http://savygamer.co.uk/2009/08/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-2-pc-2799.html

£27.99 preorder.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/gadgets_and_gaming/article6728189.ece

Cod6 is expensive, no doubt, maybe too expensive, but it’ll sell by the bucket load. I don’t think every other publisher will automatically follow suit though. Regardless of personal opinion, Modern Warfare 2 is probably 2009’s biggest gaming release, by a distance. You can realistically sell it at £40 for the pc version – but the same doesn’t necessarily apply to Mirror’s Edge 2, Dragon Age, Diablo 3, or whatever.

Sadly, I will almost certainly pay over the odds to have Cod6 in my hands on the day of release, as I belong to a Cod4 clan, and our masterplan (I use both ‘master’ and ‘plan’ in the loosest possible sense) is to get a couple of UK servers up tout suite (sp?). It’s all about bums on seats, apparently. I won’t be paying £40 mind, but it’ll still be more than I’m used to (according to shopto.net, the RRP for Cod6 PC is actually £45).

As an aside, my clan has somewhere between fifteen and twenty members who play Cod4, but only two or maybe three of us (including myself) have ever actually played the single player.

Basically I might pay extra for this, but everything else can wait for the sales. Apologies for over-long rambling.

There is a free market. Anyone who doesn’t want to buy COD6, just don’t buy it, then get on with your lives.
if you want to be annoyed about prices, get annoyed about energy or water prices, something where you *have* to consume it.

The horse armor DLC was your coffee shop example of offering to sprinkle some cinnamon on the $3 coffee for an extra dollar. You can argue all you like about how only people who want to pay for it need pay for it, but everyone else will be over here condemning them for, at best, not understanding their market; or more likely, preying on the ignorant to make a quick buck.

Do you honestly think that if MW2 was offered as either the single player component, or the multiplayer component, for 2/3rds the price of a normal game, or both for full price, it wouldn’t be hailed by gamers everywhere as the best deal since sliced bread?

The Witcher, Mass Effect, World of Goo, GTA IV, Tomb Raider Underworld and Bioshock.

Games I buy now are typically between £5 and £15, (eg last month: Dead Space £7.99 released 9 months ago) and I might stretch to £25 for a newly released game if it was something special, but that’s about it.

It doesn’t bother me that much if a games company wants to try and ‘over-price’ its games. It is very rare that the price remains very high for very long (even very strong sellers seem to eventually drop at least to under £20) and there are a lot of other games out there for me to spend my time and money on while I wait for the price to fall.

That part of the ‘free market’ seems to work quite well but it’s based mainly on self space, used games and not so much on the quality of a game title (which would be a better reason for reducing the price of a game so quickly after launch). The reason to complain is that because of the way the games industry works (i.e. discrete price points) then what we’ll see is many new games just setting their prices at the new ‘normal’ regardless of quality, content or perceived worth – same as it’s ever been….

Gee! Thanks, mister. I never wouldn’t had thought ‘uh nothing like that.

Seriously though… the whole point of your little aside there is completely at odds with how game developers and publishers want the game industry to work. The prices shouldn’t fall that fast…. there’s no need for them to. Imagine if you turned around to Cliffski and told him that you expected to pick up his games for £2, 6 months after release. What do you think he thinks about that? I certainly believe that game prices fall off too quickly at retail and relying on that system to get what you want actually puts developers out of pocket instead of rewarding them for the game you want – whether that be SP, SP+MP or MP.

The rest of that post is just confused. Like you give an example of supposed market failure in which it is clear the market response works and forces the company to lift their game! Or you get confused talking about DRM analogies when the point is one of simple inflation. Or get confused about whether the developers get pay rises when the simple point is that if that investors just got rich off of a polished AAA game we will see more investment in attempts to make polished AAA games. Or complain about the games industry having a standard price while complaining about MW2 experimenting with a price increase above the current standard. Or try to pretend that you can decide what the proper pricing should be by waving your hands about console sales as if that were the only factor. No, no, no.

It’s not my fault you can’t follow reasoning. If it’s confused then it’s because the initial points i was responding to make no sense either…. hence the point of my response. I could respond to each and every one of your complaints about my points and clarify them for you but since you’re clearly not interested in debate, more in dismissal (and it seems no one else is either) then i guess i won’t.

If you want to continue i’m happy to do so… but less of the under-handed insults because i don’t follow your exact viewpoint or am a fan boy of “whatever point of view” please…