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EA Outs Battlefield 4, Plans To Charge $70 For New Games
Justus writes "Posts at NeoGAF and IGN show that a quickly-removed Origin advertisement for Medal of Honor: Warfighter reveals plans for Battlefield 4 and a new-game cost of $70. With Battlefield 3 DLC promised through 2013 and PC games cheaper than ever with things like the Steam Summer Sale, are gamers ready to buy Battlefield 4 at next-gen pricing?"
Both ubi and activision also charge $70 when they know that the game will sell. EU has been the only one that hasn't done this. But now that they will with Battlefield 4, I doubt anyone is going to not buy the game because of that. They want it, they will buy it.
Both uBI and aCTIVIOSION are much worse than EU now, anyway.
"Outs" Battlefield 4? What, are they going to be in rainbow camouflage or something?
Loved the series before it so I preordered. I finally get the game and find it has created the most elitist and troll infested cesspool of a game I've ever encountered. Between the stat padders on Operation Metro and the server admins kicking me for outscoring them, I got fed up. I think the final straw was when forum 'discussions' degenerated into the person with the highest KD ratio automatically being right about everything. The community killed that game.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Quit your bitchin'
I have owned every Battlefield, including the Bad company series, 2142, etc. So, as you can imagine, I am a big fan of these type of games. Sadly, I will be abandoning the series because the one player storyline is just too damn short. I mean, you can complete the entire game within 1-2 evenings. That's a rip off, it was the same thing when Valve started to produces "Episodes" for Half-life.
The greed behind these companies will destroy them.
I stopped buying EA games when every single one started having a web interfaced that required me to download a browser plug-in to launch a windows EXE on my local hard drive.
I don't want to download your shitty browser plug-in and be forced to use a shitty browser just to launch the game. I want to click one button to launch the executable and be in the game.
I won't spend $70 on any EA game. I won't even play a Free to Play EA game because of this.
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It was $70 at Target. That was almost 20 years ago. Now games have better graphics, better replayability, on-line multiplayer, etc. and they sell new from $40-$60. That's not bad given the progression since then. I'd ask you to get off my lawn now, but it's been paved over with concrete.
BF3 was such a huge let down it was like they forgot what BF was about and turned out a COD ver of their games i wouldnt pay 10 dollars for BF4, the shameless money grabs and lack of respect for their own IP have turned me off to modern shooters all together. i might come back for the new BF 2042 if they make a stable titan mode for 64 players that doesnt lag the server whenever people get to the core. but i definitely would not feel comfortable paying 70 dollars for these new games with half the content of the old ones
that was 20 something years ago, and hell if you dont want to pay 70 2012 bucks for a game that has higher production quality than most movies from 20 something years ago and gives you months of entertainment, wait
yea OMFG wait, by Christmas it will be in the sub 30$ bin at walmart and still have thousands of players.
of all the things people can bitch and whine about new games, cost is not really one of them
a 2600 game would cost you 77 bucks today
a SNES game would cost you 79 bucks today
Metal Gear solid would cost you 84 bucks today
(and we haven't even left the 90's yet)
so please STFU that game prices have not inflated equally with everything else, they have actually gotten cheaper!
I play PC games through steam, and I'm patient. Haven't paid more than $30 for a game in years, and I'm not about to start.
Sorry but since you don't pay them any money you are not entitled to call yourself a customer and your opinion is irrelevant.
Current PC Game prices here in Australia have been in the $70-$100 range for years, yes even this year where our dollar is worth more than yours.
I'd say it's nice to see you finally playing catch-up if it weren't for the fact that it's only going to translate to $150 games here.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
They should price the games according to the country being sold, like it's happening for years now with drugs. The can't complain for piracy when they sell a 70$ game to someone gaining 7$ a day. All these lost profits have the potential to lower the price for everyone.
Your argument is flawed. Back then, games were a niche market. Less people were buying them, the industry was just getting started, and games came with manuals.
Today, games are prevalent, the market is understood, and the industry has been around a while. They also have no manuals.
However, cost is going up because industries are getting greedy and are creating a false environment of "games are in trouble thus we must raise prices".
