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Chicken and egg problem: they will keep buying those games as long as the company controls the IP. It’s always market control (always has been).
You do realize that’s the case for every form of IP, right?
“Man, I want to read the new Brandon Sanderson book, and eat food this month. But the publisher is asking $4,000 for a copy!! What theft!! I’m going to have to subsist on chewing dirt for the next few months!”
Or, sane response:
“Well, that price is ludicrous. I guess I’ll read other books” (and in this case, play other football games)
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I mean, sure. You are correct in principle.
The argument that people „vote with their wallet“ is not new. But the fundamental problem is that you can’t make them. They have jobs, kids and might not be the most intelligent people. So if the kids ask for this game, they might get overwhelmed by life and make bad decisions. Welcome to being human.
The issue is that corporations are not subject to „life“ so they are able to shape the market as they pleased unless stopped. It has happened countless times. Mergers being stopped because it gave them too much power, predatory business practices leading to lawsuits because they keep competition away.
It’s all about power balance. They can employ psychologists to study our behavior, we can’t and the government can’t and is too slow.
So yes, the „game difficulty“ for large corporations needs to be upped significantly.
You voting with your wallet does not mean that your vote wins every time. Madden might still exist even if you don't buy it. But at least you can direct the money you would have spent on it elsewhere, to someone who needs it more.
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I know and I didn’t say otherwise. But this only focuses on you and does not solve the underlying issue. I‘m not saying buy the game. I‘m saying the corporations have too much power.
You take that power away by voting with your wallet though. EA just had its ass handed to them via BattleBit, delivering the game that fans actually wanted, not to mention Baldur's Gate 3 outdoing the last number of efforts from EA's own BioWare. Voting with your wallet isn't an overnight process, and often enough, it brings corporations down.
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I‘m not disagreeing that not buying stuff is good. I am saying that we are not bringing corporations down and we are not discouraging them from finding new ways to fuck with us.
Madden 22 raked in 4.4 billion usd. Apparently, typical AAA games take about 60 mil usd to make. That is a 6.666% margin.
Now make something and sell it on ebay, amazon or anywhere for that margin and people will cancel you in a heartbeat. In the country I live in, if you sell something for more than twice the original price, you can get sued.
But nobody has all the stuff required to make a competitor to madden. So you control the market. Pretty easy to grasp in my opinion. And games also are getting more and more convoluted with trash paid dlc, crypto, nfts. You can look at minecraft bedrock for example. Nobody is telling bill gates to stop because people have no choice but to miss out on the game, have their kid not participate in school buddies chit chat and so on. It’s an impossible situation to solve on a „vote with your wallet“ basis.
You're missing the point. This is not about the Madden. This is about the Not-Madden.
Voting with your wallet is not "Refusing to buy a media for several months until its publisher relents and cuts its price in half, meanwhile depositing your $60 in a jar for when the day the price falls". Instead, it is "When you have money for entertainment, you use it for properties OTHER than the one you used to go for".
So, to further my example; "Me/my kid really wants the new Brandon Sanderson book, but instead of chewing dirt to pay for it, we decided to vote with our wallets! ...But, because Sanderson is a crazy eccentric billioinaire with a patience greater than 5 years, he just INCREASED the price in retaliation to $8 million! What are we to do? ...Read OTHER books? HERESY!"
Blaming the subject on corporate psychology is a complete cop-out. They do not grab your wrist and force you to click the Buy button. I'll make some allowances for instances of gambling addiction (and I would not try to apply this pricing logic to the housing market due to collusion and other factors) but otherwise, price acknowledgment is a very human thing people need to get used to considering, even when it comes to beloved IPs.
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I can see your train of thought and it makes sense up to the last part.
As someone who has studied sales and marketing actively for nearly two decades, built rather large companies and happens to be very good at pattern recognition, I know that people don’t understand what is being done to them.
Psychology has been used for a long time to study how to make someone act against their best self interest. Putting this on people with addiction problems is both selling them short and underestimating the problem.
Sales people in certain companies (that I have been to) learn how to use body language, speech patterns, behavioral patterns and other things to manipulate people into buying a particular thing at a particular time. Keep in mind that there is a human in control in this situation and unless they have psychopathic tendencies, they will try to work with the customer instead of against them.
But this is also done in marketing. Best example is the facebook/instagram/youtube algorithm, where the goal is to keep you on the site. It is done (very simplified) with showing you everything that will or might interest, aggravate or otherwise trigger you to keep watching. I‘m not saying it is impossible to leave but especially the not so strong characters will comply. Again, this is the majority of people, not the minority.
From there it is only a small step to actually selling you stuff your don’t actually want/need by showing you price increases (urgency), many different products (availability), fitting videos on other sites (cross site tracking).
These are only the ones I have crossed in my career. It shows that the mentally vulnerable (especially kids) get blasted with this stuff and manipulated into thinking certain thoughts and wanting certain things.
