EA says next gen gen games will cost more

Wonder how much of this devs will see in royalties?

“It would not surprise me to see selected titles carry a higher price point on new-generation consoles, at least initially.”

Madden Next: The Only Officially Licensed NFL Football game. Secure your copy today for $10. (MSRP $65.)

Hey, they bought the license to ensure the player experience, right? :)

Come on, Dave - you know the answer to that.

The signs have been pointing to this for quite some time. At the beginning of Q3 2004 there were several news items that mentioned that a price increase was probably in the works on the next gen consoles.

The good news is that the games will still sell so poorly on the PC that the retailers will be forced to drop the price significantly after only a few weeks.

And EA has to say “stupid money” to Take Two meanwhile jacking up prices of their own. Nice.

Is it because EA will have bought out every other developer in time for next gen systems, and will be free to jack the prices as they please?

My guess is because the actual development time will take longer - both coding and artwork.

Yeah, I wonder if this has anything to do with development costs doubling or tripling.

Shouldn’t really effect me since I’ll still wait until you mark them down to $20.

There seem to be some hidden costs in chaining naive young programmers to desks and depriving them of a life. What’s the cost of a whip nowadays?

Yeah, but instead of dropping from $49.99 to $39.99, it’ll drop from $65.00 to $55.00.

Monopoly = Bad.

next gen gen games will cost more

Cause EA needs to gain back some money from buying as many franchises as possible.

Everything hits $20 at some point.

Everything hits $20 at some point.[/quote]
Sure, if it’s used. For new games? I don’t know enough about distribution and how much money the stores make to determine if they’d be a able to survive dropping a game down to $20.

Sure, if it’s used. For new games? I don’t know enough about distribution and how much money the stores make to determine if they’d be a able to survive dropping a game down to $20.[/quote]

Absolutely new. My last few game purchases were:

$20 Simpsons Hit and Run
$20 Star Wars Starfighter
$20 Soul Calibur 2 (Xbox, I did pay $45 for the GC version when it came out)
$20 Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike
$10 Metal Arms GitS
$20 Prince of Persia
$20 Panzer Dragoon Orta
$20 Buffy the Vampire Slayer
$20 Battlestar Galactica
$10 Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds w/ Clone War campaigns
$20 Katamari Damacy
$15 Front Mission 4
$30 NFL 2k1, NBA 2k1, and World Series Baseball 2k1
$20 ESPN NBL 2k5
$20 ESPN NFL 2k5
$20 ESPN NHL 2k5
$10 Advance Wars 2

oh yeah, and

$55 Halo 2 Limited Edition

And considering that I’ve only opened and played about 5 of those, combined with a huge backlog from before that, and I don’t need to buy anything until it hits at least $30.

I’m hoping we don’t have to have the “viable sale price is not determined by development cost” conversation again.

When corporate executives lie like that, I want to punch them in the face.

The extra-cynical observation is that EA has this really weird schizophrenic corporate culture. They are actually proud of their development costs in a weird way (because hey, only EA can afford such extravagant development costs with regularity – they brag about this at conferences all the time), while at the same time prepping their grand plan of hiring 70% of their staff as cheap exploitable warm bodies just out of college.

Yes the other side of economics is the demand curve. Price above what people will pay and they won’t buy your product.

Another problem with this pricing scheme is that games are networked products in that the more people that own them (that you can network and play a game against) the more valuable they are. Higher prices means less people buying games which means less value for the people that do buy them. Fact is that it’s a rare game right now that I’m willing to pay $50 for. There were three for me last year.

On the other hand I can see some games being worth the full $65, that’s what I pay for an excelent game and it’s expansion.

It will be interesting to see if the introduction of the new consoles gives game designers enough leverage to ask customers to cover the increased prices they say they are incurring.

Still seems ridiculous. I very rarely see games that particularly impress me in that department - especially when their big claim is pushing a spraying a million polygons out of a boring engine. Cutting back on the spending and having art directors and designers producing games that look good because they plain /look good/ would be great. While I’m not saying BG&E was a cheap game for Ubisoft to make, I can say that I thought it looked absolutely stunning despite being designed around the oldest console around.