Price points to me are irrelevant and should be for any semi-intelligent buyer. Look at the product, look at the price and see if it's worth it. I'd be happy to pay $200 for a game that was worth $200. BF4 however I doubt I'll pick up even at $10 as that series (and CoD) have been downhill since BF1942 and CoD4. However I'm not naive enough to think that most people will take that stance. Many people happily go to get fleeced at a local, highly over priced store rather than shopping for physical copies online, or getting a digital copy - ie. steam specials. The more EA gets hammered pulling silly stunts like this the better it'll be for gaming as it's bound to sink in sooner or later that they're being idiots. "Here's the same thing we sold you last year, but you get to pay an extra $10 on top of what you paid last time, whooooo!!!"
It is in Australia. Even when our dollar buys more than the US.
Of course I'm not ready for "next gen" prices. I'm not even willing to pay the current gen prices. If I can't wait it out for the price to come down by at least 50%, I won't buy it.
It doesn't help that almost all commercial PC games come in the form of sloppy console ports these days. I wouldn't even consider pirating them. If there wasn't such a strong indie game market I probably wouldn't buy any new games at all.
eg. a "new release" shooter from ebgames (gamestop) $68AU, which is about $70 US.
https://www.ebgames.com.au/pc-150873-Spec-Ops-The-Line-PC
In other news, US companies overcharge foreigners.
Your argument is flawed--$35 of that $70 price was for the media itself because cartridges were expensive little buggers. Today DVD's cost pennies.
SNES cartridges carried a much higher cost than a plain stamped optical disc or downloaded content.
This is the same EA who recently said that they were going to a full-on digital company too, and cutting out the middleman(aka retail boxed stores) eventually. Well, isn't that interesting. You'd think, maybe, just possibly, they'd take the reasonable approach and sell something for less and in turn make more money by selling more copies. Instead of charging more money, and selling one copy.
Om, nomnomnom...
TPB Online Store
Have you ever heard of this thing called "inflation"?
If your statement is true, how come stuff like food and cars are not getting cheaper, although I'm pretty sure their market is also quite understood?
Yes - it was a superb game with hundreds of hours of playability. It also had a far superior multiplayer mode to Battlefield - if my friend started screaming racial slurs at me, I could always smack him upside the head ...
Sales of games have gone up as well. More people buy them, and marginal cost has gone way, WAY down. Console cartridges had a fairly high marginal cost. Those chips weren't that cheap. DVDs cost next to nothing, a full boxed game costs $1-2 at most to make. Digital distribution is even cheaper, costing only a few cents for a download at most and the cost is borne entirely by the company running the DD service.
Also DD allows for more profit per title. Steam, Impulse, etc take less of a cut than retail. Standard retail markup is usually 100%. So if you want a retailer to sell your product for $60, you have to charge them $30. Just the kind of margins required to make money with all the costs of retail. DD charges less, Steam doesn't reveal their specifics but it is more around a 30/70 split (70% to you) than the 50/50 of retail.
Of course if the DD happens to be owned by the company then all they pay is the cost to host and transfer it to customers (usually they outsource that to someone like Akamai) which as I said is only a few cents.
So really it seems to make sense that maybe games should be costing less. Yes the product cost is higher, but distribution costs are very low and of course we all know from ECON 200 that lower prices equal more sales.
The question is all one of value for the money. If they want $70 for their game and other companies will sell them on sale on Steam for $20, then maybe they don't get many people paying $70.
Remember when Street Fighter II came out for SNES? It was $70 at Target. That was almost 20 years ago.
A large part of that $70 price tag was actual manufacturing costs. Street Fighter II was the first 16MBit SNES game, and producing ROM cartridges that large was not cheap at the time.
uh, ok.
* use standard media instead of hardware media (DVD/blue ray vs cartridge)
* Better distribution channel.
* Bigger market
* Development cost (code) lower due to library / engine / plug in software solutions
* re-usage of some artisitic/texture
* better software practice, standard, and sof forth
That made game much cheaper to produce than it was a long time ago. In fact, you have to wonder why the price stay fixed at 50$ rather than go lower, seeing the poor quality of certain products and obvious , VERY obvious reusage of assets (dragon age 2 for example).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
GP didn't call him/herself a customer. (S)he said they don't know how to treat their customers, so it makes sense (s)he's not interested in spending $70 to become one.
