Madden should not be 70$

then don't buy it

people keep buying it, so why wouldn't they raise the price?

Typical moron gamer moment, though: Bitch about price, buy it anyway, leave a bad review at 500 hours played, and repeat next year.
- They named this pathology The Maddening.
Now that FIFA's gone, EA needs another cash cow.
- Fifa isn't gone, only the FIFA in-game branding is gone. It's just called FC24 instead of FIFA 24.
  
  And most of the world that plays FIFA isn't going to play an American football game. American football is completely different and not relatable to pretty much anyone except those from USA (or maybe Canada, dunno).

The game isn't for you.

They continue to do very little updates and charge full price because people keep buying it.

They sell like crazy. There was a chart that showed Madden selling more per year than most Nintendo games.

It's a free market. Just don't buy it

Sport games should be sold as game as service rather than yearly releases.

I wonder if they'd have a hard time selling a service that doesn't include the micro-transactions.
- Relying on only seasonal subscriptions is not enough. They have to sell something else és well to keep up.
Why? They’re probably making way more money this way anyways.

Let me share a secret with you: Madden (Year) is the same game as Madden (Year-1).

Wait, if I rename my Madden1.exe to Madden23.exe will I get the latest game?
- ... You're gonna need to rename to madden25.exe
"SportGame (Year-1) is literally unplayable because my favorite player is no longer in Team X."

-- Every sport sim players
PS3 NCAA 14 blows next gen Madden out of the water. It's not even close.
- NFL 2K5 is the GOAT NFL game.
Typically yeah but this year is actually the first time PC is getting the next gen version ps5/xs have had since 21

No yearly release should be $70.

At this his point they could start charging $100 a year for it and I wouldn't even blame them.

No game should be 70$ if you ask me

Games should not follow inflation at all?

N64 games were 50$ in the 90s, more limited releases (Ogre Battle 64 for example) were 60$.

Games pricing has stagnated, that's good for the consumers but bad for smaller developers...
- Surely the difference in overheads involved in physical vs digital would mean profits are increasing at a higher rate then sale price
- The medium games came in were more expensive
  
  The gaming audience was much smaller
  
  Games were only sold in stores
  
  If you add all the season passes you're paying the same or even more with further microtransactions
  
  Games in general now have a longer shelf life
  
  AAA games in my country have been 69,99€ since the PS3 launch and now they're asking 79,99€. It's true development costs have ballooned, but I just don't think that's a good price/time ratio and rarely do I buy games over 15€. I really don't mind waiting a couple years.
- If you're going to count in inflation then I'm going to count in the poor quality of those games
- Do you want to know my opinion on inflation? Specially on "inflation" in an industry that offers less and less over time for a higher price?
Tears of the Kingdom was $70, and I honestly feel like it was worth it because it’s quite an entertaining and enthralling experience.

“Pro football video game v. 34” is probably not in the same caliber though.
- TofK could be the best game ever made (and I don't think it's too far fetched given how good it is) and I still wouldn't justify anything bigger than 50€, 60€ being generous.
New releases used to be £40 when I was a kid (twenty years ago), given inflation, £70 sounds not too bad.
- That $40 included plastic packaging and a disc both of which largely don't exist anymore.
- 40? I remember when they were 20. Hell, I remember when you could get slightly older titles for 10. I used to go to Egghead and buy slightly older games with my allowance.
- more importantly they sell way more units now. It takes virtually no more effort or cost for gaming companies to sell 20 million units vs 1 million.
I dunno. Baldurs Gate 3 has a truly unbelievable amount of content in it. $70 for it is almost unfair when you consider how far $70 gets you in almost any other hobby.
- Someone told me something similar about Tears of the Kingdom and my answer is the same: BG3 could be the greatest game ever made with content from here to eternity, but 70$ is still too much for a game. Specially considering who ends up benefitting the most from the sales.
Depends on the playtime you get out of it. 140hrs+? Great value.
- I have devoted that amount of hours or even more to some games and still think the 40-50€ that costed me each one of them when I bought them is too much.
  
  Entertainment shouldn't be that expensive. Period.

For like 20 years y’all have been buying the game, year after year, even if it’s not worth it.

Football video games were such a big part of my childhood in the 80s and 90s, but football video games died the day NFL2K died.
See also: Pokémon.

I've always been bothered by the lack of competition (and anti-competitive behavior) in the football space.

Madden is worth whatever people are willing to pay for it.

I'm reliably informed by people who really hate Overwatch that thinking like this makes you a chump for capitalism who is ruining the industry.
- Capitalism works. There are markets who will pay for these and that’s why they are made. That’s what capitalism is.
  
