Activision CEO's Price Drop Suggestion Inappropriate, Says SCEA CEO

i suggest activision reduce their game prices to 19.99

All the major publishers see some worrying numbers coming up in the next 2-4 years. The biggest are cost of development are going up while the sale of hardware will level off in 2009 with incremental growth there after. Kick in licensing deals that may come for renewal in this next gen life time, and operating costs go stratospheric. Franchise games are losing their luster and countering that is a big challenge.

The Wii is the perplexing wild card and has been a consumer sell out for over a year. At its current rate, it could triple 360/PS3 HW sales by 2009. Developers (Activision) want many to believe that the price is a key factor in sales. Reality is price isn't a factor. In fact many developers like Activision know that 3rd party games sell poorly on Nintendo systems. Always have, always will. So it's not just a a matter of porting games to the Wii.

Be prepared to read CEO Bobby Kotick's 2009 message to shareholders on Activisions share slump. He'll point out the console price message and the 360/PS3 low market sales as a direct indicator.

All games should be $19.99. That's the only reasonable response to Kotick's statement.

Maybe Sony should just let Harmonix's RB patch go through in response to this.

personally when i consider system purchases, i look at the costs of the games first, not the console.

I think both Microsoft and Sonys need to start thinking about how to cut costs for their consoles instead of continuously selling them at a loss on launch. If the PS3 was released a year later, I think by then they would have started off making a profit rather than waiting around hoping people would buy their system when it was $600 fucking dollars. Not only that but you had to spend another $60 just to get a game with it.. what the fuck Sony?

Not only that but they would have had a much higher amount of launch titles and those titles would probably have been much more polished to begin with and possibly been worth the $60.

well of course Sony wouldn't suggest lowering the game prices since they'll see a cut of those profits to recoup their ridiculous hardware losses. Activision on the other hand wants as many potential customers as possible so they'd rather see the hardware go down in price. Is Microsoft going to complain about this?

I think Kotick's comments are correct , dropping the hardware to $199 in the next two years will help the industry achieve a market size that has lower risk and higher profits for software makers.

Sony shouldn't have responded.

I find this comment deliciously ironic given that both Sony and Microsoft set minimum MSRP's for AAA titles on their platforms ($59.99 for US releases).

I find any and all advertising use of the band "Saliva" inappropriate, Sony.