(I'm not taking any position on whether (s)he should or not download the game illegally)
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I guess they'll release Battlefield 4 before "the future" then, as it is the same EA that predicts that in the future all games will be free.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Thank you for making the 2nd hand market even bigger.
I hope you realize you are screwing nobody but yourself in doing this.
Enjoy your lower sales numbers.
I bet those crooks will sell or allow the evil aussie ozziesoft or who ever, have country wide exclusive distribution rights, and have their own 40% markup for zero work.
EA, please dump/ignore ALL au middle men, setup your own EAAU HQ, and use it to bring in all games at true true true wholesale prices ($40USD) and sell them to AU shops at 65AU, so they can retail for $70AU in shops, below every single retailer selling competitors products in AU for $110+.
Screw the middle men, the exact work they do is nothing special that EA cannot do themselves in AU.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If they've upgraded the game engine significantly, opened up the world (or at least removed the artillery insta-death wall around all the levels), and made the enemy take wounding damage and react accordingly, then yes, that's a distinct improvement over previous iterations of the franchise. If it's just what amounts to a map pack for the same engine with a short-ass totally linear single-player campaign bolted on, then it's Doom with extra shiniez and they can go phuq themselves.
I'm going to use my awesome psychic powers here to predict that it's a map pack with a 10-hour campaign bolted on, and a handful of obscure weapons added to the multiplayer. Because that's much, much cheaper than actually doing any work.
Most games companies (excluding Valve) are no longer in the business of providing top-quality entertainment. Their job now is to figure out precisely how little they can give you, and how much they can charge you, before you finally vote with your wallet and go somewhere else. You know that if the game makers came up with a 16-hour campaign, the publishers would release an 8-hour campaign, and 2 x 4-hour DLC.
I haven't bought anything in the last 6 months that wasn't on Steam. Still working through Arkham City, Psychonauts, Serious Sam 3, Braid, Rock of Ages, and Assassins Creed. I don't need or want to buy any new games at $70 or UKP equivalent - I'll just wait until they show up on Steam in a year for half that.
Stop complaining about game prices, you only make yourself look stupid.
$50 in 2002 = $63.86 today
$50 in 1992 = $81.82 today
$50 in 1982 = $120.04 today
Games have actually gotten cheaper, not more expensive over the decades, because their prices have not kept up with inflation.
We typically get charged $130-150 for new console games. The PC equivalents are around $100 so a bit cheaper. The NZ$ is currently worth 80 US cents so you do the maths.
The part that really disgusts me is that NZ salaries are significantly lower than the US and yet entertainment costs are way higher. Heck, I can buy Blu ray discs from the UK for half the cost delivered than I can just by going to JB Hifi down the road. Shame that Amazon UK won't sell us games too because the UK prices on those are typically half the cost of the same game here too.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
You people still pay for computer and vidya games? What a bunch of saps! The last game I bought was Half-Life 1!
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
I wont be. Why?
Because Battlefield 3 was shit. Because they made the unlocables too lopsided, because after they charge you the US$70 which translates into no less then A$150 they still want $20 odd a month for premium which like unlockables, will be so lopsided as to make the game unplayable if you don't pony up the monthly danegeld, sorry, subscription fee.
BF 1942 and BF2 were works of art, BF Bad Company 2 was good, BF3 was just a huge steaming pile of unbalanced crap that I stopped playing after 3 days.
I haven't paid for COD since COD United Offensive back when CoD was a decent game.
I do have a problem with paying more, games are overpriced as they are but there's always some numpty that doesn't think when handing over money for the latest call of halo or whatever. To be frank, it's what is killing the games industry by rewarding publishers who release mediocre sequels with a large percentage of the budget dedicated to marketing.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
is 2017... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV-gnh1En6E
Actually, it's EA so I won't even play their games. The Evil Association doesn't even deserve my time to pirate.
