@MisterPi Best Buy is ending GCU?!?! I hadn't heard! I just checked it. Ewwww. That was the best program and the only reason I started using BB at all. Oh well, back to Amazon-only....but without GCU, Amazon will likely be dropping their discounts too soon. They only did it to compete with BB. BB was great since it wasn't only pre-orders and included collectors editions. Amazon excludes collectors editions, and frequently they play with pricing....you don't get the Prime discount on a game that's on sale so they often put pre-orders on "sale" for $2-5 off so you don't get your 20%. Amazon also irks me because when they change things and remove services, they don't tell you, it just changes one day, quietly, secretly, without explanation. Like collectors editions suddenly stopped having discounts applied. So much for market competition, back to MSRP pricing on everything! Horray for monopoly power!
@Gamer83 Thanks for that link, that's awesome! I already got my physical preorder shipped, but maybe I'll use that for GoW! Or Yakuza....hmm what other exclusives have I missed? Just got Ni No Kuni 2.
And yeah, they sure have been killing it with sales. MS undercuts them a bit when they have sales....but MS has so FEW sales....mostly endless rows of Farm Simulator DLC and a few good games, while PS always has these huge all encompassing sales. I kind of miss that on MS This week they have witcher 3 for $20.....so tempted, but I wanted to play that on X1X instead. The foliage just looks better.
Though I still have a soft spot for physical.....I REALLY dislike this trend of MSRP through authorized dealers model of controlled pricing at 3 stores...physical kept prices in check. Without it it's like the Hi-Fi distro model that the parent company enforces price forever and ever and there's no market competition at all. Add in, no supply and demand laws due to infinite supply in digital and we'll get rekt.
@NEStalgia
The big PS4 exclusives so far this year are MLB The Show 18, God of War, Yakuza 6, Ni No Kuni and Detroit. For remakes/remasters Shadow of the Colossus and Dragon's Crown Pro. I have MLB, GoW, Yakuza and DCP, and love all of them but would give the highest recommendation to God of War. My game of the year so far and I think it'll probably end up as my favorite PS4 game when it's all said and done, with only The Last of Us Part II having an outside chance to change that. You really can't go wrong with whatever you choose those. PS4 is having another stellar year.
@NEStalgia Trust me, I'm just as crushed about the news! I have no clue what I'll do for discounts now because even Amazon has them very limited. I'm reaaaaaaallly hoping against hope that it'll be back in some form. For the life of me I can't imagine why they didn't just raise the subscription price or at least restrict what can be discounted and for how long. As lame as it would be compared to how it currently is, I'd take that over removing it completely, especially because it was pretty much the only reason I bought anything non-gaming related at Best Buy. Now, with no physical discount, I can just drive to the gamestop down the street.
@MisterPi
I'm still playing my launch PS4 on a 1080p tv but think Horizon, God of War and Dragon's Crown Pro all look stunning. Can only imagine what that bump up to 4K does for them. Hell just HDR (which my tv doesn't have) alone has done wonders for certain games from what I've seen on friends' tvs.
@MisterPi Yeah, that's just it. I had vowed to never, ever ever ever EVER shop at Best Buy ever again after their catastrophic appliance department colossally screwed me with the most awful experience I've ever experienced (a delivery guy that refused to deliver, insisted that he couldn't take it to where it needed to go, then pretended to speak no English, then finally drove off. The BB manager told me that they were right and they're granted 15 minutes for delivery. I went off to a real appliance store a few hours later and they just laughed.....they've heard of that before. They did the whole thing easy peasy. But GCU brought me back and I've been buying a lot (octopath collectors ed!) and I considered them a real contender where Amazon fails often. I still have almost 1.5 years on my sub so I should hoard the collectors eds while I can. But after that I can't imagine touching BB with a 20 foot pole ever again. Their pricing is obcene without GCU. And yeah, once Amazon drops discounts (and you can bet they will....silently....and soon), which have already become sparse, the only option is RRP everywhere. And then why not just support GameStop? Much as I hate them they're the least evil of the bunch.
I suspect digital is the culprit, companies got used to having price controls without supply forcing value. Illegal in any industry except digital distribution. Our laws are so backward. No doubt they leveraged "but we're getting $60 on the digital front" to squeeze the margins on retailers, making these promos that always undercut digital less viable. In adopting digital we've given away the store on market power. I suddenly feel less guilty looking into the "gray market" stores for digital now. We can all play at this game.
@NEStalgia@MisterPi I'm not sure how the situation is in the US, but we have dozens of small online retailers in my country. Without an actual store, their prices are much lower than what you find in the big retailers like Amazon. Most (AAA) games I buy are €52 instead of the usual €60. And there's plenty of online retailers that offer a simple reward system; You get points for every x amount of money spent, and you can trade them in for discounts (similar to what Nintendo is doing I suppose). I'm positive many alternatives exist in the US.
@Octane Maybe we do? But I can't say I've ever found a new game for anything less than MSRP that wasn't used or off of a shady website. I'd love if there were more well known options for discounted physical games, though.
Does suck they got rid of gcu for those that used it. I'm 100% digital on the ps4 but still buy some physical switch games since there's no type of family sharing. Hopefully Amazon maintains the prime discount but I can easily see them just stopping it without warning given this news.
It really makes me wish we could see Octopath Traveler in such a high resolution.
