Last of Us comes out this Friday. While main stream reviewers get it wrong on occasion it's still ridiculously hard to post a 96 out of 100 (67 reviews) on
Metacritic.
This is a game I've been looking forward to for a while so it'll be interesting to see if it can live up to the hype.
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Originally Posted by Mattyk
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This is the biggest wait and see for me.
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Flexible pricing is what has made Steam a PC gaming haven. I recently bought every single Grand Theft Auto game ever made on Steam for under $15 -- total. That's spectacular. Sales and deals can revive catalog titles, and make them attractive to a new group of consumers. And publishers can get revenue they'd otherwise miss out on: 100,000 consumers paying $10 for an older game beats out 10,000 paying $60.
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I think I've said it before that I love getting games digitally. For example recently with the Last of Us I canceled my preorder on Amazon when I found out I could download it from the PSN Store on launch day. I also said that I would have gladly payed $60 for a digital copy of Halo 4 instead of the $40 I got it at in disc form.
With PC the adaption to digital gaming has been made easy with larger hard drives and cheap prices on Steam and Amazon. With the Xbox store and the PS Store the price up to this point rarely seems to go below the standard $60 price point. Plus most people aren't willing to upgrade their hard drives even though affordable and easy options exist for both consoles.
I think games have been heading towards digital copies anyway. The thing that companies need to do is be more flexible with their pricing. Having games like Madden sell for $60 digitally a month before the next one comes out is obviously not going to fly. Even now while typing this Madden 13 is selling for $40 retail and $60 digitally. Stubborn gamers like me might drop the extra $20 on games they really like but for the majority of gamers as well as people like me who are on the fence about any particular title it's probably not going to work.
Regardless if Microsoft and Sony remain committed to addressing the concerns gamers have over pricing and ease of access the transition will go seamlessly and everyone will win, except for maybe Gamestop. However if they put up road blocks and make games harder to play as well as more expensive then things will get ugly in a hurry.