I bought Mass Effect 3 and you wouldn't believe all the hoops I had to jump through just to play the game. One of them was as silly as downloading the game files from the EA server even if I had them on the DVDs I had bought. The Origin client was a beta version, and when I contacted EA support to ask for a stable, they said they don't have one. I also asked if I could play the game if Origin network is shut down. The answer was that it's a new network and it's constantly expanding, so I shouldn't worry about it shutting down.
Never again.
Only dumb birds land downwind.
I've never paid more that $30 for a game, normally won't buy a new game for more thatn $20, and usually wait for sales or other discounts. I've got the money, but I find games rarely deliver the entertainment value for the cost. I've never purchased a game at the current $60 price point, so I'd expect more gamers to start passing on the triple-A releases, or DLC driven games.
I can not even remember the last time I paid $60 for a new game, let alone $70. Thank goodness Walmart exists to keep game companies honest, because gamestop certainly does not put up much of a fight in the price department (new releases routinely are $60 or $70 on Gamestop pre-order, but on actual day of release, Walmart puts em out at $49.99
The Death Knell of EA Games.
70$ would be acceptable if I was allowed to sell the game when I got bored of it...without having the buyer lose out on multi player. I don't see anything wrong with a 70$ price tag but that shit better not be dRM nor require an internet connection to play or a multi player key code.
Please stop using the term "next-gen" for every goddamn thing.
"Next-gen pricing" is an abomination. Overcharging is not even "next-gen", it's old fashioned "squeeze consumers for every penny", early 20th century greed. The kind that makes your customers lose enough respect that they wait for SKIDROW to come out with the unofficial demo.
Anyway, Battlefield 3 was overpriced by about $20. At $39 I would have felt like it was a worthwhile purchase. At $59 I felt ripped-off. The additional customers EA would have gotten at the lower price point would have more than made up for the lower price-per-unit and maybe your customers wouldn't hate you so much.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I paid 70$ for Super Mario Brothers 3 when it came out. It was totally worth it! I bet this game won't be as good though.
The only time I was kicked from a game was in Metro.
And guess what: All of Xbox Live has been Metro since December 6, 2011.
More than the 70$ retail price, the concept in BF3 that's giving better equipment to the gamers ready to pay big bucks for DLC is not only greedy-to-the-core but quite unfair for the "regular" players who are thinking that 60$ to play a game is more than enough. What better experience than being killed "one on one" by someone armed with a gun you don't have access to? They are killing the franchise with their thirst of money. BF3 was my first purchase in this series... and you can bet it will be the last.
But even taking inflation into account food did actually get cheaper over time and so did cars. Ask anyone who lived in 1960 and was not part of the middle class how many times they'd eat meat in a month. I know both my grand parents couldn't afford to eat meat in a family setting more than once a week. I eat meat every single day and so do those of their generation who are still alive and kickin'.
As for cars. There used to be a time when people couldn't afford more than one car per family and that was IF they could afford one at all. Now the husband, the wife AND the kids once they're old enough all have their own cars.
Sure, some things sometimes get more expensive and I'm not saying ALL food are cheaper, or ALL type of cars are cheaper. But cars like the Renault Dacia Logan - here in Europe - opened a whole new market of cars for people who couldn't afford a new car and could only buy used stuff. Lots of people who used to buy used cars are now buying them new. The Dacia Logan is cheaper than real motorcycles ! (By real I mean anything that isn't a stupid 125cc)
Commodities like food and transportation has already reached its base point - they are sold at just barely above material cost - sometimes below when subsidized by outside sources such as the government. The profit margin is miniscule, which is part of why food costs the same and farmers are making such piss-poor money compared to 10 years ago, and why auto makers are constantly getting bailed out.
If the video game industry charged just over cost of programmer time, API licensing, and distribution costs, we'd be left with a $10 game, online distro only. Hm, it's almost like it has been done before.
In an open source community where you don't usually pay the devs and digital distribution is free, you can theoretically create full commercial products for free. Look at OpenOffice. Do you think they're making money like Microsoft? Of course not.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Not released yet, but soon. Free to play (not pay to win) FPS, 2000 players in 64 sqkm maps, combined arms, 10 person squads, huge customization options, the list goes on.
