NBA 2k21's Next Gen Launch Price May Hint At a Price Jump - Take 2 is getting Greedy

[Myles the Potatophile]

People forget that back in the day that cartridge prices were all over the place and some even went for $80 at retail.

Not that I think it's a good thing, I already think $60 is too high, but it's not somewhere we haven't been before.

I remeber a few RPGs that cost around $90 because of the data capacity the carts had. Chips and circuit boards cost big money. But having to pay $70+ for a CD-based game or digital download is retarded.

 

[whatever I feel like]

How much you want to bet the "current gen" 2K21 will just be a copy and paste of last year's 2K? Or the year before?

Worse, if its anything like past launch versions, they will strip a lot of stuff out. Though, as a mitigating factor, places like Amazon and Walmart have been selling at cost for a few years now so you will only have to pay 60 if you buy from them. Or you can wait a year and have them used for ten and shipping.

 

[White Devil]

I remeber a few RPGs that cost around $90 because of the data capacity the carts had. Chips and circuit boards cost big money. But having to pay $70+ for a CD-based game or digital download is retarded.

I'm not disagreeing with you, just making the point that it is not new. Of course this is retarded but they're going to go the ages old excuse of "Oh, AAA development is so expensive and we need to recoup costs like marketing!".

 

[Myles the Potatophile]

I'm not disagreeing with you, just making the point that it is not new. Of course this is retarded but they're going to go the ages old excuse of "Oh, AAA development is so expensive and we need to recoup costs like marketing!".

Doesn't a bulk of that money go to the publisher? I know Steam gets a nice chunk out of everything sold.

 

[White Devil]

Doesn't a bulk of that money go to the publisher? I know Steam gets a nice chunk out of everything sold.

I would imagine that is contract specific. I'm not going to claim any inside knowledge of how the game industry financials work, I just know the usual excuses they use to charge bullshit prices.

And I think Valve wants like 25% of whats sold on their platform, I honestly cannot recall.

 

[Super Hans]

Doesn't a bulk of that money go to the publisher? I know Steam gets a nice chunk out of everything sold.

Steam gets a 30% cut to start out, and then once you reach certain sales thresholds the cut they take goes down to 20%.

And a lot of people don't understand that Valve isn't just being an asshole and taking money for nothing. They provide a marketplace, patching system, as many multiplayer servers as you need to use, forums, and a ton of other stuff that you get access to in exchange for that cut. Sony and Microsoft charge 30% and they can barely provide a functional online marketplace, and get fucked if you think about asking for server racks for free that users are already paying for via PS+ and XBL.

 

[Pargon]

I'm not disagreeing with you, just making the point that it is not new. Of course this is retarded but they're going to go the ages old excuse of "Oh, AAA development is so expensive and we need to recoup costs like marketing!".

Does a yearly franchise even need marketing? Just put a banner up on your front page. "Hey, Sportball 2k21 is coming out. It sure is sportball all over again. You'll buy it if you like sportball. Here's the release date. It's got a player roster and a career mode like always. We'll put in the features we cut over the last five releases over the next six months in patches. Maybe."

Everyone who buys these games knows what they're getting before the wrapping is off. If you like 'em more power to you I guess, it must be nice liking a franchise that gets an entry more often than once every half-decade.

ETA:

Related.

 

[White Devil]

Does a yearly franchise even need marketing? Just put a banner up on your front page. "Hey, Sportball 2k21 is coming out. It sure is sportball all over again. You'll buy it if you like sportball. Here's the release date. It's got a player roster and a career mode like always. We'll put in the features we cut over the last five releases over the next six months in patches. Maybe

Does your dev/publisher employ marketing people? If so, they want a paycheck. That means yes, it will "need" marketing.

 

[Secret Asshole]

I remeber a few RPGs that cost around $90 because of the data capacity the carts had. Chips and circuit boards cost big money. But having to pay $70+ for a CD-based game or digital download is retarded.

I remember game journos bitching awhile ago games should cost more, like 20 bucks more. I'd only agree if all microtransactions and gatcha were in game only, non-grindy and free. But we know that would never happen, so companies can get fucked.

Back in the day, FF3 and FF2 could cost you around $70-80. That's now about $140-150. That's because carts were fucking expensive and a real shitty technology. It required a lithium battery to save.

