people keep buying it, so why wouldn't they raise the price?
Typical moron gamer moment, though: Bitch about price, buy it anyway, leave a bad review at 500 hours played, and repeat next year.
They named this pathology The Maddening.
Now that FIFA's gone, EA needs another cash cow.
Fifa isn't gone, only the FIFA in-game branding is gone. It's just called FC24 instead of FIFA 24.
And most of the world that plays FIFA isn't going to play an American football game. American football is completely different and not relatable to pretty much anyone except those from USA (or maybe Canada, dunno).
The game isn't for you.
They continue to do very little updates and charge full price because people keep buying it.
They sell like crazy. There was a chart that showed Madden selling more per year than most Nintendo games.
It's a free market. Just don't buy it
Sport games should be sold as game as service rather than yearly releases.
I wonder if they'd have a hard time selling a service that doesn't include the micro-transactions.
Relying on only seasonal subscriptions is not enough. They have to sell something else és well to keep up.
Why? They’re probably making way more money this way anyways.
Let me share a secret with you: Madden (Year) is the same game as Madden (Year-1).
Wait, if I rename my Madden1.exe to Madden23.exe will I get the latest game?
... You're gonna need to rename to madden25.exe
Thanks. I feel like, I just saved 70$.
"SportGame (Year-1) is literally unplayable because my favorite player is no longer in Team X."
-- Every sport sim players
PS3 NCAA 14 blows next gen Madden out of the water. It's not even close.
NFL 2K5 is the GOAT NFL game.
Typically yeah but this year is actually the first time PC is getting the next gen version ps5/xs have had since 21
No yearly release should be $70.
At this his point they could start charging $100 a year for it and I wouldn't even blame them.
For like 20 years y’all have been buying the game, year after year, even if it’s not worth it.
See also: Pokémon.
I've always been bothered by the lack of competition (and anti-competitive behavior) in the football space.
Football video games were such a big part of my childhood in the 80s and 90s, but football video games died the day NFL2K died.
No game should be 70$ if you ask me
Games should not follow inflation at all?
N64 games were 50$ in the 90s, more limited releases (Ogre Battle 64 for example) were 60$.
Games pricing has stagnated, that's good for the consumers but bad for smaller developers...
Surely the difference in overheads involved in physical vs digital would mean profits are increasing at a higher rate then sale price
Maybe, development cost hasn't gone down though, not one bit!
Not really.
Optical discs are dirt cheap. This old answer from Quora says physical media (disc, case, artwork, inserts, etc) accounted for $2-$5 of the cost of a game.
And selling on steam costs 30%
IIRC 30% was also the standard box store cut. Steam just carried it on.
So that's like a 2.5 - 7% margin on a $70 game.. an extra 7% profit margin at the high end is pretty significant
Yes, if you're selling millions of units. But if you're buying just one, $2-$5 probably isn't going to matter to you. Not many people would buy a game at $68 they wouldn't buy at $70.
The medium games came in were more expensive
The gaming audience was much smaller
Games were only sold in stores
If you add all the season passes you're paying the same or even more with further microtransactions
Games in general now have a longer shelf life
AAA games in my country have been 69,99€ since the PS3 launch and now they're asking 79,99€. It's true development costs have ballooned, but I just don't think that's a good price/time ratio and rarely do I buy games over 15€. I really don't mind waiting a couple years.
Bad price/time ratio? I don't know many hobbies where you'll spend that kind of money for 100h+ of enjoyment...
You can buy musical instruments for that price software or hardware synthesisers, for example.
But that's exactly the point, I'd rather pay double, triple, quadruple for something I know I'll use for hundreds of hours (a monitor, a new keyboard, a Steam Deck) than 80€ for a game that will last me 12 to 30 hours (I only play offline story-based games).
Even if I considered game X, there are decades worth of games availabe for under 10€ that I would rather get now or buy a Humble Bundle while waiting for a sale.
The issue becomes of all publishers start to follow Nintendo's model and not dropping the prices much.
If you're going to count in inflation then I'm going to count in the poor quality of those games
Rose tinted glasses.