That was the Theban sacred band. Thebes is in Greece, not Italy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The $70 price is for the "Digital Deluxe" version. The regular game costs $60. http://store.origin.com/store/ea/search/?keywords=warfighter
EA seems to really like DLCs. I propose a solution to pay $60 and DLCs to enhance a barely-functional game.
Separate DLC packages at $1 minimum for:
1) knife
2) handguns
3) rifle
4) a playable character
5) explosives
6) Ammunition
7) being able to run
8) crouching option
9) first-aid packs
10) ability to chat with others
These 10 packs would bring the cost back to $70. If you're the peaceful type and want to play the game without killing anyone, you only pay $1 to purchase a playable character.
I don't have a problem paying $70, $80 even sounds fair, as long as that includes future DLC.
Since BF2 at least (vets probably will say earlier) Battlefield players have been complaining about DLC splitting the community, and DICE/EA have been saying they'd do something about it. Spoiler alert, they haven't.
Games cost a lot to make -- OK. DLC costs more. But PLEASE just charge me up front, don't surprise me 2 months later with "Premium" edition expansions that mean half the player base will not be able to join half the servers.
Given that these guys produce AAA titles and have heard the community bitching for years, jaded lil' ol' me is left to think this is not only money-grubbing but planned deprecation: cash in on whoever's willing to buy the expansions, and if it splinters the playerbase, even better, because the next title will be out in six months anyway.
I will be passing on this title and spending the cash on indie titles or devs/publishers I have more faith in. Sorry, DICE. Wish it could have worked out differently.
I did not mind paying 60.00$ for a game that is finished before it comes out, but i don't like being their bug control, then for 6mons they do very little, then they sit by, while the cheaters take over the game, that my friends is the biggest problem with BF3, and don't tell me theres only 1 to 3% cheaters, STFU ALREADY, ur just making ur self look stupid, and now they have expansion packs out and didn't even debug the first, and if u didn't buy premium, they used them against you, so for me to spend my money on any game, it needs to be built for PC, not consol, finished when it comes out,thats where we realy got shafted, build it rite and u will get more PC gamers in the long run
BF3 required an investment of 500eur for a GPU to just make the game playable.
You can play the game easily with a nVidia GTX460 or with the ATi 4870, either of which you can get for less than $150 in the US. I'm confident that even with the Euro markup, you can do it for under 200 euros.
Wow ... I didn't realize Peter Moore posted on slashdot! How's the stock holding up these days :) Maybe you need more ads in your premium mobile games?
Tell me, if current games are truly worth sixty dollars a pop, then why do they plunge in the value within the first six months? There are only a handful of titles that can maintain that price for over a year while a vast majority of them fall to the toilet. That tells me that the majority of games are over priced and guess what ... they are. God - duke nukem forever went from sixty dollars to ten dollars - new - in six months. Overpriced much?
Comparing two prices from two different decades without taking into account other factors is incredibly naive. The gaming market has exploded in that time. It's gone from a handful of millions to billions of paying customers. Computing power has gone through the roof. The necessary skills to build these games has substantially dropped and while budgets have increased so has the profits by a wide margin. By all accounts, these games should be far cheaper than they are. Not the silly inflation math you are using. The used market would not be so out of control if this were the case.
A funny thing has also happened in this time period. Sequels are pushed out faster, content is held back in the form of consumables, we're watching the rise online passes, and now the most odious of all - free to play games that end up becoming quite the cash cow (75% of apple's top twenty grossing games are free to play). Games like Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, and lets not forget Madden are repurposing the same technology, the same assets what would arguably called expansion packs not twenty years ago. And the hilarious thing is that some of these "AAA" games are just flat out broken on launch.
Now look - if you feel you are getting value for sixty bucks, all the power to you, but seeing as you hitting the Walmart bargin bin, I'm guessing you don't. Well the real bad news is almost upon us. Digital distribution completely screw us. Whereas games drop like a rock on retail shelves to make way for other games, digital games can stay high in the upper fifties or sixties as long as they like with an occasional "deal" of five dollars off or some other nonsense. I'm not talking Steam (they get it) but stores like xbox live, origin, and I'm guessing the playstation store (I never use it so I don't know). And this is without any distribution costs except bandwidth which is dirt cheap. The last game I bought for sixty bucks was Battlefield 3 last year. I played it for a month and will probably sell it on Amazon in a few weeks. Meanwhile I buy a ton of games on my iDevices. If they suck, I hardly bat an eye. That's how it should be.
