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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?"
"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.
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-$60. That's not bad given the progression since then. I'd ask you to get off my lawn now, but it's been paved over with concrete.
that was 20 something years ago, and hell if you dont want to pay 70 2012 bucks for a game that has higher production quality than most movies from 20 something years ago and gives you months of entertainment, wait
yea OMFG wait, by Christmas it will be in the sub 30$ 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.
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.
It's even worse when they charge those insane prices for downloadable copies. With online downloads they no longer have the bullshit excuse of more expensive distribution in Australia yet still geo-discriminate (it's totally a word) to not undercut the physical copies. Skyrim was $89 on Steam at launch.
Then they wonder why piracy is so high.
Unicode in Slashdot
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".
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.
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?
>ubi
>activision
>worse than EA
Yeah nah. EA are scum, always have been. Activision just rehash their crap and charge $15 for map packs without shame but they know that they provide a service and at least respect their paying customers. EA are the worst kind of hypocrites, flooding the market with crappy sports titles and generic cod-clones and then claim to be "a driving force of innovation". They say they will never do sales like steam sales, because it devalues games. Have you seen Origin lately? Sale Sale Sale Sale. Not only that, you try getting support on your title. I'm sure if you've kept up with gaming news you know all about EA's retarded banning policy, and how they handled people criticising Bioware. EA spit in the face of their customers.
Ubi just have crappy drm and price gouging. They aren't actively malicious like EA.
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.
I don't really want to pay more for a product, no one does, but I'd be one of those people who'd pay more for BF4. Why?
Because I've had more hours out of it than just about any game I paid $60 for by quite a margin. The cost relative to the amount of entertainment I'd get out of it would still be better than most $60 titles - to me, $70 for 120hrs of entertainment is still far better than than the average $60 for maybe 10 - 20hrs of entertainment I get out of most games.
In contrast I don't pay $70 for CoD anymore, because it just got ever shitter since World at War culminating in the abysmal fuckup of a game that was Black Ops. If it started to get better again I might, but the franchise has just dropped to the level of a A shooter rather than an AAA shooter, and I can pick up any number of A rated shooters released over the years for fuck all - they're 10 a penny.
I don't have a problem paying a bit more for something that's actually worth it, what I wont pay more for is shit.
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.
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.
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.
first flatscreen TVs were in tens of thousands range. You see what i am getting at?
Games used to be a niche, a luxury, now they are a mainstream entertainment for the masses and a mature industry - economies of scale should apply, considering digital distribution, tech advances and what not... not to mention depressed economy.
I, for one, probably won't be. Battlefield is getting worse.
-BF3 has, in general, meh maps. Flags are clustered in the center rather than spread out. Map design compromises for multiple game types make them mediocre for Conquest AND Rush. So, there might be lots of space, but no reason to be there.
-Login/usage issues with Origin and Battlelog.
-Taclights I could light my whole house with.The blinding factor would be tolerable, if it only did that in dark environments. But even in bright daylight, its just as blinding.
-Being able to fire through cover as long as your hairline is above it. Meaning the shooter is visually all but unexposed, usually including the muzzle flash.
-No squad voice comm. You must do this either by Battlelog party or third party software. I do so love stopping to type to my random pub squadmates.
-Oh, and the love from EA/DICE: if you were one of the pre-order crew, thanks for supporting us! We'll show you consideration by making you pay for Back to Karkand like everybody else when you buy Premium. If you -bought- Back to Karkand.. bahahahahhahaha, we love you even more.
On less egregious notes:
-"decline revive" does not solve the issue of derpfibrilation. Fixing that would require something more like a short (~2 second?) timer during which you can accept a revive. If you accept, then you revive. Cannot extend revivability past your normal respawn timer. If you do not accept, you respawn as normal and no points are awarded to the medic.
-Jumping should not be a part of faster infantry movement.
-Vaulting still not great. Windows that you can vault.. on to. And then you have to crouch walk to get through. Really, DICE? Other objects that look like you should be able to vault, but it just jumps and won't let you over. Awesome.
-Randomly get "caught" on nothing, making you let go of the movement key and hit it again to move.
-Wonky hit detection declaring headshots that don't look like they hit the head. Other shots not being declared headshots, despite the blood spray from.. the head.
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'd suggest Binding of Isaac, that's GREAT value for the money. It's like $3 and I've played it for 40+ hours while others have gone past the 100 hour mark!
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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
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 $23 for The Orange Box, which had 3 games. My total play time across all of them is around 1,000 (thousand) hours.
Sorry, your explanation makes some sense, but in the end, you are paying for overpriced product and more profits are going to EA's exec pockets.
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?
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?
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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