So reader SchizoSlayer drops us a line, and he says “Did you know that EA store is selling Spore for £40?” We didn’t, but it is. The same site is selling this same digital download for $50 in the US. And Amazon UK are selling it in a box, delivered through your door for £27.
Just sayin’.
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What I mean is that you can download the game now, quicker and more conveniently (in theory). This is a good thing, and it’s important to realise that this extra convenience will (and should) come with a price tag.
As I said, EA’s downloader has issues, but in general terms of digital distribution the point stands.
Prey is £18 on Steam and it was in Zavvi the other day for £1, yeah. There’s definately a price parity of sorts :/
Shopto had it for £22.99 preorder. WHY WHY did I miss that one. :(
most annoyingly i downloaded the creature creator from EA for £5, expecting to egt that off the digital download (which i will). But then, noticing they are selling it at £40!! means that i can buy it cheaper anywhere else without the £5 discount. There’s something wrong with digital distribution. People may want to download, but they don’t want to so much they’ll hand over and extra £10-15 for the priviledge. Come on EA, learn to aid your consumer. I want to buy from you directly (which must leave them with more profit), now match (or at least get close to) your boxed rivals….
This does suck big time..
@ Theory: Same here, I heard it was a zombie run cartel but I’ll defer to Gap Gen on this one.
@ The_Mhor: Ah yes, the old three installs only DRM. I’m hoping that’ll get patched out, à la Bioshock, particularly as I’ll be upgrading soonish but I’m not counting on it.
EA are retards. By selling online they cut out the retailers. Retail should be dead and buried right now. Plus the cheek of charging people for an ‘extended download’ is just insulting. it takes me under 20 seconds to validate someone’s order when they ask for a re-download that’s over a year old. I get maybe 3 a week. Big deal. If I was charging people money to download a 35MB file every year or so, when they were a PAYING customer of mine, I think I’d need my head examined.
@Bobsy
Are you nuts? About 35 – 50% of a retail sale goes to the retailers, not the publishers. so on a £30 retail game, the publishers maybe make £10 – 15, from which they deduct the cost of the packaging, DVD production, printing of the manual, shipping etc, so knock off a couple of quid and cost of production. On a download sale the profit it all theirs and the expenditure far less. One would expect at the minimum that the DD prices are comparable Vs the retail prices, but in the EA store the prices are actually much higher than the retail equivilant. Minor quibbles about other publishers Steam pricing aside, generally on Steam a new game price is pretty favourable compared to the retail release, and with Steam you don’t get charged for redownloading games. To make it out that EA by deigning to do DD at a considerable mark up is them (the worlds biggest games publisher) doing the DD seeking customer a favour is absurd. Amazon will deliver anything over £15 for free to your front door/workplace wherever and still charge you about £13 less than EA DD does.
I finally have a handle on the regional pricing disparity, having been frustrated for years as a UK citizen.
The thing is, the price of something with no real manufacturing cost in a market has nothing to do with currency exchange rates.
At all.
Forget them.
It’s all about what you can get people to pay, usually based on precedent. New games on the PC were £29.99 a decade ago and have been creeping up slower than inflation. £40 is entirely reasonable given the pricing history.
New games in the US are $50. Can’t speak for history there, but I don’t think they’ve gone up dramatically recently, and certainly haven’t come down.
Online stores obviously can undercut retail because they don’t have the infrastructure to maintain, and digital downloads are usually priced to match local retail so as not to piss-off the retailers.
No mystery.
mandrill: The Proper XBox 360, with a hard drive, so you can download all the things you need to if you’re going to enjoy it to its fullest, and a headset so you don’t have to listen to me going “Hello? HELLO? YOU’RE ON MUTE, MANDRILL” through your TV speakers if you play online, costs $399 before sales tax in the US. Which, thanks to the pound collapsing, equates to £170. Add on VAT and you’re up to £200, give or take a few pennies. This isn’t Rip-Off Britain for once.
Unless you’re buying from the EA store, like this story is about, anyway.
@ all the guys defending valve about the pricing of COD4
Valve made the CHOICE to allow this product to be available through thier system.
Even if they are only the distributer, they are still part of the equation.
@Watcher95
Ultimately no ones forcing people to buy games through Steam, esp if the prices are over inflated by the Publisher. Should Valve start stepping in and telling publishers what to charge in their digital shop? Sounds like a swift recipe for losing other publishers from the venture forever. However when the suits at Activision puzzle over why their Steam sales of CoD4 panned in Europe, I’m sure they will ponder the wisdom of going for different pricing options. A market is best decided upon by market forces and supply and demand.
Would I have like to have CoD4 on Steam, yes. Was I prepared to get ripped off, no. What did I do? Bought a retail copy. Simple really.
@kadayi,
Same here, bought it retail for about $40.
If the price is nearly identical, steam is ALWAYS my first choice, but sadly not this time.
My original point was simply meant to illustrate another online distribution service which sometimes charges significantly more than the retail channel.
Sometimes isn’t quite the same as always, as is the case with EA. Sure you can normally pick up games that have gone off the boil like Prey, etc retail and they will be cheaper than on Steam, however that’s generally because it’s the retailer setting the price rather than the publisher. When you pick up a game for $5 or a £1 you think anyone involved is making a profit? It’s purely a case of the retailer cleaning out the stock room through bargain incentives. With DD there is no stock room, so although a publisher might lower prices or put together value packs to encourage sales, it’s unlikely they are ever going to drop them as low as retail bargain bin levels.
BTW, for any concerned about Prey’s price on Steam – CD keys in this format: AAB1BB2C345CDD6E E7 can be activated on Steam, meaning if you see it for 5 cents at retail you can probably plug it in to you Steam account and toss the box out.
See, that’s the thing – for me, digital distribution offers the convenience of “instant” (or at least, fairly quick) delivery right from the comfort of home. But that’s balanced out by not getting any of the benefits of physical media, like a manual I can read without printing it out or trying to alt tab between the game and PDF viewer. Or installation that doesn’t rely on my having a fast internet connection up and running. And the ability to play without relying on the distributor still existing.
Making it pretty much a wash in my book. Which leaves the fact that the costs on their end are substantially less and thus I should be getting cut in on at least some of the resulting savings. And I’m mostly not.
here in Italy the boxed Galactic Edition is priced 49,90€ but the standard download edition from EA is still 54,90€.