K
Tears of the Kingdom was $70, and I honestly feel like it was worth it because it’s quite an entertaining and enthralling experience.
“Pro football video game v. 34” is probably not in the same caliber though.
TofK could be the best game ever made (and I don't think it's too far fetched given how good it is) and I still wouldn't justify anything bigger than 50€, 60€ being generous.
New releases used to be £40 when I was a kid (twenty years ago), given inflation, £70 sounds not too bad.
That $40 included plastic packaging and a disc both of which largely don't exist anymore.
And a complete game!
Those cost pennies. They were never part of the cost.
Absolutely agree with you.
However it's what's been said to people for years to justify the cost
I guess I just have never heard that before. 🤷
Never was a significant cost. So complaining, you are never going to get you 50c of plastic to burn down the planet to spite publishers.
40? I remember when they were 20. Hell, I remember when you could get slightly older titles for 10. I used to go to Egghead and buy slightly older games with my allowance.
No you don't. You are just imagining. At no point ever was $20 typical for a new game.
I dunno. Baldurs Gate 3 has a truly unbelievable amount of content in it. $70 for it is almost unfair when you consider how far $70 gets you in almost any other hobby.
Someone told me something similar about Tears of the Kingdom and my answer is the same: BG3 could be the greatest game ever made with content from here to eternity, but 70$ is still too much for a game. Specially considering who ends up benefitting the most from the sales.
That makes zero sense. Explain why BG3 is not worth $70. Give me real data showing that. How much should it cost considering how many people worked on it and how much was spent developing it?
It takes 75 - 100 hours to beat the game, and that's just one play through and that one play through can take even longer depending on play style. This is the kind of game people can get several hundred or thousands of hours out of. Show me any other hobby where you can spend $70 one time and get hundreds of hours of enjoyment.
Hell, even if you sped through the game as fast as possible and spent 50 hours (made up number, not sure what a speedy play through takes), that's still a LOT of time for the money spent. Take an uber out to a movie with friends, then go to a restaurant, then uber back home and you'll have bought at least two copies of BG3, yet you got a few hours of entertainment.
There are next to no other forms of entertainment that give give you that many hours for your money.
Depends on the playtime you get out of it. 140hrs+? Great value.
I have devoted that amount of hours or even more to some games and still think the 40-50€ that costed me each one of them when I bought them is too much.
Entertainment shouldn't be that expensive. Period.
If you were fine paying $50 15 years ago then I don't see why you would complain about paying $70 now. That's just inflation.
I don't agree. Development costs money and I'm willing to pay for it. I usually compare it to other daily things, such as nice restaurant visits or such. Things costs money.
Just because I'm curious, what would you feel to be a fair price for one of those games?
Except most of the revenues from the sales of the games don't go to those who actually develop the games. We all know gamedevs aren't paid enough and sometimes do a lot of crunch, specially in big studios. We can't ignore that fact.
Imo I could excuse a maximum of 50€ (or dollars in this particular case), and the ideal would be something between 30 and 40.
Depends on the studio of course, but I bet in the general case they wouldn't be payed more if the price was lowered. It'd be fun to investigate the margins but I don't care enough to do so.
The games I play the most are actually from reputable studios and/or indie devs whom I don't mind supporting. Except football manager, but I don't buy new revisions and have clocked enough hours to feel ok with the price.
Madden is worth whatever people are willing to pay for it.
I'm reliably informed by people who really hate Overwatch that thinking like this makes you a chump for capitalism who is ruining the industry.
Capitalism works. There are markets who will pay for these and that’s why they are made. That’s what capitalism is.
If not for capitalism, these games wouldn’t even exist.
Now, the issue I think you’re worried about is that people begrudgingly pay for the game when they don’t really want to. Or pay more than they want to for it.
That’s not capitalism, that’s FOMO.
People make a ton of shit everyday that I don’t buy. But obviously someone is out there paying for this shit, or it wouldn’t be being made.
What do I care, or what do you care about it enough to even address?
If people don’t buy it, it either gets cheaper or it’s not made at all. So just don’t buy it. I haven’t bought a sports game in 20 years because of this. But they keep making them and people keep complaining about them.