So, while your extreme boom example does play out as you say, the overarching problem has a lot less remarkable features and is therefore harder to spot and harder to fight.
Combine that with giant companies that own 60% of popular sports games for example and you absolutely have a problem.
„Vote with your wallet“ only serves these corporations because nobody cares about 3 less sales if you can manipulate everyone to buying more of these.
This is why the only solution that will put an end to this is outlawing what we call „dark patterns“ (google it) and break up large corporations.
While on a side I agree with you, on the other I see everytime people complaining about subscription fatigue and they never, ever would pay a recurring amount for a game.
So I don't really have a solution for this lol
I figured savvy sports fans would find a good simulation game without the license and just mod in the updated rosters, but that never seemed to happen.
There are no other football games that are even respectable efforts, and despite the rhetoric, Madden is actually a very good football sim that continually gets developed from year to year.
I suppose I implied but didn't explicitly state that my expectation is that someone would develop that competent football game. There's an early access game now, arguably 15 years too late, called Football Simulator that could be that game. If it's well-made, hopefully it serves that audience. But I don't think it's just rhetoric. Madden review scores have been falling in later years, and that's to be expected when they have a monopoly on the NFL license.
Reviews are extremely lazily done and about game modes. The game modes have seen minimal development since the emergence of ultimate team, and people are justifiably unhappy with that.
Literally not one major outlet is evaluating the actual simulation of the sport, which very clearly has massive investment from year to year and sees serious improvements to complexity and fidelity in each instance, with stagnation only coming when it hits the wall of what console hardware can do.
I've seen football simulator. It might maybe be competitive on physics with decade ago Madden, but even that's generous. If you just want a vehicle for franchise mode it might work for you, but if you want to play football it's just not close. Madden isn't perfect as a football sim either, because the physics of football are insanely complex, but there's nothing out there that's better than "kind of close to a decade ago" technically. You're much more likely to make something tolerable leaning into the discrepancy and making an arcade-y NFL Street knockoff, and that isn't there either.
Value for money is a great thing to evaluate in a review, and the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years, hence the lower scores.
the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years,
This is a ridiculous lie. It's not even in the general vicinity of reality.
The absolute best mainstream review of Madden in existence is a many times less competent version of that platformer review where the guy couldn't get through the tutorial. You unconditionally are not qualified to give any opinion in any context if you don't understand the mechanics and strategy of the sport.
So you think they should pay more than twice as much than they currently are?
Madden isnt worth $70 a year. Let alone the $156 you seem to be suggesting.
If you're paying for a new version every year, is all that different than paying for a service? At the very least, with the yearly release model, you can simply decide not to pay for a year and keep playing the old one.
What are you talking about? This is the same game as the previous edition. I am not even sure they changed the graphics this time.
None of those yearly recicled buggy trashy sport games should be 70 or 30 dollars even. Why people still buy that shit?
A lot of people are only passingly interested in video games. For people that just want to sit down and play something having to learn about the game and how it's played is work, not entertainment. I can see how someone who only games maybe once a week could have some real fun playing a sports game. It's very easy to pick up because they already know the rules. I don't agree personally, for me games are the most fun when I'm interacting with a new mechanic, but I am also willing to grind for hours optimizing and learning to push the game to its limits. If you don't have the time for all that, but you still want to game, sports games are a perfect entry point. Not even I can come up with a justification for the pricing though.
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No. It’s not. They’re gibing their opinion that these sportsgames are buggy and not worth a lot of money and also asks why people buy them.
The one that is gatekeeping is you by telling them what to do and in a very rude fashion.
Keep your aggression outside of this place please. If you think that is an unfair assessment, use arguments and convince people.
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I make a difference between referring to an inanimate object as „shit“ and getting up in someones face about it.
This is why I say it’s aggressive. And yes, you would have been right to call them out and say „because people enjoy it.“ or something along those lines.
It’s not worth discussing this at length. Dude has a point that many people have a problem with the software for different reasons and you have a point that people enjoy that stuff. All I‘m saying is please be kind to eachother.
Have a good one.
Complaining about prices is so pointless. These companies price their games for maximum profit. Clearly other people seem to think it's worth it. If you do not, don't buy it. Simple as.
Counterpoint:
You, and everyone else, should be making enough money right now that a $70 price tag isn't a problem.
Wage stagnation makes price increases seem worse than than they should be. Truth is we should all be making enough that a few bucks increase in the price of Netflix or YouTube shouldn't be something we struggle with.
So by all means, pile it on at EA, but save some of it for your employer too
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I get your point. It’s absolutely crazy that people don’t srike en masse for better conditions but then you got people thinking fuck you I got mine.
But I also think that while this is true: EA still is pretty much the worst and needs to be disbanded for controlling large parts of the market and extortionist marketing techniques.