Hopefully you’ve already seen it all over the place, but if you haven’t: Best Buy is having a big $9.99 video game sale. Get ye to a store ASAP.
I’m heading out of town this morning to parts unknown (Vermont, actually) and there’s a Best Buy just outside the airport. I may have to stop by and see what’s around.
I’m ultra-cheap when it comes to gaming. No one likes to spend too much. Hopefully this helps someone out. Let us know if you pick anything up!
So this seems like a great sale, but Blockbuster is also dumping a bunch of games dirt cheap as well, and some Wal-Marts marked a bunch of games on $10 and $15 clearance last month.
I almost wonder if this is a sign of other problems.
Not that it has stopped me from picking stuff up on the cheap.
Yeah. I picked up PGR4 from Wal-Mart almost two months ago.
Most of the games are pure dreck, but Sam’s did have GTAIV for $25 a while back too. It’s now back up in price.
So, I’m tripping through my sale pick-ups on the database I used to track my old “Best and Worst” series.
March
Guitar Hero World Tour – $25, Circuit City
Soul Calibur – $25, Circuit City
No real commentary. They were going out of business so no concern.
Dynasty Warriors Gundam – $10, Wal-Mart
Still don’t understand. This game is easily going for $40 everywhere else and even with the sequel out the best I can find is $30 used. I’ve only seen 1 copy at my local Wal-Mart and other ones don’t have any copies for any price. Weird.
Conan – $10, Wal-Mart
I think even pre-clearance this was easy to find for $15, so no big shock.
Baja: Edge of Control – $15, Wal-Mart
Uh, this is still selling for $40. Not sure why, it’s a terrible game. Very odd markdown though. $40 was it’s original price to, this game never hit $60.
Battlestations: Midway – $15, Wal-Mart
Still selling for about $30 until just a couple of months ago, and even then $20 is common. Not a huge deal and it doesn’t seem to move so this one I understand.
Rock Revolution – $10, Target
Just a random clearance item. No mystery either, these don’t move.
Zack & Wiki – $10 Wal-Mart
Hmmm…I think it was already at $20, but that’s still a 50% markdown for a game I thought reviewed well and sold well. Wii games seem to have somewhat longer legs, did it stop moving?
Army of Two – $15 Blockbuster
This one has been stubborn at $30 for awhile, just became common everywhere for $20. Still, tons of copies so I can see the $5 discount just to get them out of inventory.
Banjo & Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts – $20 Blockbuster
I could have sworn this was released at a $30 price point. Is confidence so low in this title that the price is already dropping or is it general downward pressure happening all over? Everyone seems to love this game.
GRiD – $20 Blockbuster
Still commonly found for $40 and it has been holding steady at that price for awhile. It even remained at $60 longer than I would have predicted. A 50% price cut seems drastic.
Iron Man – $15 Blockbuster
No shock here.
Spider-Man: Friend or Foe – $10 Blockbuster
Another 50% price reduction. Possibly due to the flood of Spider-Man titles on the market.
Ghost Squad – $10 Blockbuster
This game has stubbornly stuck to $25 for well over a year. I was stunned at how much it was reduced. I’ve been waiting for it to hit $20 for awhile, so I grabbed it.
Turok – $10 Blockbuster
Surprised it didn’t hit this price point sooner.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars – $10 Best Buy
Currently “On Sale” at Blockbuster for $25. Hovers between $40 and $35 depending on where you look. Drastic price cut.
Looking at how little some of these games are going for, I’m starting to wonder how successful it is releasing games for $60. I think the current economic downturn is just putting more downward pressure on pricing and getting games that haven’t even been out for a year for less than 25% of retail should be scaring the crap out of publishers.
The retailers wouldn’t be selling the games this low if they thought they could get more.
@Jason O – you got some good deals there.
Ghost Squad is a hoot and well worth $10. It a good party game–even the gals got involved.
GRiD is the racing game I had the most fun with last year–that was NOT Burnout Paradise. Heh.
Zack and Wiki is good for a waggle,er, play through.
Guitar Hero World Tour introduced me to the madness.
I, too, also hear people going crazy for Banjo but I look at all my friends gamercards and no one has played it.
I want to play Banjo but even at the low entry price, I just can’t seem to justify it until I actually play it.
Jason O – I’m with you 100% on that last bit. Some of the games during Best Buy’s big $10 sale aren’t even a year old. I set out this year vowing to really try hard to reduce the number of impulse, full-price games I bought and it is working. The biggest factor in keeping my money in my wallet is seeing more and more how fast game prices are dropping after the first few launch weeks.
Add to that the fact that up here in the wild and wooly north, game prices are now almost a standard $69+ tax (meaning you’re lucky to come home only $80 lighter after a game purchase) and that bump in price, coupled with the stupidly cheap cost for NEW games a mere month or two (sometimes weeks!) after release and the fact that you could pay $59-69 for Fallout 3 or the same price for a piece of shovelware… All of these things combined have really caused me to be a bit gun-shy with ‘real’ games this year.
DS and PSP games are still relatively affordable and I’m willing to take a chance on a game that is $30-40 on launch day.
It’s just kind of sad that with people taking a longer, harder look at their expenses and cutting costs where necessary that games are still retailing for the same cost 3-4 years into this generation that they did when it started, esp. when we see such rapid drops in price. It’s like they’re just selling it for the $60 price tag out of habit now, knowing full well that only a few games will be able to be sold for that amount for much more than a month or two.
Pardon the ramble. It’s late and this subject tends to get my dander up.
It’s like they’re just selling it for the $60 price tag out of habit now, knowing full well that only a few games will be able to be sold for that amount for much more than a month or two.
I think it’s more like a stubborn insistence that this business model works. This despite Valve’s earlier experiment on Steam with Left 4 Dead showing that a reduction in price will easily make up the loss with increased sales and the continued insistence of licensing software without full ownership but selling it with a pricing scheme akin to a physical product.
Oh, don’t get me started on selling a digital version of a game for the exact same price as a retail copy. Grr…