Activision unveiled the pricing for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, five seconds later a lot of tea and cake was spit and splattered over PC monitors in Britain.
The RRP of Infinity Ward’s sequel is GBP 54.99, just for the standard edition. A sign of things to come? Publishers have remained quiet on such a price direction, all except for EA.
”There has been no change in our trade pricing policy and no change in RRP,” publisher EA told Eurogamer. Generally the British gaming public are used to paying more than our cousins in Europe and North America - but now discontent is beginning to stir.
Activision blame the weak £ to € exchange rate and the rise in development costs for videogames, so naturally the British will pick up the tab for publishing giants.
”You can’t continue to trade as normal when the biggest territory in Europe has seen cost of goods increase by 30 per cent due to the strengthening of the Euro. Publishers somehow need to offset this drastic increase in costs,” said THQ’s Ian Curran to MCV.
”Exchange rates between the Euro and the pound are making it very difficult for publishers to show an acceptable operating margin in the UK,” he added. Curran says he’s ”not surprised” MW2’s price went up, ”and I feel this will continue across more key titles.”
A top bigwig game buyer for one of the UK’s biggest retailers commented: ”A couple of months ago a few publishers mentioned that they were being hammered because of the Euro. To combat this they decided that certain titles would have a higher RRP.”
”You can guess the reception this got from retail. The fundamental problem is that the customer will feel conned that the latest triple triple-A is £50 at retail when last year it was only £40.”
Has your supply of triple-A games gone up in price? Could Activision have been super serious about dropping the PlayStation 3 platform for lack of return after all?
