Assassin's Creed 2 is only $36 at Walmart right now

This is how it should be. Titles will only sell for so long at $60. After that there's going to be a huge stop in sales. Price dropping will only increase more sales for those who wanted to wait, but in more immediately than years down the road.

@Sonos

I agree. I feel like they could easily lower the $60 price point, sell more copies when the game has all of the hype surrounding its release and, in the end, make more money. As it stands now I rarely buy a game over $40 because I know that a special deal or a price drop is always going to be available somewhere within the first 6 months of release. Especially when you consider how many good games come out in the fall right before Black Friday. They wouldn't have to implement these deals so suddenly if the price point was lower to begin with.

Then again I'm sure they have professionals who analyze the market and determine the price point so I'm basically talking out of my ass.

The $60 price point is what has me buying only a few select games instead of every game that I think looks good. If they lowered that price point I me, and I think many other gamers would pay a lot more attention to games that aren't MW2, Halo, and other big franchise AAA games. Assassins Creed II is one of the games I passed up last year (in favor of Uncharted) but if the price point was lower I would have gotten both games.

i think there's a few things being missed in this conversation.

1) walmart is lowering the price, not ubisoft.

2) the point of a company isn't simply to "make money," it's to make as much money as possible with the most minimal and efficient investment. just because ubisoft made 96 million doesn't mean they are necessarily performing well or up to the expectations of their stockholders, so i think that's a pretty poor way of arguing for a different price point for games.

3) the cost of making a solid game today is disproportionately higher than it ever was. your average AAA title costs 20-30 million at least, and can balloon as high as 60-80 million. this is compounded by the fact that video games more or less cost the same than they did 10 years ago (there have been some fluctuations such as $50 or $70, but overall it's been within range). what game companies are seeing is greater investment, and not as great a return. we won't be seeing a drop in price points any time soon.

@David

You raise some good points. The one place I have to disagree with you in is game companies giving a bigger investment without getting as great of a return.

If you're just looking at price point per copy, yes, that's true. But pretty much every 30million dollar AAA title breaks 1 million in sales fairly quickly. That wasn't happening when games were priced at $50 and had significantly lower budgets. Successful devs are definitely making more money than they ever have thanks to how much game sales have ballooned this generation. (MW2 sold what,4 or 5 million on day 1?)

The flip side of course is the higher risk in making an AAA game if your game doesn't sell well. Which is why I think the prices should be lowered, if only a little, so that gamers don't have to choose "Do I buy this AAA game or this AAA game?" And allows for more developers to get higher sales number and the industry as a whole to profit more.

It's called a recession.

Yeah, Amazon's had it for $36 for several days now, probably in response to the Walmart price or vice versa. It was still only $39.99 before that.

Amazon = no tax (for most) + free shipping + not contributing to Walmart's raping of America = WIN!!

I like Walmart, they have the cheapest groceries by a pretty significant margin (Target comes close but has less selection). Regular grocery stores can be almost twice as expensive for a lot of things, probably because they have unions which drive up prices like crazy. I'd have a lot less money to spend on other things if it wasnt for Walmart.

Yeah, I bought it when it was $40 last week, and used $20 with my pre-order credit. Had I waited a week I would have saved $4 more...but no big deal, the game was excellent.

uhh no....thats the same price it is almost everywhere

Gamestops deal really isnt all that hot. They probably buy pack AC2 for aroun $11...and with 50% bonus that would only make the trade-in value around $16.

Not to mention it's STORE CREDIT.

I may have to get it for my 360, its collecting dust anyways. : P