They’ll be able to sell Madden [insert year here] for the $65 because people will want to play the latest in tandem with the season.
fooey. I can wait a year or more for most ea games. hello bargain bin!
Oh, I forgot about Madden… I picked up Madden 2002 for $5 when I was looking for ESPN NFL 2k5. Being late to the party has advantages. As for the suckers that shell out $65… haha, suckers. :wink:
Haven’t sales also doubled or tripled also in the same timeframe?
Man, $65 is pricing me out of the game. I am not going to pay that much. So many games are mediocre - I can’t see paying that much for a mediiocre product.
Agreed, Mark. Few people love gaming more than I do, but at 65 dollars, with a new family, that’s a price point I no longer would feel comfortable meeting. At that point, it would be time for used games, or waiting for the discount. Particularly if the game in question is from EA, who has negative goodwill from me.
Everything hits $20 at some point.[/quote]
It takes years for some titles. I remember Q3 selling for close to original retail a year after it was released.
Mmmmmm warm bodies… sometimes I call the games industry the “meat grinder”.
Actually, it might take less time for some things. I know artists that would spend a LOT of time taking their high poly concept models and getting them under the poly limit while keeping them looking good. It’s kind of like having tons of memory on the PC and a limited amount on consoles.
This is another reason I don’t bother with most sport games. Tennis and golf are about as far as I go and I don’t care who the avatar on screen is, unless it’s a hot female with realistic body physics… but that’s another story.
It takes years for some titles. I remember Q3 selling for close to original retail a year after it was released.[/quote]
Fine by me, it’ll take me that long to work through my backlog. <must resist temptation to add extraneous smiley>
Now there is the disadvantage that occasionally you do miss those small distribution games that stay at full retail and then just disappear. But when you’ve got a stack of AAA titles that you bought for $10-20/ea, it doesn’t really hurt that bad.
I have not purchased “War in the Pacific” because of it’s extreme price, and same will go for any game over $50 that I’m not going to play for less than a trillion hours. EA, I’ll play matrixgames football instead of yours this year. Thanks!
Didn’t the games for the original Sega Genesis launch run 65 bucks? My memory’s hazy but I think they tried this before.
That’s OK, I can wait a year to get the game when it drops in the $20 range. The way I see it, they can get $50 from me by letting the prices stay as they are, or try and charge more and get $20 from me instead. $50 is the max I’m willing to spend on a game these days.
When games were on cartridges, the cost was raised for including more memory in the game or special chips. Cartridges allowed the game maker to actually do things to extend the capability of the system through the cartridge itself. It’s a very different thing from raising prices when the disc itself is identical whether the game is $10 or $50.
The physical goods could be significantly different in the cartridge days and memory was not cheap.
–Dave
I’m not defending any particular publisher on this, but inflation has to be taken into account at some point.
We were paying $50 for PS2 launch titles 5 years ago. Hell, I remember paying $70 for Civ back in 1990, which is nearly $100 in 2003 dollars. The industry as a whole needs to make an adjustment, and doing so at a generation break is a natural point and won’t lead to price wars.
I keep hearing the adjusted dollars argument, but I just have to wonder why it was that Sony adopted $39.99 as the HIGH price point for Sony-developed and published PS2 games just two years ago? Obviously they didn’t see lowering the price as a problem.
Granted, they are back at $49.99 for a few things like Killzone, but that $39.99 price flies in the face of these expected price hikes.
Plus, games are bigger now. You’re selling to far more people than you were five years ago. The growth in userbase more than makes up for the lower price point and in fact, raising prices may have the exact opposite effect. You’ll probably start seeing game sales DECLINE. That can’t be something the industry wants now.
Japan has already experienced the decline in console game sales. We really are most likely next here in the Americas…
–Dave
I suspect they’re thinking of having a multi-tiered pricing structure, where big-budget, high-profile games go out for more than the average game. So it’s $59.99 for Madden, $49.99 for NCAA, $29.99 for FIFA (in the US, at least), something along those lines.
Sony doesn’t have to pay licensing fees to themselves. At $10 less than a 3rd party title, they’re making probably $3-5 more per sale.
I really wonder how enthusiastically the next gen systems will be embraced if the games have an MSRP of $65?
Rising costs, inflation – I understand that games are more expensive to make, but when you raise prices consumption usually falls or consumers find cheaper alternatives.
Isn’t that what hurt the N64 versus the PS? New N64 games were at least $60 when they were released, I remember their “greatest hits” collection going for $40 each. As a result, I just waited until the N64 was dead and bought everything used, including the system. Looking back, I don’t recall buying a single new N64 game, meaning Nintendo made absolutely no money from me that console generation.
Meanwhile, Sony undercuts them in retail price due to the lower cost of production of CD’s versus carts. If I recall, that’s where the $50 price point came from, before that cart prices would vary greatly. I remember Chrono Trigger for the SNES being sold for $80 new.
My point, if I have one, is that software can price itself out of the market. But EA will probably soak the Madden fanboys for all they’re worth because they don’t buy that many games, and that’s the game they want.