Games

then don't buy it

people keep buying it, so why wouldn't they raise the price?

The game isn't for you.

They continue to do very little updates and charge full price because people keep buying it.

They sell like crazy. There was a chart that showed Madden selling more per year than most Nintendo games.

It's a free market. Just don't buy it

Sport games should be sold as game as service rather than yearly releases.

Let me share a secret with you: Madden (Year) is the same game as Madden (Year-1).

No yearly release should be $70.

No game should be 70$ if you ask me

For like 20 years y’all have been buying the game, year after year, even if it’s not worth it.

I'd say that's its because there's only really 1 country that's going to buy it in large numbers but the reality is it's the standard ea tax. Stop buying it every year or stop complaining.

Madden is worth whatever people are willing to pay for it.

Just take your John Madden Football Sega Genesis ROM and use this tool to update the roster yourself. Who'd be able to tell the difference?

Madden is so dumb its literally the same game with one feature taken out and one feature reintroduced every year

Not my problem really.

They know that people are going to pay for it. For exactly the same reason I haven't bought a Formula 1 game in a few years. Every year it's just not quite worth the 60-70 euro's for me. I'm not even that mad about the 70 euro price tag if I get something nice for it in return, everything has gotten more expensive and games have been 60 euro since forever, but last year's game with some small changes is not going to cut it for that price.

God look at those crusty ass grass textures, def not $70 material

If people buy it anyway at the full price, then the game publisher will correctly deduce that it indeed worth at least that much money for enough people (otherwise those people would not part ways with that much money to get it) to get that game as soon as it comes out.

In Economics, perfect pricing (which is not yet possible but, damn, they're really trying hard) from the point of view of a seller (i.e. for maximum profits) is when they get exactly as much money from each individual as that person is willing to pay for it, so the "ideal" world for them would be individually-tailored prices going as high as it could possibly go for each person whilst still managing to sell to that person.

As they can't as of yet sell at different prices to each and every individual, they've gone as far as they can (regional pricing, different prices in different stores with different audiences and, maybe more importantly, time-from-publishing pricing) and then push prices up and up slowly whilst checking if in total the price increase has yielded more money or not (they have no issue with loosing customers due to higher prices if in total they still make more money at the price point than at a lower price point).

IMHO, in the face of this, the easist and best reaction for somebody who wants the game but does not think it's worth $70, is to wait until the price falls down to how much they're willing to pay for it (even better, let it fall some more and buy a couple more games with the savings). In fact if enough people do it the price will fall much faster as the publisher's sales data analysis will signal to them that they've put the game at too high a price point and they'll lower it trying to pick up the "money left on the table" from those who are interested but not at that price point before those people lose interest.

What is the allure to a yearly new Madden game?

I loved sports games growing up, but they are absolutely terrible now. Over priced, full of cash grabs and needlessly complex. I just want to hit x to pass. I don't want a fucking story line, I just want to play the game.

Anytime I consider buying a Madden game, I watch a YouTube video of competitive play for the latest version. It always reveals how garbage the football sim part is. It's all audibles and hot route spam and exploiting the useless AI in the same ways over and over again.

I'll never buy a Madden game while all that crap is in there. They should make it so that spamming audibles and hot routes causes players to blow assignments and false start all the time, but the average "competitive" Madden player would probably die from nonstop crying and pants-soiling if EA did anything like that.

Same for FIFA. Or EAFC.