Paying $70 for a game with full microtransactions in 2020 is fucking retarded beyond belief.

 

[CheezzyMach]

A price jump in the middle of a global crisis.

Are these fuckers retarded?

 

[Marissa Moira]

A price jump in the middle of a global crisis.

Are these fuckers retarded?

Considering that Activision is refusing to ever have Warcraft 1 and 2 and Diablo 2 ever dip below 15% off on Gog.

The answer is yes.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

"BLACK LIVES MATTER"

*Charges Niggers more for their yearly DLC*

 

[Pissmaster]

I remember game journos bitching awhile ago games should cost more, like 20 bucks more. I'd only agree if all microtransactions and gatcha were in game only, non-grindy and free. But we know that would never happen, so companies can get fucked.

Back in the day, FF3 and FF2 could cost you around $70-80. That's now about $140-150. That's because carts were fucking expensive and a real shitty technology. It required a lithium battery to save.

Paying $70 for a game with full microtransactions in 2020 is fucking retarded beyond belief.

Ironically, they could have brought the price down considerably if saving were at least regulated to a floppy drive or cassette tapes or something. Like I get the advantages to expensive cartridges was to make them impossible to copy without special hardware and no loading times, but considering the market was just then recovering from a massive chip shortage, I'd like to know what retard thought it'd be a better idea to just slap each and every cartridge with a little RAM chip and a button cell battery that keeps that chip perpetually powered. Like why not have an aux jack on the SNES that you plug a tape recorder into, and just have everyone save onto cassette tapes? I wouldn't have lost nearly as many saves that way, and it would have made them cheaper to produce.

I mean, hell, the Famicom flat-out did that with their own special floppies on the Famicom Disk System.

 

[cjöcker]

Most modern AAA games aren't even worth $60. If it's something good that took actual effort to make that hasn't got micropayments shoved into every crevice and is rich in content like Death Stranding (rich in content), Borderlands 3 (shitloads of base game content, really replayable until you never want to play it again) or DOOM Eternal (not rich in content but extremely replayable) I'd happily pay full $60 for it. Games like Destiny 2, Battlefield 4, Hitman 2016 which were more desolate than a North Korean's stomach on launch for $60? Suck my ass.

 

[tehpope]

Ironically, they could have brought the price down considerably if saving were at least regulated to a floppy drive or cassette tapes or something. Like I get the advantages to expensive cartridges was to make them impossible to copy without special hardware and no loading times, but considering the market was just then recovering from a massive chip shortage, I'd like to know what retard thought it'd be a better idea to just slap each and every cartridge with a little RAM chip and a button cell battery that keeps that chip perpetually powered. Like why not have an aux jack on the SNES that you plug a tape recorder into, and just have everyone save onto cassette tapes? I wouldn't have lost nearly as many saves that way, and it would have made them cheaper to produce.

I mean, hell, the Famicom flat-out did that with their own special floppies on the Famicom Disk System.

In Europe, they could have gotten away with that since the UK and other nations used low cost micros for their pcs and Pretty much all of them relied on tape until Windows took over in the mid-90s. It probably wasn't done since the US only used tapes very early on with the first gen of home computers (TRS80, the PET, Apple II). It'd be a hard sell. Japan was largely the same.

Mostly as a way to keep piracy low. Yeah you had rom copiers that ran off HD 3.5' floppies, but those were the exception. Also Carts are pretty kid proof, since home consoles were still aimed at kids. There's no moving parts to break. Plastic can be pretty robust. It wasn't until CDs came down in price that the allure of more storage per game convinced companies to switch to them. Didn't hurt that Sony allowed everyone to use their pressing plants for very cheap. The only reason Nintendo stayed with Carts until the 6th Gen was because they got burnt on CDs with their deals with Sony and Philips. They eventually used tech by Panasonic and kept with them until the Switch.

Edit: Nintendo did mostly use flash memory for storage on N64 games. There were a few games that used cell batteries for their memory, but that was mostly the exception. Nintendo probably used the KISS method for design: Keep It Simple Stupid. Using an external media for storing saves would probably cause more headaches than their worth. The only thing tapes and floppies had going for them were their cheapness. They were still susceptible to the elements and could eaisly get damaged beyond use.

