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?"

Comments

Outs?

[Antarius]

"Outs" Battlefield 4? What, are they going to be in rainbow camouflage or something?

launching an exe from a web browser is stupid

[locopuyo]

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.

Remember when Street Fighter II came out for SNES?

[the_humeister]

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.

My 16 bit games cost 50 bucks

[Osgeld]

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!

Re:My 16 bit games cost 50 bucks

[LandoCalrizzian]

Of all the examples you listed, how many of those ~$80 can you still play 20 years later after the studio is gone or no longer supporting the game? The way EA is setting up Origin, you are just renting the games and they only guarantee access for 2years in the Origin TOS. With DLC and in game ads, they are overcharging for the game.

Good luck with that

[tsotha]

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.

Re:No, no no

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget the community: the biggest problem I have with companies like EA is that they support draconian nonsense like DRM. I can't support them in good conscience.

Re:Yawn

[quantumphaze]

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.

Re:Remember when Street Fighter II came out for SN

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:uBI and aCTIVision do it too

[promythyus]

>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.

Well the thing is

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Remember when Street Fighter II came out for SN

[JDG1980]

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.

Re:uBI and aCTIVision do it too

[Xest]

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.

Games are already too expensive

[mjwx]

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?

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.

In contrast I don't pay $70 for CoD anymore

I haven't paid for COD since COD United Offensive back when CoD was a decent game.

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 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.

Re:Games are already too expensive

[MacGyver2210]

As a professional video game developer on the same platforms, I have to ask: why are you charging more? The cost of bringing games like this to the market has plummeted for large dev houses compared to their retail cost. Their labor is at a fixed rate and has an easy transition to existing properties like this, leaving just content development and level planning for a "new" rehashed game from one of their franchises.

If they were rewriting the graphics and physics engine each time, I would believe it and say it's a fair price - those parts of a game are a lot of work when done from scratch. However, I would guess they're just using Havok or Unreal or something of that nature instead, which just costs them a small licensing fee and not a shit-ton of programmer time. That alone should knock some of the game price off.

They have a subsidized online subscription service. On top of the already-too-expensive game purchase, they want you to pay a 'premium fee' to play online? Hell no. You get one or the other, trying to collect on both is far too greedy and people just aren't going to buy your steaming pile of rehashed done-and-done-again shit.

I still play Counterstrike / Condition Zero / Day of Defeat / HL2 Deathmatch which ran me about $10 years and years ago. Those are some rock-solid classic shooters, and I find the community supports them even more now that the gawkers and "ooh, new shiny" players have moved on to other games.

EA is just in this for money - don't let anyone tell you otherwise. They don't have their staff or customers' best interests in mind, and they never will. Don't believe the hype, and don't feed the trolls.