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U.S. PS3 Game Prices Staked At $59.99
Despite some confusion last week about pricing on PS3 titles, U.S. gamers (at least) will be able to buy titles for Sony's console at a manageable price. Gamespot reports that the official Sony site is listing PS3 games at about $60. This includes seven launch titles, including a first-party game. From the article: "Shoppers can now preorder Ubisoft's Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII, Activision's Tony Hawk Project 8, Call of Duty 3, and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog and Full Auto 2: Battlelines, as well as Sony Online Entertainment's Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom. The pricing of Untold Legends may reveal what future PS3 owners feared--that first-party games would retail for the same price as third-party games." Ars Technica's Opposable Thumbs notes that 360 games are already dropping in price, and hopes Sony will follow suit next year.
...and then an additional $40 for the content? I'm underwhelmed.
Seriously, given that we know Sony intends to nickle-and-dime us for their online service, requiring downloaded content for their games, the fact that games are "only" $60 really doesn't matter to me.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
This console's already facing a hard enough time as it is with its own price tag. Considering the PS3 is likely being sold at a loss like most previous consoles, Sony can't afford not to sell games at a competing price point to the Xbox 360. Anything higher would doom the PS3 right from the start.
8==8 Bones 8==8
If this is just $60 for the game and that is everything you need to buy that seems like a pretty good deal, I wouldn't want to pay that then have to pay loads more for "added content"... like cars and tracks in a racing game. I don't know what the US people are used to paying for games as soon as they come out though, is $60 really that much? We're paying £50 for 360 games!
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
If this is a permanent thing, then I've got to give them kudos for not letting the prices get out of control while still keeping quality high (at least in the graphics department...we shall see in everything else).
Although for me, it's a moot point because I'll be getting $50 Nintendo Wii games well before I consider a PS3 purchase. I'll probably eventually get a PS3 but by the time I do, I'll be paying walmart bin prices for old games.
Don't forget the extra money for "microdownloads" (the buzzword for "content that should've been included in the original package"), especially for the GT series.
Oh, and don't be surprised if we're eventually forced to view in-game ads all while receiving no price break.
And you wonder why people pirate games?
You could have put a period after the word "friend" in your last sentence.
Ignore news related to it.
"Glory [or defeat] is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
It's only a loss during the launch phase. Sony has always made a slight profit from hardware sales from the psx to the ps2 after that point. They've stated this many many times but I guess the consoles sold at a loss mantra will stay forever (xbox never helped with this either--losing like a billion per year for the entire division since it's creation).
Hmmm... Pie...
Big f'ing deal. Games will be $60? $10 more than average, this is news somehow?
It's so hard to buy games nowadays with prices like that, especially when you rarely tire of the old ones, and some can be acquired via friends and other non paying methods.
You really can't buy anything unless you know for sure it's worth it, or you have a good paying job.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Are you new to the Internets?
Usually, people replace the letter S with the dollar symbol, for example, Micro$oft, to make the kind of point you are aiming for.
SONY IS TEH RIPOFFS!!!11
The launch titles are overwhelmingly sequels. So you really are paying to play stuff you've played before all over again, just with more polys.
Yeah man, that extra $10 per game is really gonna bre$k the b$nk.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
Sony is realizing that very few people want to pay $600 for a console and $80 per game. Even Microsoft has to realize that $400 for a console is too much. Yes there are people who will pay that much, there are people who pay tens of thousands of dollars for a watch or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a car. When a company cuts the price of its console and games before launch they are admitting that they have made a mistake in pricing.
The decreased game price will really squeeze the developers. Developing a 20+ gig game, filled with high definition pre-rendered cutscenes costs a fortune. Combined with the fact that the developers do not know how many PS3s will be out there when they release their game. This encourages developers to stick to 3 to 6 GB games and co-develop them for the Xbox 360. Sony will have to pay for exclusivity, very few developers will want to make PS3 only games without a bundle of cash from Sony. This is Sony's nightmare: games which don't require the Blu Ray drive (thus making it look like a waste from a gamer perspective) and games which exist on both of the high definition consoles. There is even some discussion that Microsoft will pay through the nose to have Resident Evil 5 exclusivity.
One of the big questions is whether or not Sony will decrease the amount of money that it demands from the developer for every game sold. This information will get out because this is the big factor on whether or not the console will be profitable overall. The investors will demand this information from Sony.