Complain about yourselves, it’s not capitalism, it’s the consumers.
Uh, I thought I was being pretty clear that I wasn't the crazed anticapitalist, but I guess Poe's Law.
I'd say that's its because there's only really 1 country that's going to buy it in large numbers but the reality is it's the standard ea tax. Stop buying it every year or stop complaining.
Just take your John Madden Football Sega Genesis ROM and use this tool to update the roster yourself. Who'd be able to tell the difference?
those of us that actually play the game
Not my problem really.
Madden is so dumb its literally the same game with one feature taken out and one feature reintroduced every year
God look at those crusty ass grass textures, def not $70 material
They know that people are going to pay for it. For exactly the same reason I haven't bought a Formula 1 game in a few years. Every year it's just not quite worth the 60-70 euro's for me. I'm not even that mad about the 70 euro price tag if I get something nice for it in return, everything has gotten more expensive and games have been 60 euro since forever, but last year's game with some small changes is not going to cut it for that price.
If people buy it anyway at the full price, then the game publisher will correctly deduce that it indeed worth at least that much money for enough people (otherwise those people would not part ways with that much money to get it) to get that game as soon as it comes out.
In Economics, perfect pricing (which is not yet possible but, damn, they're really trying hard) from the point of view of a seller (i.e. for maximum profits) is when they get exactly as much money from each individual as that person is willing to pay for it, so the "ideal" world for them would be individually-tailored prices going as high as it could possibly go for each person whilst still managing to sell to that person.
As they can't as of yet sell at different prices to each and every individual, they've gone as far as they can (regional pricing, different prices in different stores with different audiences and, maybe more importantly, time-from-publishing pricing) and then push prices up and up slowly whilst checking if in total the price increase has yielded more money or not (they have no issue with loosing customers due to higher prices if in total they still make more money at the price point than at a lower price point).
IMHO, in the face of this, the easist and best reaction for somebody who wants the game but does not think it's worth $70, is to wait until the price falls down to how much they're willing to pay for it (even better, let it fall some more and buy a couple more games with the savings). In fact if enough people do it the price will fall much faster as the publisher's sales data analysis will signal to them that they've put the game at too high a price point and they'll lower it trying to pick up the "money left on the table" from those who are interested but not at that price point before those people lose interest.
Jokes on them, my limit is wildly low compared to this. Most sports games are worth 20 bucks max at this point, the main content is just reskinned gameplay with updated stats and an unnecessary twist on controls. Its DLC.
Wow. Please tell me more about this capitalistic wizardry. This comment just wasn't quite excessively detailed enough.
So you just had to write what in your eyes is "obvious" for everybody as a comment, which hence is redundant, about how some other comment is "redundant and obvious"...
Oh, the irony!!!
According to economics, you're not as smart as you think.
What is the allure to a yearly new Madden game?
Statistics of players being updated and new character models being added. Nothing that couldn't be done in an update. Honestly most sports games should literally just be games as a service already.
Updated stats and roster. Slight gameplay tweaks.
I loved sports games growing up, but they are absolutely terrible now. Over priced, full of cash grabs and needlessly complex. I just want to hit x to pass. I don't want a fucking story line, I just want to play the game.
Anytime I consider buying a Madden game, I watch a YouTube video of competitive play for the latest version. It always reveals how garbage the football sim part is. It's all audibles and hot route spam and exploiting the useless AI in the same ways over and over again.
I'll never buy a Madden game while all that crap is in there. They should make it so that spamming audibles and hot routes causes players to blow assignments and false start all the time, but the average "competitive" Madden player would probably die from nonstop crying and pants-soiling if EA did anything like that.
I don’t know what audibles are, but I’ve become increasingly interested in action-strategy type games that find ways to directly punish players that have high Actions Per Minute, encouraging people to take fewer, more deliberate movements. Kinda like combo rhythm in Arkham, rather than mashing X to attack.
Are these still cut down releases based on last-gen console versions? That seems to be the historical trend with EA PC ports.
But even if not, that price is still high.