Isn't it just a little ironic that you're asking for a game where the graphics are pixels large enough to be seen by the eye to be rendered in ultra HD?
@Octane Here in the US our retail has been fully gutted. Occasionally you'll find an odd physical shop with a smattering of things, but most of retail has gone through full collapse in the last 20 years, led by Walmart for decades with a strategy that could only be described as the war strategy of "enclosure", where they would concentrically ring an area with stores, undercut the other local stores until they all closed, then move inward and close the periphery stores, leaving one retail establishment for every 1 hour radius or so. Their success with that strategy for a good 30+ years, followed up with the existence of Amazon finishing off the rest, and retail consists of Amazon, Walmart, and third runner up Target, along with a small handful of more specialty mega-chains like Best Buy and various clothing stores. Meanwhile, online, the dominance of Amazon and difficulty competing against them has forced most smaller sellers to either sell through Amazon itself or eBay. Vendor discounts for the big chains are MASSIVE, so no smaller store could ever compete against them, and anyone that tries is almost always going to be more expensive, to which the masses shun the store, citing how they "rip you off." without understanding that the big stores aren't "giving you bargains" they've cut the mfr from making much, if any profit, cut all value from all partner and supply chain partners, simply to annihilate all competition so once they have free reign they control pricing forever (which is why investors pump money non stop into an Amazon that's never actually turned a profit selling anything. Because once they win, they have a monopoly or triopoly on retail and can pull unlimited profit forever.) Then again, aren't you UK? Its not much better over there I thought!
For now the big retailers were the only hope of discounted games. As they phase it out, it's RRP, more than RRP, used, and the shady "gray market" sites that sell keys online that came from "not quite illegal but not entirely legit" sources. Usually it's just currency exchange manipulation like they buy region free keys in Singapore for 1/2 the US price then sell them worldwide....but sometimes there's issues (like when Ubi banned a bunch of such keys because they were bought from EA Origin with stolen CCs.) We were talking about this in the XBox thread yesterday ironically enough.
The digital revolution was ALWAYS going to create a stagnancy in pricing, as they've tried to do for years. We got our discounts now. We'll pay for them later. Especially on console where you have ONE retailer essentially. PC is a little better with Steam/GoG/Humble/EA and some smaller stores competing. No free market system survives when there's unlimited supply and no competition. Here, Amazon and some others sell digital. But physical...."authorized vendors" are kind of it. Most distributors that smaller stores used have vanished or been consumed into the mega chains.
@redd214 Amazon will stop it, suddenly and without warning. I can guarantee you that. They only started it in response to GCU, within weeks. I give Prime discounts until August at best. Believe it or not, GameStop may be the best bet now with a $15/yr or $30/yr membership. Though Best Buy does still have the Best Buy rewards that give a $10 discount on select pre-orders, now that I think about it. So....basically the same as Amazon's current bonus? Maybe they'll keep it but manipulate it more often to not actually qualify.
@Ralizah No, Steep isn't on sale this week.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
At least Sony runs a lot more sales than MS. MS sales are good when they have them...but they have so much less of them. Shame most non-exclusives I now want on the X because why not? And I'm still annoyed FFXV came out the way it did. I have the disc vesion on PS4 but will likely rebuy the gold version on etiher platform next time its on sale because there's $40 of DLC just to make my day 1 disc a complete game. That's when I learned to stop buying new releases. Except Detroit and maybe GoW....I just couldn't help myself.
It really makes me wish we could see Octopath Traveler in such a high resolution.
Isn't it just a little ironic that you're asking for a game where the graphics are pixels large enough to be seen by the eye to be rendered in ultra HD?
@Haru17 Blame Microsoft. They stared it with Minecraft in 4k so you can use 5000 pixels to render an 8x8 sprite. But they'll be the highest quality 8x8 pixels anyone has ever seen.
And the gall of Rare to put these highly historically inaccurate robot arms and legs into Sea of Thieves. Shame on them, and shame on Dice. Feed their firstborns to the wolves!!!
Choosing a cartoony art style completely dismantles any expectation of historical accuracy.
Also "pirates" is not a historical event. People sailing around in wooden ships shooting canons at each could be set any time between 1300 and 1800.
Choosing a cartoony art style completely dismantles any expectation of historical accuracy.
Also "pirates" is not a historical event. People sailing around in wooden ships shooting canons at each could be set any time between 1300 and 1800.
It's almost like that comment was sarcastic or something. Because it's not a robot leg, it's a peg leg and as it happens they had stick technology in 1300. The only thing ridiculous about that Battlefield trailer are all of these neckbeards who need to come down from their treehouses moaning about SJWs (read: the ever-so gradual loss of male privilege).
Oh, and all of the falling objects and explosions. But mostly the first thing.
The only thing ridiculous about that Battlefield trailer are all of these neckbeards who need to come down from their treehouses moaning about SJWs (read: the ever-so gradual loss of male privilege).
The male privilege of being 99% of combat deaths while the women suffered the oppression of sitting at home, is obviously meaningful to some social neckbeard treehouse justice warriors.
It's mostly just recreational internet outrage though. If the actual game reviews well, no-one will care about the cyborg lesbian infantry. But at the same time, it's not unreasonable to expect Dice to just decide if it's supposed to be a historically accurate series or not. If they made it obvious that it's not realistic, like Far Cry or Wolfenstein, almost no-one would care. It's that sense they're trying to lie about history that annoys people, not simply the inclusion of a female character.
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