Playstation Gamer UK

Since Tuesday I’ve been thinking about what I’ll be writing about today. Some of the obvious choices for me were the ones that were filling the internet and N4G.com. Killzone 2 and the hate for the PS3, but, I don’t feel like beating those particular dead horses, instead I’m going to go beat another dead horse, the economy.

The economy world wide has taken a major hit, but no country has been hit harder than the one that started it all, the good old United States of America. And how is the government of the USA planning on fixing this? By spending money to the point they have an amazingly huge deficit. And I believe that the video game industry should take a cue from this. Both Sony and Microsoft (but especially Sony) have to drop the price of their consoles. In my opinion, Sony’s PS3 is the best value but people don’t care about that, all they see is the $399 price tag and their gut reaction is “no way, it’s two expensive”. There is a lot of speculation about a $100 price drop coming sometime before E3 (I predicted as early as March and others have said April) but I’m not sure that is enough. As soon as Sony drops their price Microsoft is supposedly going to drop the price of their Xbox 360 Pro sku to $249 which will once again leave Sony as the more expensive of the two. I believe that Sony has to stay on par with the Xbox 360 Pro price point, and that means dropping the price $250. Yes, they’ll lose money, a lot of it, but they’ll bring in a lot more and their sales will go up dramatically and with those extra console sales will be extra software sales which is where they can make most of their money back. 

Not only has the recession hurt potential sales numbers but it may also hurt the game industry’s games as well. There are people out there that are claiming that the Wii has done untold amounts of damage to the future of video games. This is based on the belief that other console manufacturers and game studios will follow Nintendo’s lead and start leaving the graphics behind in favour of… I don’t know, whatever it is that Wii games have that makes them so successful, to be perfectly honest. However, I believe the recession will do far more damage to the industry than the Wii. With studios dropping like flies those still clinging to life are going to stop taking risks and are more likely to revert back to milking the same franchises over, and over, and over again. If this happens games like Mirror’s Edge and LittleBigPlanet may never be made. Mirror’s Edge and LBP were two of the most innovative games made last year and, particularily with Mirror’s Edge, there was a considerable amount of risk taken by their studios in making them and without innovative titles, where is the game’s industry?  It’s an endless stream of FPS and sports games, just the same games over and over again because they know they’ll sell. 

The recession will also make the value of review scores go way up. With people not wanting to waste their $60 on a crappy game even some of the more casual gamers are going to go look at sites like IGN, Gamespot and 1UP to see what is the best. This could be a good thing, it could be a bad thing, that’s yet to be known but what is known is that if people start relying on their local Gamestop employees to recommend games to them then there are going to be a lot of misled customers out there.

But that’s just my opinion, what’s yours? Leave your comments down below, Scruffy.