I got Madden 22 for free. It was the first Madden I've played since the 360. It was fun for about half a season and then everything falls apart.
madden should not be
The only sports game worth buying is nba 2k. The graphics are way better. The franchise mode is a million times better. There is less glitches. Stop buying madden. Tell the NFL you dont want EA anymore
*Wii Sports has entered the chat
I also enjoy FIFA. Certainly wouldn't buy it full price but $5-$10 is worth it.
Yeah I have a version of Madden from 2015 that works perfectly fine and seems to be more or less the same game, have been very happy with it. I refuse to pay $70 for a game that I know is riddled with microtransactions for really.... nothing else changing
I am curious as to why you say the game riddled with microtransactions? The only microtransactions I have ever seen is the card pack shit and that is incredibly easy to not pay for by just playing the other 95% of gameplay features they offer in the game that are completely free of microtransactions.
I buy Madden on sale every 2 years. Last year was the first time I bought it new since Madden 25. Same game with betterish graphics
You can get cheaper tickets to a real game.
lol have you seen ticket prices lately?
Maybe nosebleeds at a bottom 5 NFL team, and even that is questionable. Football tickets are very expensive these days.
Let's say you score a 20$ ticket to a 3.5 hour game. That comes to $5.7 per hour of entertainment. Meanwhile, this game at $70 means you only need to put in 12.5 hours of playtime to get the equivalent, and after you can continue to play as much as you want unlike the in-person ticketed experience.
Not gonna lie, Madden shouldn't even be 7 dollars.
This post reminded me, probably time for a new softdrinktv video on YouTube.
And yet for years sports fans have enjoyed themselves.
Christ you fuckers are pushy.
IT'S NOT FOR YOU. GET OVER IT.
Elitist twat.
Lolol YOU'RE (royal) the one constantly telling Madden fans how dumb they are. 🤷♂️
The fuck are you talking about, they do that themselves.
👌
Gatekeep much?
people should be paid more for their work!
things shouldn't cost slightly more money!
Gotta pick one chief.
Cut the CEOs' pay and you'll be able to get both
EAs CEO makes $20MM. They have 13k employees. That's an $1100 raise, give or take, if you take every penny from the CEO. For the vast majority of their employees, that is less than a 1% raise.
So no, it won't get you both, in any meaningful sense.
I am pretty sure we don't need to raise every employee's wages. Some of the upper management who sit in their offices biting nails, for example.
The point is to reduce the wage inequality inside a company.
So you want to raise the wages of the people making $140k per year but not $170k?
Why?
Where did you pull those numbers from, then?
Edit: And yes, if you are not productive, you get paid less. That's the whole point. If you are not 100x productive, you don't deserve to get 100x the wages of a regular employee too.
People do not get paid based on production but based on value.
And a guy sitting in their office biting nails all day is somehow much more valuable than the people developing the product. Sure, if you would believe in that.
Who do you think is "biting their nails all day?" Like, which positions specifically.
Also game devs work in offices (or at home offices)
I googled median EA wages (gave me median, top 75%, etc), EA CEO pay and number of employees at EA and then did division
If I follow your search terms, the first Google result is this. If the data were to be trusted, then most of the employees are absolutely paid much less than the "top positions".
If you are taking the CEO's income literally (without considering their assets), then you are hopeless.
Yeah if you don't work in CS you're making at or near 100k and the math holds.
Compare the salary ranges with # of employees per role.
EA chose neither.
Do you have a source on that? Because EA pays in the top 20-25% for their market.
Part of me wants to argue that the games industry has a long-standing history of under-compensating workers, which makes being within the top 25% not particularly impressive, but instead I'm just going to admit that you caught me ragging on EA with an easy jab.
They did lay off a shed load of workers earlier this year mere days after announcing record profits though. Still, they're not quite the miserable black hole that they were in the 'EA Widows' era when they were forcing unpaid overtime on a straight up illegal level.
then don't buy it
people keep buying it, so why wouldn't they raise the price?
Typical moron gamer moment, though: Bitch about price, buy it anyway, leave a bad review at 500 hours played, and repeat next year.
