Current-Gen Price Drop and 360 Shortage

Gamespot is running an article reporting that Activision's Robert Kotick believes that current generation games will drop in price due to the arrival of next-gen consoles. From the article: "Unfortunately for current-generation holdouts, Kotick also said that publishers will quickly shift their development efforts away from today's consoles, which has been the case in the past, when the introduction of the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube games saw PlayStation and Nintendo 64 development plummet." Meanwhile, the retail chain EBGames has announced that it has presold it's allotment of 360 consoles. From the article: "We are currently sold out of our popular Xbox 360 bundles ... Check back frequently for more opportunities to pre-order an Xbox 360."

Comments

News?

[Otonotachibana]

How many people out there were actually expecting pricing of our current gen games to not drop? In Japan, where production for older (Neogeo)and even defunct systems (Dreamcast) continued through several console generations, this might be news. Here in the states anyone who would pay $50.00 for an N64 game, Genesis, or Nintendo would be declared non copus mentus. Doesn't matter how well-crafted the game, the US console market is unforgiving of older tech.

EB Games and "Pre-orders"

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

From the article: "We are currently sold out of our popular Xbox 360 bundles ... Check back frequently for more opportunities to pre-order an Xbox 360."

Translation: "We are not currently ripping people off with our pre-orders, and our minimum wage managers are incapable of gauging demand well enough for our buyers to just buy the right number of consoles, so we're going to pretend to be sold out for a while, so that when we magically "discover" more bundles about 3 weeks before launch, the drooling masses will fight each other for the right to be bent over the sales counter and screwed."

Fuck it, it'll be in the store when I go to buy it (not from EB) or it won't. If not, the money will go to some other toy this year. Besides, MS said they were producing tons so that there would be no shortages. Far be it from me to belive something Microsoft said, but in the grand scope of things, I think Gamestop/EB are being more deceptive here than the manufacturer.