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.

Comments

Re:$60 for the game...

[UbuntuDupe]

Yeah, after all of Sony's reps talking about how "price doesn't matter, work a little harder, we're giving you better stuff", it's not clear what to make of the $60 price announcement. It could just be the old tactic of "We've got GREAT prices on keyboards, yeah, just $3 apiece. ... OH!!!!!!!! You needed the VOWEL keys to work too! Oh yeah, we can enable that for $47 apiece."

With Sony -- and they've already partly revealed some of this -- it'll be It could just be "We've got GREAT prices on games like Gran Turismo, yeah, just $60 apiece. ... OH!!!!!!!! You wanted to drive CARS in it too! Oh yeah, we can enable that for ...."

Re:Wii

[Anonymous Coward]

You could have put a period after the word "friend" in your last sentence.

Loss Misunderstandings

[Nazmun]

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).

Re:Loss Misunderstandings

[LoverOfJoy]

The question then becomes how much of a loss are they taking during this launch phase. From all I've heard those losses could be HUGE. And people still feel it's overpriced and many are waiting for a price drop. So if their launch phase accrues massive losses and doesn't even create a large enough base for developers to feel safe about making a profit from, then Sony may never FULLY make up for the losses later. Sony won't get a hundred million units sold at a profit after the first few million sold at a loss if the developers aren't making enough attractive games for it.

ouch

[Joe the Lesser]

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.

launch titles

[pr0nbot]

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.

Sony facing harsh realities

[ConfusedSelfHating]

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.

Re:Sony facing harsh realities

[hal2814]

"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."

Right. So what better way to get everyone's business than to price the PS3 rather high at launch to get the folks who will shell out any price and then come down on that price later to get everyone else? How much were people paying for 360s and PS2s on eBay at launch? Sony might as well price high enough that they get that money instead of some store clerk with better access to the inventory than most folks. They can come down in price later when they actually have more consoles produced. Besides, if BluRay really does catch on and gets mass produced in DVD-level numbers, the console manufacturing price will drop sharply. That's an awfully big if but it's an if Sony has bet their console's success or failure on.

Re:$60 for the game...

[Nom du Keyboard]

Okay, most /.er's will think I'm some kind of troglodyte because I don't have any form of internet at my home. Well, it's not because it isn't available. It's because there's NO WAY I can afford it.

You read and post to Slashdot. You own previous game consoles and games for them, plus the television to play it on. You can afford a PS3 and the games for it, but not an Internet connection and all the gaming possibilities that can give you?

You either live far away from civilization, or allocate your money in other ways of your choosing and therefore shouldn't be complaining about not having money for whatever.

Repeating again..

[Square Snow Man]

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.

Re:Repeating again..

[Phisbut]

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.

And I'm going to repeat a question I asked earlier on, do you have a source for that info? The only info I have so far comes from 1up.com and it says :

The microtransaction-focused game, Gran Turismo HD: Classic will be the online-focused entrant into the GT-series. In this game, players will (reportedly) start with no cars or courses available to them. Instead, they will need to purchase their stable of cars and courses to race on.

If that's the case, you can hardly win any races when you've got no car to ride and no course to race on. Has this report been debunked in any way?

The availability of all cars by winning races is as much a rumor as the need to buy them all so far.

that's a STUPID argument

[Travoltus]

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.

Affordable in the USA, but not in Europe

[Kazzahdrane]

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.

Re:Pretty Obvious

[kannibal_klown]

Since the console is sold at a loss, Sony has to make their profits on the games. They literally can't afford to sell games at lower prices

It's a pickle, I'll give you that. But that's the problem with a competitive market.

• If you sell them at too low a price, it will be harder to make your profit back. Essentially each owner will need to buy more games to recoup the hardware loss.
• But if you raise the price, fewer people will buy them. This is amplified by a competing product. If your console is more expensive than the competition AND your games are more expensive than your competition then fewer will buy your product. So you either need to stay near your competition's price or offer something substantially better.

Sometimes just adding a few dollars can make a massive different to sales. You have to speculate where the sweet spot is for sales x price.

Re:Which console am I a fanboy of, ostrich man?

[mattxmayhem]

hey, calm down there, turbo.

Re:$60 for the game...

[Given M. Sur]

"We've got GREAT prices on keyboards, yeah, just $3 apiece. ... OH!!!!!!!! You needed the VOWEL keys to work too! Oh yeah, we can enable that for $47 apiece."

1 w1sh th3y h4d t0ld m3 th4t 2 b3g1n w1th. 1 c4n't 4ff0rd 4n0th3r $47 :(

Re:Which console am I a fanboy of, ostrich man?

[Tim C]

I'm ragingly pissed off at the 360 for Oblivion charing micropayments for "Horse armor" mods

You're pissed off at a console because a software producer decided to charge for a ridiculous add-on? You can buy the horse armour for the PC version too, you know (along with other add-ons that I also can't be bothered with).