Activision Blizzard’s Bobby Kotick has expressed his upside down smiley face at Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo’s lack of ”aggressive price cutting” in any way.
They should be ”recognising the difficulties” consumers are up against in this nasty economic climate and ”pricing their hardware appropriately.” Kotick joins other industry voices.
”I was disappointed not to see any sort of aggressive price cutting,” Kotick told Bloomberg. ”Of all the things that the hardware companies need to be doing right now, it’s recognising the difficulties of the economy and pricing their hardware appropriately.”
GameStop Chief Executive Officer Daniel DeMatteo has already pointed out the hardware is priced far too high for the corporate giants to meet their sales expectations this year.
”The hardware price points, where they are right now given this economic environment, are too high,” DeMatteo warned in a conference call. ”If the platform holders are going to make the numbers that they’ve forecasted for the year, those numbers will have to change.”
Nintendo has in fact raised the price of their Wii console to help combat the change in the Yen, much to the dismay of western gamers looking for some action on the hardware. Sony is expected to announce something price related at the Tokyo Game Show which starts September 24th.