Sony has to hope that Microsoft feels that they will never succeed in the console market and drop out. If Microsoft is proud and doesn't want to admit defeat no matter what, Sony is really screwed. Microsoft can spend 10 to 20 billion dollars on winning the console war, this is without going into the red or going into debt. While Microsoft is still making billions of dollars a year in profit, it is very easy to tell investors that Windows has reached it's full growth potential and Microsoft needs to enter new markets if it intends to grow. Microsoft can buy with CASH Konami and Square Enix. How is the PS3 going to do if both Final Fantasy XIII and Metal Gear Solid 4 are Xbox 360 exclusives? Microsoft can justify the purchases by porting FF13 and MGS4 over to Windows Vista, telling investors that they are encouraging early adoption of Vista.
You assume that the five games in Wii Sports are in any way comparable even one sixty dollar PS3 game that will be out at launch. I could see considering the package of five equivalent to one fifty or sixty dollar game, which is probably how they would have been sold if not for the pack-in.
It seems hard to believe that Blu-Ray media won't take a bite out of either the profit or the consumer's wallet at retail. So either these initial titles aren't really on Blu-Ray disks or Sony is going to eat some profit (more than Microsoft anyway) on game sales. Wouldn't lower profit margin on sales dissuade game developers from the PS3?
It's only a loss during the launch phase. Sony has always made a slight profit from hardware sales from the psx to the ps2 after that point. They've stated this many many times but I guess the consoles sold at a loss mantra will stay forever (xbox never helped with this either--losing like a billion per year for the entire division since it's creation).
The PSX and PS2 made money from the start... with more than "slight profit after that point" with the PS2 because Sony was slow to lower the price (The PSX price dropped at about normal speed, though). The first console to sell at a loss is the Xbox.
I'm going to repeat it again because some people still keep saying you need to buy all cars and tracks in Gran Turismo HD.
The news was actually that everything would be avaible in the game when you bought it but when you want to unlock cars (which you normaly win or buy with in-game credit won from races) you could pay for them instead of needing to win all races.
First of all, if this micropayment system is allowed to take off, gamers will pay far more than the price of their console in micropayments as all game studios will harness this. You'll pay $60 for Final Fantasy XV, and then $1 for every level. It'll be a micropayment bloodbath. So no, this strategy is not affordable.
Then on top of this, when you re-sell the game, everyone has to buy the levels all over again since it is tied to your console. This is Sony with a sniper rifle zeroing in on the reseller market.
Moreover, why do I need to hand over my credit card and personal info and register my single player game to Sony, or anyone else? Sony wants everyone who buys a game to have to register with Sony and that's b.s.
This is one hard core PS3 fan boy who just suddenly decided not to buy a PS3. And I love the Playstation series.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Here in the UK we're expecting PS3 games to cost between £49.99 (the RRP of 360 games) and £69.99 (apparently for huge games on Bluray discs). This is the information game retailers have so far. Just for American readers - £49.99 is currently $94.
I honestly think Sony will make themselves Public Enemy #1 here in the UK if they try to sell a game for £70, but they've already shown they don't care about Europe in general anyway.
£30 sounds cheap to me... oh, wait, I forgot, although the "official" exchange rate makes it £30, retailers still seem to think £==$.
Count yourselves lucky. Many PS2/XBOX games launched at £45 in the UK, or about $90. PC games are usually £35 at launch in the shops.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
you would want to have the high-end system ($600), at least one "off the shelf" game ($60) and a downloadable title, like Geometry Wars was for the 360, right? And using the same model, you can expect that game to come out between $5-8 dollars. So, for the sake of argument, let's make it $6.00.
So, for one system, game, and download, you're spending... waaaait!
... we've been paying between $90 and $100 for new games for the last few years. Not impressed with this shit at all...
Awesome! This had better be the original, classic Sonic. Screw Blu-ray, downloads, and vibro-hover-senso controllers . . . as long as I can play old-school in HD I'll be happy. Maybe they'll make Mario, too. Who do I send the money to? Just tell me what to pay.
It's easy to play Sonic in HD already. Just scale the pixels up by about 4.8x vertically, and 6x horizontally. Aliasariffic :)
How do you all suppose this new generation and price structure of game systems will affect the rental market? Between Hollywood Video/Blockbuster and online services like gameznflix and netflix's game division which they refuse to just integrate into netflix (bastards,) how do you suppose they'll all react to higher prices for some consoles games and not others? Higher rental fees in the brick and mortar stores but no change for the online services? Stocking less copies of the pricier games? Just thought it would be interesting to hear some ideas.