Buying games should be an impulse purchase, not a saving money purchase. Hollywood got this with dvd purcahses. The real question ... when will game publishers?
Your comment loses its umph when you cite Braid and Minecraft (Indie games -- not AAA titles by a long-shot) as examples of games that cost ten dollars.
You're comparing something that two people worked on to something that around a hundred people worked on. Give me a break.
Wow is EA ever becoming cash hungry.. I know the economy is in the shits, but come on EA... It's not like we are doing any better!
Everyone seems to be installing spyware and shit that calls home constantly including software which can't be uninstalled. Games requiring you to "login" to play even when not playing online. In game advertising. Ominous license agreements enabling collection of your first born from your computer.
I can't buy new games anymore. In the last three years every single time I have seen a game I liked.. each time I have look up what "klingons" are included...sighed and moved on.
All I want to do is play.. not have to deal with vendor bullshit. For $70 people are not going to fork out that much cash and also put up with any bullshit. Who knows maybe they will have learned their lesson from what went down with previous battlefield titles but I doubt it.
Your comment loses its umph when you cite Braid and Minecraft (Indie games -- not AAA titles by a long-shot) as examples of games that cost ten dollars.
You're comparing something that two people worked on to something that around a hundred people worked on. Give me a break.
That's the thing though, these indie games are better in terms of playtime and quality then the so called "AAA" titles lately.
Right now 2-10 people can create a game enjoyed by the fans, sell it for $10 and earn a profit.
Meanwhile 100-200 people working for a big name studio create a game, sell it for $60-$70, and manage to destroy any good will their fans have for them because of corporate decisions(always online, unbalanced micro transactions, game stopping bugs, telling us we don't know what fun is, deflecting criticism instead of learning from it, etc.)
I imagine I don't have to list recent AAA titles that turned out to be huge disappointments.
they are raising prices because they can and they should.
why wouldn't you raise price if your customers kept paying them ?
Absolute statements are never true
I have to believe that the premium packs are not selling well. I refuse to buy premium packs that is something they took away from their customers the ability to make mods. I'm inclined to pay the 70 but if they hook mods in down the road im just not going to pay anymore.
Jack of all trades,master of none
fuck that
I never even got battlefield 2032 or whatever that crap was to work for more than a few minutes without crashing to desktop with no error message what so ever. There was never a solution offered and thousands of reports of the problem all over the message boards.
There is absolutely no way I'm giving them another dime of my money, period. I called tech support for help, and finally got someone to explain that my drivers were to blame. I was running the very latest drivers and the ATI drivers had no problem with any other game from Oblivion to WoW and others. Yet this game would crash to desktop with not so much as an error code or log to send to support... yeah sounds like a driver problem to me.
Fuck them. I won't be giving them a penny and neither should you.
In a game overrun by 10 year old trolls. Play Tribes: (Ascend) for $0
the biggest problem I have with companies like EA is that they support draconian nonsense like DRM
What maker of living-room video games doesn't support such "draconian nonsense"?
And the average Australian makes 20% more than the average American household. Is it no surprise that things cost more where people have more money to spend? Never mind the fact that Americans work more hours per week and have less vacation time per year to earn their income.
There is no "Microsoft tax" for PC games.
There are also no living-room PC games because there are statistically no living-room PCs.
So fucking what? More money goes into development of the games. Oh wait, this is shitdot where you fucktarded, communist loving asspies think a $5 game is too fucking expensive because you are too fucking lazy to fucking work. That is why you fucktarded shitdot sheeple love communism and all communist nations and hate capitalism and America.
GO AHEAD FUCKING FLAME AWAY
OR WASTE YOUR GODDAMN MOD
POINTS FUCKTARDED SHITDOT SHEEPLE OR EVEN BETTER
GO SLIT YOUR FUCKING WRISTS
FUCKTARDED SHITDOT SHEEPLE
You buy it and you're playing it in just the time it takes to DL it.
