Too Much

I was just in Best Buy after going to see "The Ring 2" (don't waste your money on seeing this in a theater, it's a rental at best) and realized I had forgotten about the "Two Greatest Hits for $25" sale that was going on. This included Xbox Platinum Hits and Gamecube Player's Choice games as well. Considering you could be getting some great games for only $12.50 a pop (and no sales tax, God Bless New Hampshire). That's less than the sale price of a new DVD. That's less than what people who still pay for music spend on a new CD. You could be tempted to walk out of there with eight new games for $100.

I decided not to get any since I have so much unplayed shit as it is. The $5 Circuit City sales are the ones that are really "too good" to pass up. I've still got plenty of those in plastic. But for Best Buy, Circuit City, or any other retail to run such a promotion suggests to me that there are simply TOO MANY FUCKING GAMES on the shelves. I don't know if a retailer breaks even on a sale like this, or just uses it as a "loss leader" to get consumers to check out more expensive items. But it's plainly obvious that there are too many games. And with Microsoft and Nintendo having no real criteria for what becomes a "Platinum Hit" or a "Player's Choice" title that makes for even more bedlam. Sony should also probably up the requirement to 600K in sales twelve months availability at retail instead of the 400K and nine months shelf life they use now. I see so many unpurchased copies of a great game like VF4 Evo (which is highway robbery for only $9 - $19, thus attempting to make amends for how much Sega has mugged their fan base the past ten years) and I realize that publishers are basically saturating the market.

Is there any point to this bullshit that I am typing? Sort of. We keep hearing that publishers want to charge more and more for games. $59.99 sounds like the starting price just for "regular editions" of games. Who knows what they'll want for "special edtions." Yet there are so many AAA games that remain sitting on the shelf for $19.99 that Best Buy decides to effectively cut the price by another 40% for one week in order to unload some of the games that are taking up shelf space. So they honest expect people who realize that most games aren't worth more than $20 to pay three times that? They're nuts. Going into the next gen, there are five console franchises that could get away this.

01. Grand Theft Auto - lets face it, anything that is in such ridiculous demand will sell at a marginally higher price. People love running hookers over with cars. It's fun.

02. Halo - the "limited edition" (that was about as plentiful as the standard SKU) sold because it was worth another $5 to get a cool metal case and some "making of" footage. They could get away with charging $59.99 for a regular edition of Halo 3 easily. Particularly if they could promise new downloadable content within fucking half a year of the title's launch.

03. Madden - it sold millions every year already, and now it's only the "NFL" game on the market until 2009. EA sucks donkey shit, but rest assured Madden NFL 2006 will cost $59.99 and everyone will still buy it.

04. Gran Turismo - throw in damage modeling and an online mode for GT5 and people would pay even more than $59.99 for it, though I wouldn't expect that unless there are some force feedback wheel bundles. Which would be more than $149.99, and is completely unrelated to the point that I'm illustrating with this post.

05. Pokemon - because the fucking faggots who buy this shit will do so no matter how much Nintendo rips them off.

There you have it. That's it. If every non-bargain console SKU release is priced $59.99 next gen, you can expect a few things to happen. Fewer games will be sold at full price. The bargain bins will fill up so fast that Best Buy will be running "2 for $25" sales every week. And the adoption rate of new hardware will be much slower than what we have seen in this hardware cycle. PS2 managed to sell for $299.99 at record amounts and for what may be the longest amount of time (I don't know if another system has sold well at that price for a year and a half straight) because there were a lot of "good stuff cheap" games the constant competition between third parties drove software prices down. I haven't been paying $49.99 for all but a small handful of games since 2002, and I'm sure as hell not about to go back. I don't see too many people rushing out to buy $299.99 systems if the software pricing sucks.

Another facet of the next hardware cycle that people keep droning on about is how difficult game development is becoming, and how much longer it will take to make games. I hate delays more than anybody, but look at the amount of shit on a store shelf. Look at how many franchises like Tony Hawk and Splinter Cell seem to have a new, barely improved sequel out every single year. Too difficult? For shithead publishers, it seems like development has become too easy. They're not doing anything remotely interesting, and they're churning out boring sequels to boring games at a record pace. I can't wait to see the amount of uninspired, Renderwared, XNA'd, cross-platform manatee dung that the likes of EA, Activision, and UbiSoft are going to churn out next generation.

On second thought, I can wait.