They named this pathology The Maddening.
Now that FIFA's gone, EA needs another cash cow.
Fifa isn't gone, only the FIFA in-game branding is gone. It's just called FC24 instead of FIFA 24.
And most of the world that plays FIFA isn't going to play an American football game. American football is completely different and not relatable to pretty much anyone except those from USA (or maybe Canada, dunno).
The game isn't for you.
They continue to do very little updates and charge full price because people keep buying it.
They sell like crazy. There was a chart that showed Madden selling more per year than most Nintendo games.
It's a free market. Just don't buy it
Sport games should be sold as game as service rather than yearly releases.
I wonder if they'd have a hard time selling a service that doesn't include the micro-transactions.
Relying on only seasonal subscriptions is not enough. They have to sell something else és well to keep up.
Why? They’re probably making way more money this way anyways.
Let me share a secret with you: Madden (Year) is the same game as Madden (Year-1).
Wait, if I rename my Madden1.exe to Madden23.exe will I get the latest game?
... You're gonna need to rename to madden25.exe
Thanks. I feel like, I just saved 70$.
"SportGame (Year-1) is literally unplayable because my favorite player is no longer in Team X."
-- Every sport sim players
PS3 NCAA 14 blows next gen Madden out of the water. It's not even close.
NFL 2K5 is the GOAT NFL game.
Typically yeah but this year is actually the first time PC is getting the next gen version ps5/xs have had since 21
No yearly release should be $70.
At this his point they could start charging $100 a year for it and I wouldn't even blame them.
For like 20 years y’all have been buying the game, year after year, even if it’s not worth it.
See also: Pokémon.
I've always been bothered by the lack of competition (and anti-competitive behavior) in the football space.
Football video games were such a big part of my childhood in the 80s and 90s, but football video games died the day NFL2K died.
No game should be 70$ if you ask me
Games should not follow inflation at all?
N64 games were 50$ in the 90s, more limited releases (Ogre Battle 64 for example) were 60$.
Games pricing has stagnated, that's good for the consumers but bad for smaller developers...
Surely the difference in overheads involved in physical vs digital would mean profits are increasing at a higher rate then sale price
Maybe, development cost hasn't gone down though, not one bit!
Not really.
Optical discs are dirt cheap. This old answer from Quora says physical media (disc, case, artwork, inserts, etc) accounted for $2-$5 of the cost of a game.
And selling on steam costs 30%
IIRC 30% was also the standard box store cut. Steam just carried it on.
So that's like a 2.5 - 7% margin on a $70 game.. an extra 7% profit margin at the high end is pretty significant
Yes, if you're selling millions of units. But if you're buying just one, $2-$5 probably isn't going to matter to you. Not many people would buy a game at $68 they wouldn't buy at $70.
The medium games came in were more expensive
The gaming audience was much smaller
Games were only sold in stores
If you add all the season passes you're paying the same or even more with further microtransactions
Games in general now have a longer shelf life
AAA games in my country have been 69,99€ since the PS3 launch and now they're asking 79,99€. It's true development costs have ballooned, but I just don't think that's a good price/time ratio and rarely do I buy games over 15€. I really don't mind waiting a couple years.
Bad price/time ratio? I don't know many hobbies where you'll spend that kind of money for 100h+ of enjoyment...
You can buy musical instruments for that price software or hardware synthesisers, for example.
But that's exactly the point, I'd rather pay double, triple, quadruple for something I know I'll use for hundreds of hours (a monitor, a new keyboard, a Steam Deck) than 80€ for a game that will last me 12 to 30 hours (I only play offline story-based games).
Even if I considered game X, there are decades worth of games availabe for under 10€ that I would rather get now or buy a Humble Bundle while waiting for a sale.
The issue becomes of all publishers start to follow Nintendo's model and not dropping the prices much.
If you're going to count in inflation then I'm going to count in the poor quality of those games
Rose tinted glasses.
K
Tears of the Kingdom was $70, and I honestly feel like it was worth it because it’s quite an entertaining and enthralling experience.
“Pro football video game v. 34” is probably not in the same caliber though.