Which could be a long time if you live too far from the DSLAM to get DSL and no cable TV company services your address either. Would people on a 5 GB/mo satellite plan really have the patience to devote over a month to downloading a single-DVD-size game?
If there wasn't such a strong indie game market I probably wouldn't buy any new games at all.
What strong indie game market? According to CronoCloud, people give neither a damn nor a fuck about indie games.
Their DRM is every bit as insidious as EA's.
That's it for me, no more Battlefield anything. I've had enough.
What should a game or movie that costs $100 million to produce and $1 per copy to distribute cost? Just how relevant is the $1 in the pricing? A game that costs $40m to make and $5/copy might would sell for less.
They charge $70, I spend $0. Basic as that. Maybe if they'd make the games...you know...good, long, and not rehashed old ideas, then I'd considering paying $70. Until then, hell no.
I detect sarcasm in your post, and I assume that your point is that customers on satellite are an edge case not worth serving. So what video games should people stuck on satellite play instead?
so many on slashdot are moral crusaders, opposed to even the most basic of concepts (such as demand) when it affect them in ways they personally find undesirable.
many people think a game is worth $70 these days, so they'll pay that. many slashdotters will continue to complain about "greed" as they download copies of games they feel they deserve to play despite being above their price-range of below their moral high ground.
I remember when SNES and Genesis games used to cost $80-90 back in the day. Boy those were expensive lol
I can't stomach $60 for a game, either. Being a cheap bastard, I don't start buying games until they've been on the market for quite a while. The last title I bought at release for full price was C&C3:Tiberium Wars about 5 years ago (wasn't worth it). This strategy has worked well for me -- I have no plans to buy a "new" game anytime soon. In fact, I just bought The Witcher yesterday ($2.49).
Assuming a relatively low sales tax of 6% and actual retail price of $69.99 for BF4, the total price of BF4 would be $74.19.
For that money, right now on Steam I can get Fallout 3:GotY, Fallout: New Vegas, Dead Space, Dead Space 2, Saints Row: The Third, all 6 "X" games, 3 "Hitman" games, Trine 1&2, 5 "Prince of Persia" games, and both "Penumbra" games for a grand total of $70.90. No tax.
BF4 may actually provide quite a bit of good gameplay, but I have a hard time believing it would provide more hours of enjoyment (or higher quality enjoyment) than two Fallout titles, two Dead Space titles, and SR3. If BF4 has a pipboy and lets me beat pedestrians with a huge purple dong, I might change my opinion.
Some advantages other than price: major bugs tend to be patched, possible DRM removal by the developer or availability of DRM work-arounds (ex:no-CD), video drivers have had time to be optimized, reviews and community stabilize, user created content available (depending on title).
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Battlefield 7 is coming out in 2014, it'll cost about $100.
But it'll totally be worth it, right? Because it'll have (insert retarded extra content that 6 didn't have here).
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
"Everything is worth what the purchaser will pay for it."
I'd rather wait for the game to drop in price a few months later than pay for the full priced game...
Oh wait. I can't afford the full price game right now. So my plan is the only way I can get games.
Besides I got two problems with the Battlefield series:
1) EA and it's penchant to mess up good titles.
2) The Battlefield series in general. Never cared for those games.
After years, I can safely say, the series will never be as good as 2142 ever again.
Remember how Street Fighter 2 didn't also come with it's own worth in DLC just to play the full game?
They are not getting more expensive, you just have a much lower tolerance for higher prices because you can easily get a game for free on the internet.
is TL2 that good ? I know D3 is that bad...sadly
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
$70 is too much. As it stands, I rarely buy a game at $60. I wait 6 months to a year, till it drops in price to $20-30. With the amount of DLC being tossed out, it gets easy to spend $100 or more in total on a game. Plus, with the various Steam sales, I've been getting a crap ton of good games and spending a fraction of the full retail price. They may not be from giganto publishers by EA, but if you enjoy the crap out of a game, does it matter who made it?