Tired of Paying $60 for New Games? Prices May Come Down, Says Report
February 4th, 2009 | Written by Anthony Perez | Topic: Industry News
An analyst for Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) says that more games are being released for less than this generation’s standard price tag of $59.99, and that trend may continue as hardware prices fall and more consumers enter the gaming market, driving a need for lower, more competitive pricing on software.
“Recent data trends… indicate that initial MSRPs are declining on both the Xbox 360 and PS3 as the amount of games priced under $59.99 has increased 66% over last year, while the entire quantity of games only increased 44%. In other words, pricing is beginning to come down,” noted analyst Jesse Divnich. “Its weight, however, is not heavy enough to reflect on the current trend in pricing. We believe this will likely change. As the Xbox 360 and the PS3 hardware continue to decline in price, more non-traditional, casual, family, and price sensitive gamers (noting these demographics sometimes overlap) will likely adopt these systems, which will increase the demand for cheaper titles. In fact, if we look at upcoming releases in February and March, the average initial MSRP for games on the Xbox 360 is $53, much lower than the average initial MSRP.”
While this sounds nice and hopeful, that drop in average prices may be affected solely by the number of budget titles being released. Most of the biggest games are still priced at $59.99 such as:
X-Blades
FEAR 2
Street Fighter IV
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand
Star Ocean: The Last Hope
Godfather II
Halo Wars
Tom Clancy’ H.A.W.X
Resident Evil 5
Wheelman
So don’t get your hopes up too high, because you’ll pretty much be getting price deals for games like Trivial Pursuit.
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