Gamestop has recently slashed prices on a few recently released games. Prince of Persia, EndWar, and Far Cry 2 have all had their prices cut from $59.99 to $39.99. Some might be wondering why this would be a bad thing. Believe me I don't complain about saving money but it doesn't bode well for the gaming industry as a whole. All three of these franchises are well known products already and the fact that their prices have been cut so drastically so soon after release doesn't look good in terms of sales. It has been a great year for gamers and a very bad one for developers. Gamers have been awarded with new IP's like Dead Space and Left 4 Dead and great sequels like Gears of War 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4. The problem is that a lot of these games still havn't sold well. Companies rarely like to make new properties due to not knowing whether people will actually buy the finished product. That is why companies are so willing to endlessly shell out sequel upon sequel without ever really changing anything. Then we as the gamers cry foul that developers aren't making anything new and exciting and when they finally take a chance, we the gamers, don't buy it. Many big developers and publishers this year went out to make new IP's this year and it was unfortunately a terrible time for that with the world's crumbling economy. The sad thing about it is that for every new piece of garbage that came out this year like Mirror's Edge, there was a Dead Space which is one of my picks for game of the year. Now that games future is in jeopardy along with many others due to the sad state the world is in.
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2 comments:
Well I think the problem here is that these games were released at the tail end of the holiday rush, where most gamers and shoppers had already bought all of the games they were going to buy for this holiday season. Now, Gamestop is stuck with a ton of extra copies of this game when the publishers should probably have released it some time after the holiday onslaught or the eventual games-drought of summer when people are actually looking for stuff to play - not swamped with what they already have.
I mean, it's tough to convince someone to buy a game they never heard of already, but imagine trying to sell the same product after they just spent $180 on Gears 2, Fable 2, and Fallout 3? It's just not going to happen - and it's really not going to happen when the economy is in an absolute shitstorm.
Hence the price cuts.
While no, I don't think that it's good that the prices were cut because that means less incentive to make new IPs and less money in to fund them - I feel that it was more the fault of the publishers and release times than with consumers and gamers.
the price cuts are a combindation weak projected sales and deflation
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