 

[Billy_Sama]

I kind of miss the days there were multiple games for a sports league. Sure it filled the used game section with sports titles but it made the sports game market competitive and would probably give people a choice on another sports game than this overpriced 2K garbage.

 

[The Last Stand]

I kind of miss the days there were multiple games for a sports league. Sure it filled the used game section with sports titles but it made the sports game market competitive and would probably give people a choice on another sports game than this overpriced 2K garbage.

I remember the OG Xbox had a bunch of football games. NFL Fever, Madden, NFL 2K, NFL Blitz and NCAA to make a few.

 

[Pissmaster]

In Europe, they could have gotten away with that since the UK and other nations used low cost micros for their pcs and Pretty much all of them relied on tape until Windows took over in the mid-90s. It probably wasn't done since the US only used tapes very early on with the first gen of home computers (TRS80, the PET, Apple II). It'd be a hard sell. Japan was largely the same.

Mostly as a way to keep piracy low. Yeah you had rom copiers that ran off HD 3.5' floppies, but those were the exception. Also Carts are pretty kid proof, since home consoles were still aimed at kids. There's no moving parts to break. Plastic can be pretty robust. It wasn't until CDs came down in price that the allure of more storage per game convinced companies to switch to them. Didn't hurt that Sony allowed everyone to use their pressing plants for very cheap. The only reason Nintendo stayed with Carts until the 6th Gen was because they got burnt on CDs with their deals with Sony and Philips. They eventually used tech by Panasonic and kept with them until the Switch.

Edit: Nintendo did mostly use flash memory for storage on N64 games. There were a few games that used cell batteries for their memory, but that was mostly the exception. Nintendo probably used the KISS method for design: Keep It Simple Stupid. Using an external media for storing saves would probably cause more headaches than their worth. The only thing tapes and floppies had going for them were their cheapness. They were still susceptible to the elements and could eaisly get damaged beyond use.

Yeah you've got a good point. I went down a rabbit hole in my mind about how they'd enable piracy, and I figure we'd see bootleg cartridges with something like 4mb of RAM on-board show up at flea markets, along with cassette tapes with games you could load from there into the cartridge's memory. It'd take a long time for them to load, but at a time when games could cost $80, they'd sell like hotcakes. That being said, I guess they could add a hardware timer on-board to where when the SRAM in the system filled up and the cassette mechanism started copying, it'd have to get a signal to re-activate, which would only happen every couple of minutes, making for a godawful transfer speed of 8kb every 2 minutes. So that'd make a 4mb game take 17 hours to load, if you could even fit 4mb on a tape.

I'd still have personally preferred saving to tapes as a kid, since it's a miserable experience to lose all your progress in an RPG, and that was a very real thing that would happen as your cart's pins would wear down over time.

 

[tehpope]

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/4/2...ps5-xbox-series-x-game-prices-70-dollars-norm

The companies that sell video games are all staying relatively quiet about whether they plan to universally hike game prices from $60 to $70 with the launch of next-gen consoles later this year. But of the more vocal ones, massive publisher Take-Two Interactive has flip-flopped in its public statements of late, causing a bit of confusion in the process.

After initially becoming the first company to say it would hike the price of next-gen versions of NBA 2K20, CEO Strauss Zelnick now says that may not be the company’s plans for all of its next-gen titles going forward. “We’re definitely announcing pricing on a title by title basis,” Zelnick said in an earnings call Monday evening (via Ars Technica). “I would just observe, there hasn’t been a frontline price increase for a very long time, although costs have increased significantly.”

Zelnick echoed that sentiment in an interview yesterday with Gameindustry.biz, saying that rising development costs may influence pricing in the future. “There hasn’t been a price increase for frontline titles for a really long time, despite the fact that it costs a great deal more to make those titles,” he said. “And we think with the value we offer consumers... and the kind of experience you can really only have on these next-generation consoles, that the price is justified. But it’s easy to say that when you’re delivering extraordinary quality, and that’s what our company prides itself on doing.”

So Take 2 might be backing down on raising the prices of their games. Still up in the air though.

 

[The Last Stand]

So Take 2 might be backing down on raising the prices of their games. Still up in the air though.

I wouldn't put it past them. They're starting this trend with a sports game that has microtransactions. With how much they make from microtransactions alone, they could make up the development costs.