role will ISP’s play in the future of gaming? While many of these questions will play themselves out over the next year, the first glimpses at the answers will be at E3 – and we’ll be watching.

[tip of the hat to Game Politics]