TofK could be the best game ever made (and I don't think it's too far fetched given how good it is) and I still wouldn't justify anything bigger than 50€, 60€ being generous.
New releases used to be £40 when I was a kid (twenty years ago), given inflation, £70 sounds not too bad.
That $40 included plastic packaging and a disc both of which largely don't exist anymore.
And a complete game!
Those cost pennies. They were never part of the cost.
Absolutely agree with you. However it's what's been said to people for years to justify the cost
I guess I just have never heard that before. 🤷
Never was a significant cost. So complaining, you are never going to get you 50c of plastic to burn down the planet to spite publishers.
40? I remember when they were 20. Hell, I remember when you could get slightly older titles for 10. I used to go to Egghead and buy slightly older games with my allowance.
No you don't. You are just imagining. At no point ever was $20 typical for a new game.
It absolutely was in the 1980s.
Edit: Here. Even cheaper than I claimed.
more importantly they sell way more units now. It takes virtually no more effort or cost for gaming companies to sell 20 million units vs 1 million.
If they're selling 20 million more units than they used to, then $70 clearly is not too much and outs this post as nothing more than a moan.
I dunno. Baldurs Gate 3 has a truly unbelievable amount of content in it. $70 for it is almost unfair when you consider how far $70 gets you in almost any other hobby.
Someone told me something similar about Tears of the Kingdom and my answer is the same: BG3 could be the greatest game ever made with content from here to eternity, but 70$ is still too much for a game. Specially considering who ends up benefitting the most from the sales.
That makes zero sense. Explain why BG3 is not worth $70. Give me real data showing that. How much should it cost considering how many people worked on it and how much was spent developing it?
It takes 75 - 100 hours to beat the game, and that's just one play through and that one play through can take even longer depending on play style. This is the kind of game people can get several hundred or thousands of hours out of. Show me any other hobby where you can spend $70 one time and get hundreds of hours of enjoyment.
Hell, even if you sped through the game as fast as possible and spent 50 hours (made up number, not sure what a speedy play through takes), that's still a LOT of time for the money spent. Take an uber out to a movie with friends, then go to a restaurant, then uber back home and you'll have bought at least two copies of BG3, yet you got a few hours of entertainment.
There are next to no other forms of entertainment that give give you that many hours for your money.
Depends on the playtime you get out of it. 140hrs+? Great value.
I have devoted that amount of hours or even more to some games and still think the 40-50€ that costed me each one of them when I bought them is too much.
Entertainment shouldn't be that expensive. Period.
If you were fine paying $50 15 years ago then I don't see why you would complain about paying $70 now. That's just inflation.
I don't agree. Development costs money and I'm willing to pay for it. I usually compare it to other daily things, such as nice restaurant visits or such. Things costs money.
Just because I'm curious, what would you feel to be a fair price for one of those games?
Except most of the revenues from the sales of the games don't go to those who actually develop the games. We all know gamedevs aren't paid enough and sometimes do a lot of crunch, specially in big studios. We can't ignore that fact.
Imo I could excuse a maximum of 50€ (or dollars in this particular case), and the ideal would be something between 30 and 40.
Depends on the studio of course, but I bet in the general case they wouldn't be payed more if the price was lowered. It'd be fun to investigate the margins but I don't care enough to do so.
The games I play the most are actually from reputable studios and/or indie devs whom I don't mind supporting. Except football manager, but I don't buy new revisions and have clocked enough hours to feel ok with the price.
Madden is worth whatever people are willing to pay for it.
I'm reliably informed by people who really hate Overwatch that thinking like this makes you a chump for capitalism who is ruining the industry.
Capitalism works. There are markets who will pay for these and that’s why they are made. That’s what capitalism is.
If not for capitalism, these games wouldn’t even exist.
Now, the issue I think you’re worried about is that people begrudgingly pay for the game when they don’t really want to. Or pay more than they want to for it.
That’s not capitalism, that’s FOMO.
People make a ton of shit everyday that I don’t buy. But obviously someone is out there paying for this shit, or it wouldn’t be being made.
What do I care, or what do you care about it enough to even address?
