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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
>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 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.
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!
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Only if Australia had their own developers...
Judging by the number of "in Australia, it costs..." posts in this story, I'd say every Aussie capable of turning on a computer is too busy posting on Slashdot to make a video game.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon