The “sale” price you see here is effectively the “standard” price. Publishers know that most users will just wait for a sale to make their purchase, and that those too desperate to wait will be willing to pay any inflated “full” price they set.
I used to see them all the time on Playstation. Kingdom Come Deliverance and Prey are $3 right now, Control and Shadow of War are $6, Serious Sam 4 is $6 (I might get that one). There are others too. But not as many as there used to be though.
I don’t know whether it’s the case here (it’s the biggest sale of the year regardless), but often game developers will have licenses for some of the content in the game (music, most often), and when those licenses are soon expiring they do a fire sale on it. The previous Forza Horizon game comes to mind.
Instead of lowering their prices over time and so sales are less significant of a percentage, they keep the original price indefinitely and just have lots of sales. This makes the percentage off much higher than if they had depreciated the regular price as it should. Pretty common these days.
This also pleases the Steam Store algorithm god. A big spike will bump the game up in the charts, then the algo will serve it to more people in the store and more people will buy it. The more sales momentum a game has the more the algo will show it in the recommended sections.
The slow burn lowering prices over time also maintains a bit of long term income for a maintenance team to patch and improve the game. This game is 2 years old and is getting slammed down to $5, that says to me they’re just trying to cash out on whoever is left that wants to buy it but hasn’t, and then I’d bet this game never sees an update ever again afterward.
This shit winds me up so much. It used to be that a game would be full price for 6-12 months before moving onto a budget label at a vastly rexuced price.
Nowadays games are full price forever, except for the few days a year when they go on “sale” and get reduced to what they should’ve been all along. During which time the publishers get to act like they’re being altruistic and doing us a massive favour.
These are solid, enjoyable entries in the series. Peaked with Underground 2 and MW 2005, but the takeover/acquisition of Criterion pumped new life into HP 2010 and MW 2012.
Exhibit B:
nfs games released after MW 2012
These are dogshit. Heavy dlc, meh progression, horrible to play on a keyboard, stupid upgrade systems (cards? cards? are you retarded, EA?), always-online, shitty online servers, horrendous physics, so arcadey that they make actual arcade racing games look desirable.
You’ll note that this game is in the second group.
I got it as a gift a couple weeks ago, they paid $10 for it, which I was holding out for >$5 to buy myself; it’s actually better than the last iteration, but not by much. That game - heat - I thrashed on at launch and 6mo later, and when the premium or whatever edition dropped to like $1.25, I finally bought it (10h demo before) and honestly, I want my $1.25 back. Here, $5 for unbound is about right, near the upper limit.
If they hadn’t killed Criterion (the reboot is in name only, the talent jumped ship with the forced merge), nfs might be awesome still. They have to do a metric fuck-load to save this series. I have almost every game, I’m a massive fan of the series… But for the past decade, it’s fucking dogshit.
Is there a new title coming? My car feed has been featuring a real build of the Most Wanted (2005) M3 GTR recently from BMW. I see franchise sales often when a new entry is coming out. I don’t see any announcements though, so maybe it’s just because it’s rated so poorly
Edit: no news of a new title, but the Borderlands franchise has a sizeable discount bundle on Xbox, at least. Bl4 is coming. But it’s also a sale weekend anyway
$70 price is for people who are really impatient and then sales are to capture price sensitive people over time. Not unusual. It’s why I wasn’t bothered by the $70 retail price, since I knew I’d never have to pay it. It’s just a tax on the impatient.
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