Be Excellent To Each Other

The price increase is being blamed on the 'weak' pound, right?

Well, fair enough, but wasn't the whole reason we were paying through the nose for our games four or five years ago blamed on the pound being 'strong'?

I reckon I'm missing something pretty obvious here. Can anyone clarify?

Activision want to boil the extra pennies and distil the work sweat off them in order to get high.

£55 is the RRP, compared to all current Xbox games having an RRP of £50. Street price appears to have settled at £45.

Was it?

Currency talk is a smokescreen.

They just want to charge more so that they can get more money.

It's both, surely. Profits from games sold over here must be down due to the exchange rate and they probably think that they can charge a bit more for the biggest selling game of the year. I couldn't give a shit personally, it's only a game. I'm free to not buy it.

Although one thing I did note is that it's not the Dollar to Pound but Euro to Pound.

The Euro's to Pounds is rubbish of late (past year or so). If the Disc's are made in Europe I sort of guess it makes some sense raising prices.

Although I'm still think it's a little too much, if we take the RRP as what we'll pay.

The pound is considerably up on its low against the euro anyway.

http://www.x-rates.com/d/EUR/GBP/hist2009.html

What Lewiep said.. It's got nothing to do with the pound. They're charging more because they like it when people give them money. They know the game will sell regardless!

Michael Jackson's dead.

When the pound was strong they kept arguing that the prices of games (esp. Rock Band et al.) was a lot compared to the Yanks etc because you had to consider the costs of operating in the uk which was bound to the strong pound. (Not including the vat costs of cause, which people always forget about in comparisons)

Now the pound is weak they can say the weak pound means they can't make any profit.

Both have a slither of truth in them, but in reality it all comes down to is taking 'cost' and 'audience' (which are inversely proportional) and solving for the greatest revenue. As games are historically one of the great recession denying businesses (because a) geeks are obsessed and b) because people stay in more) they are betting that they can squeeze a price hike in. I'm guessing they can too. Which sucks.

As I said before, it's going to be interesting when they try and move download only whilst maintaining these prices.

Thanks Lave, that was my understanding of the situation exactly. It doesn't bother me in a practical sense, it just annoys me that 1) they lie so brazenly and 2) the media doesn't pick up on it and challenge them.


"But COD, you ARE the media!"

FUCK! *runs!*

Just don't buy it 'til it's £25. (Next year)

CoD4 isn't yet £25.

Bad timing, myp: HMV have starting selling COD4 for £25 as of this week.

Arf!

Ok, well change 'next year' to 'two years time', then. Of course, as the RRP is a fiver more, it'll be £30 by then.

I predict this one will be cheaper more quickly than CoD4. It's far more anticipated than CoD4, more like a new Halo type of event. Certainly there'll be millions of second hand copies within a month or two.

It all depends on how sustainable the multiplayer is. People won't trade it in if they're still enjoying it. Halo 3 didn't get cheap until about a year; I remember preowned copies still being £35 for ages.

Do you? I remember it being a lot less than a year when you could easily get it second hand for about £25. Multiplayer isn't everything, there's still loads of people who will only ever play single player games, me included apart from relatively rare exceptions.