If people don’t buy it, it either gets cheaper or it’s not made at all. So just don’t buy it. I haven’t bought a sports game in 20 years because of this. But they keep making them and people keep complaining about them.
Complain about yourselves, it’s not capitalism, it’s the consumers.
Uh, I thought I was being pretty clear that I wasn't the crazed anticapitalist, but I guess Poe's Law.
I'd say that's its because there's only really 1 country that's going to buy it in large numbers but the reality is it's the standard ea tax. Stop buying it every year or stop complaining.
Just take your John Madden Football Sega Genesis ROM and use this tool to update the roster yourself. Who'd be able to tell the difference?
those of us that actually play the game
Not my problem really.
Madden is so dumb its literally the same game with one feature taken out and one feature reintroduced every year
God look at those crusty ass grass textures, def not $70 material
They know that people are going to pay for it. For exactly the same reason I haven't bought a Formula 1 game in a few years. Every year it's just not quite worth the 60-70 euro's for me. I'm not even that mad about the 70 euro price tag if I get something nice for it in return, everything has gotten more expensive and games have been 60 euro since forever, but last year's game with some small changes is not going to cut it for that price.
If people buy it anyway at the full price, then the game publisher will correctly deduce that it indeed worth at least that much money for enough people (otherwise those people would not part ways with that much money to get it) to get that game as soon as it comes out.
In Economics, perfect pricing (which is not yet possible but, damn, they're really trying hard) from the point of view of a seller (i.e. for maximum profits) is when they get exactly as much money from each individual as that person is willing to pay for it, so the "ideal" world for them would be individually-tailored prices going as high as it could possibly go for each person whilst still managing to sell to that person.
As they can't as of yet sell at different prices to each and every individual, they've gone as far as they can (regional pricing, different prices in different stores with different audiences and, maybe more importantly, time-from-publishing pricing) and then push prices up and up slowly whilst checking if in total the price increase has yielded more money or not (they have no issue with loosing customers due to higher prices if in total they still make more money at the price point than at a lower price point).
IMHO, in the face of this, the easist and best reaction for somebody who wants the game but does not think it's worth $70, is to wait until the price falls down to how much they're willing to pay for it (even better, let it fall some more and buy a couple more games with the savings). In fact if enough people do it the price will fall much faster as the publisher's sales data analysis will signal to them that they've put the game at too high a price point and they'll lower it trying to pick up the "money left on the table" from those who are interested but not at that price point before those people lose interest.
Jokes on them, my limit is wildly low compared to this. Most sports games are worth 20 bucks max at this point, the main content is just reskinned gameplay with updated stats and an unnecessary twist on controls. Its DLC.
Wow. Please tell me more about this capitalistic wizardry. This comment just wasn't quite excessively detailed enough.
So you just had to write what in your eyes is "obvious" for everybody as a comment, which hence is redundant, about how some other comment is "redundant and obvious"...
Oh, the irony!!!
According to economics, you're not as smart as you think.
What is the allure to a yearly new Madden game?
Statistics of players being updated and new character models being added. Nothing that couldn't be done in an update. Honestly most sports games should literally just be games as a service already.
Updated stats and roster. Slight gameplay tweaks.
I loved sports games growing up, but they are absolutely terrible now. Over priced, full of cash grabs and needlessly complex. I just want to hit x to pass. I don't want a fucking story line, I just want to play the game.
Anytime I consider buying a Madden game, I watch a YouTube video of competitive play for the latest version. It always reveals how garbage the football sim part is. It's all audibles and hot route spam and exploiting the useless AI in the same ways over and over again.
I'll never buy a Madden game while all that crap is in there. They should make it so that spamming audibles and hot routes causes players to blow assignments and false start all the time, but the average "competitive" Madden player would probably die from nonstop crying and pants-soiling if EA did anything like that.
I don’t know what audibles are, but I’ve become increasingly interested in action-strategy type games that find ways to directly punish players that have high Actions Per Minute, encouraging people to take fewer, more deliberate movements. Kinda like combo rhythm in Arkham, rather than mashing X to attack.