I'm glad there are finally actual numbers, since people in the forums have been consistently listing PS3 games at the hypothetical price of $70-100, which always seemed like FUD, and now we know. I assume these were the same people (or at least substantial overlap) claiming the Wii would be $150 -- which also seemed pretty absurd -- and then got upset when it wasn't.
I mean, I'm not going to buy a PS3 at that price, though I hope to buy a Wii, but I'd still rather have a little honesty in the numbers. When you can always tell which "side" a poster is on by which imaginary price they list for a system/game, the numbers are not being used productively.
I am the man with no sig!
I'm a Nintendo fan myself, and while the parent is obviously a troll (Wii Sports isn't "five games"), you are over-looking a simple fact. If you go from 50$ to 60$ for the price of a game, that's still 20% more expensive, which means someone can buy 6 Wii games instead of 5 PS3 games.
In the last statistics I've read, the average players bought about a dozen games for their system, which means 12 games for a Wii owner and 10 games for a PS3 owner if we don't take the console price difference into account.
If we do that the console price into account, though, that means 12 Wii games instead of about 8 PS3 games, which means 33% more games for the Wii owner compared to the PS3 owner for the same amount of money.
I already sacrificed karma pissing on the Wii because of its pathetic name, and I'm ragingly pissed off at the 360 for Oblivion charing micropayments for "Horse armor" mods. I own a Ps2, a 360, a Game Cube, and a PC.
I'm just as worried about the micropayment crap on the 360 as I am about the PS3; Bethesda submarined us by throwing out that micropayment stuff long after we gamers rushed out and bought Oblivion. If I'd known this ahead of time I would have never bought the 360 at all. This time, Sony is giving advanced warning. I'm waiting to see what Nintendo ultimately does, but the word "Wii" makes me sick.
So tell me again, oh great insightful speculation boy, which console am I a fanboy of?
As for Sony and their death-by-micropayments strategy. We already know one way how they'll work - case in point: GT4 HD. So feel free to stick your head in the sand and live in denial while the rest of us raise the alarms, and when micropayments are nipped in the bud, feel free to convince yourself that it was all a figment of your imagination and not the power of overwhelming consumer backlash. BTW how does all that sand taste like?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Sony pricing games $10 cheaper shouldn't break their bank, right?
Same logic.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I haven't yet been conditioned to think that a $60 game is cheap. There are lots of people like me. Fortunately for us, there are tons of great $20 games out there that we haven't played yet, and there's always eBay. But with the new Gran Turismo No Cars Edition, that game will never be cheap, even when the sticker price falls to $20, even if I buy it for $0.99 used ten years from now. If Sony (and Microsoft) try to nickel and dime us all like that, they will get unhappy customers. In the face of viable competition that's just as fun, like PC and Nintendo, unhappy customers will turn into no customers.
So I think Sony will have to change their tune; I'd just like them to learn that lesson the easy way before it becomes a problem for everyone. Oh wait, sorry, I was lost in a dream world. Well, they aren't the only game in town. They'd do well to remember that.
.. to the conclusion that whoever thought this should be a launch title for the PS3 deserves a punch in the throat. Aside from the game itself being rubbish, the X-Box version looks pretty poor. And the 360 version? The graphics are the same as the X-Box version, except that it has massive screen-tearing problems.
"Internet," not "Internets." Only an idiot would pluralize that.
Did the NES have interstitial advertising and microdownloads? No. Did NES games get pirated? Yes. Did the SNES have interstitial advertising and microdownloads? No. Did SNES games get pirated. Yes. Did Civilization II require online product activation? No. Did Civ II get pirated? Yes.
The price of a $60 game is too high, the $19.95 game doesn't have as much content as a real game, its insulting to think that I would pay $1 for that content (which I'll happily consume, though). The anti-piracy features are too severe, the door was unlocked so I decided to help myself, hey if you had wanted people to not pirate it you wouldn't have made the protection crackable. I don't want to pay a monthly fee so I run my own private server, if I pay a monthly fee I shouldn't have to pay for a retail box, $13 a month is too much for a video game, $5 a month is too much for a video game, its insulting to think I would pay $2 a month for this "#$", I don't support games which use advertising. I don't support big corporate developers, God this game looks like "#$% compared to GTA or Zelda, why should I pay money for it.
People pirate games because people are amoral and like getting things for free. Everything else is just a post-hoc rationalization.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Let's see. Nintendo produces a five-in-one game using new innovative gaming designs and an innovative control scheme.
Sony sells $60 HD retreads of PS2 games.
I think you're right. Nintendo's games are worth far more than a single $60 Sony game. So maybe it's more like 10 or 20 Sony games in one Nintendo game.