Same for FIFA. Or EAFC.
Are these still cut down releases based on last-gen console versions? That seems to be the historical trend with EA PC ports.
But even if not, that price is still high.
I got Madden 22 for free. It was the first Madden I've played since the 360. It was fun for about half a season and then everything falls apart.
madden should not be
The only sports game worth buying is nba 2k. The graphics are way better. The franchise mode is a million times better. There is less glitches. Stop buying madden. Tell the NFL you dont want EA anymore
*Wii Sports has entered the chat
I also enjoy FIFA. Certainly wouldn't buy it full price but $5-$10 is worth it.
Yeah I have a version of Madden from 2015 that works perfectly fine and seems to be more or less the same game, have been very happy with it. I refuse to pay $70 for a game that I know is riddled with microtransactions for really.... nothing else changing
I am curious as to why you say the game riddled with microtransactions? The only microtransactions I have ever seen is the card pack shit and that is incredibly easy to not pay for by just playing the other 95% of gameplay features they offer in the game that are completely free of microtransactions.
I buy Madden on sale every 2 years. Last year was the first time I bought it new since Madden 25. Same game with betterish graphics
You can get cheaper tickets to a real game.
lol have you seen ticket prices lately?
Maybe nosebleeds at a bottom 5 NFL team, and even that is questionable. Football tickets are very expensive these days.
Let's say you score a 20$ ticket to a 3.5 hour game. That comes to $5.7 per hour of entertainment. Meanwhile, this game at $70 means you only need to put in 12.5 hours of playtime to get the equivalent, and after you can continue to play as much as you want unlike the in-person ticketed experience.
Not gonna lie, Madden shouldn't even be 7 dollars.
This post reminded me, probably time for a new softdrinktv video on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/ka0OQPTr8rA
And yet for years sports fans have enjoyed themselves.
Christ you fuckers are pushy.
IT'S NOT FOR YOU. GET OVER IT.
Elitist twat.
Lolol YOU'RE (royal) the one constantly telling Madden fans how dumb they are. 🤷♂️
The fuck are you talking about, they do that themselves.
👌
Gatekeep much?
Gotta pick one chief.
Cut the CEOs' pay and you'll be able to get both
EAs CEO makes $20MM. They have 13k employees. That's an $1100 raise, give or take, if you take every penny from the CEO. For the vast majority of their employees, that is less than a 1% raise.
So no, it won't get you both, in any meaningful sense.
I am pretty sure we don't need to raise every employee's wages. Some of the upper management who sit in their offices biting nails, for example.
The point is to reduce the wage inequality inside a company.
So you want to raise the wages of the people making $140k per year but not $170k?
Why?
Where did you pull those numbers from, then?
Edit: And yes, if you are not productive, you get paid less. That's the whole point. If you are not 100x productive, you don't deserve to get 100x the wages of a regular employee too.
People do not get paid based on production but based on value.
And a guy sitting in their office biting nails all day is somehow much more valuable than the people developing the product. Sure, if you would believe in that.
Who do you think is "biting their nails all day?" Like, which positions specifically.
Also game devs work in offices (or at home offices)
I googled median EA wages (gave me median, top 75%, etc), EA CEO pay and number of employees at EA and then did division
If I follow your search terms, the first Google result is this. If the data were to be trusted, then most of the employees are absolutely paid much less than the "top positions".
If you are taking the CEO's income literally (without considering their assets), then you are hopeless.
Yeah if you don't work in CS you're making at or near 100k and the math holds.
Compare the salary ranges with # of employees per role.
EA chose neither.
Do you have a source on that? Because EA pays in the top 20-25% for their market.
https://www.comparably.com/companies/electronic-arts-e/salaries
Part of me wants to argue that the games industry has a long-standing history of under-compensating workers, which makes being within the top 25% not particularly impressive, but instead I'm just going to admit that you caught me ragging on EA with an easy jab.
They did lay off a shed load of workers earlier this year mere days after announcing record profits though. Still, they're not quite the miserable black hole that they were in the 'EA Widows' era when they were forcing unpaid overtime on a straight up illegal level.