  If not for capitalism, these games wouldn’t even exist.
  
  Now, the issue I think you’re worried about is that people begrudgingly pay for the game when they don’t really want to. Or pay more than they want to for it.
  
  That’s not capitalism, that’s FOMO.
  
  People make a ton of shit everyday that I don’t buy. But obviously someone is out there paying for this shit, or it wouldn’t be being made.
  
  What do I care, or what do you care about it enough to even address?
  
  If people don’t buy it, it either gets cheaper or it’s not made at all. So just don’t buy it. I haven’t bought a sports game in 20 years because of this. But they keep making them and people keep complaining about them.
  
  Complain about yourselves, it’s not capitalism, it’s the consumers.

I'd say that's its because there's only really 1 country that's going to buy it in large numbers but the reality is it's the standard ea tax. Stop buying it every year or stop complaining.

Just take your John Madden Football Sega Genesis ROM and use this tool to update the roster yourself. Who'd be able to tell the difference?

those of us that actually play the game

Madden is so dumb its literally the same game with one feature taken out and one feature reintroduced every year

Not my problem really.

They know that people are going to pay for it. For exactly the same reason I haven't bought a Formula 1 game in a few years. Every year it's just not quite worth the 60-70 euro's for me. I'm not even that mad about the 70 euro price tag if I get something nice for it in return, everything has gotten more expensive and games have been 60 euro since forever, but last year's game with some small changes is not going to cut it for that price.

EA sucks. They suck, EA fucking sucks and can I say it again? Fuck EA. Price gouging for shitty products. What they did to battlefront 2? Lootbox pay to win bullshit. The AI in EAs F1 is so abysmal, 2022 was such a colossal disappointment and they are saying 80 bucks USD is a sale price for F1 2023. Naw fam fuck EA and their entire product line. I'll only buy on steam sale at 70% discount on principal
- Thankfully they backed down from Battlefront 2 and removed every single microtransaction. It's a really fun game actually.

If people buy it anyway at the full price, then the game publisher will correctly deduce that it indeed worth at least that much money for enough people (otherwise those people would not part ways with that much money to get it) to get that game as soon as it comes out.

In Economics, perfect pricing (which is not yet possible but, damn, they're really trying hard) from the point of view of a seller (i.e. for maximum profits) is when they get exactly as much money from each individual as that person is willing to pay for it, so the "ideal" world for them would be individually-tailored prices going as high as it could possibly go for each person whilst still managing to sell to that person.

As they can't as of yet sell at different prices to each and every individual, they've gone as far as they can (regional pricing, different prices in different stores with different audiences and, maybe more importantly, time-from-publishing pricing) and then push prices up and up slowly whilst checking if in total the price increase has yielded more money or not (they have no issue with loosing customers due to higher prices if in total they still make more money at the price point than at a lower price point).

IMHO, in the face of this, the easist and best reaction for somebody who wants the game but does not think it's worth $70, is to wait until the price falls down to how much they're willing to pay for it (even better, let it fall some more and buy a couple more games with the savings). In fact if enough people do it the price will fall much faster as the publisher's sales data analysis will signal to them that they've put the game at too high a price point and they'll lower it trying to pick up the "money left on the table" from those who are interested but not at that price point before those people lose interest.

Jokes on them, my limit is wildly low compared to this. Most sports games are worth 20 bucks max at this point, the main content is just reskinned gameplay with updated stats and an unnecessary twist on controls. Its DLC.
Wow. Please tell me more about this capitalistic wizardry. This comment just wasn't quite excessively detailed enough.
- So you just had to write what in your eyes is "obvious" for everybody as a comment, which hence is redundant, about how some other comment is "redundant and obvious"...
  
  Oh, the irony!!!

God look at those crusty ass grass textures, def not $70 material

What is the allure to a yearly new Madden game?

Statistics of players being updated and new character models being added. Nothing that couldn't be done in an update. Honestly most sports games should literally just be games as a service already.
Updated stats and roster. Slight gameplay tweaks.

I loved sports games growing up, but they are absolutely terrible now. Over priced, full of cash grabs and needlessly complex. I just want to hit x to pass. I don't want a fucking story line, I just want to play the game.

Anytime I consider buying a Madden game, I watch a YouTube video of competitive play for the latest version. It always reveals how garbage the football sim part is. It's all audibles and hot route spam and exploiting the useless AI in the same ways over and over again.

I'll never buy a Madden game while all that crap is in there. They should make it so that spamming audibles and hot routes causes players to blow assignments and false start all the time, but the average "competitive" Madden player would probably die from nonstop crying and pants-soiling if EA did anything like that.

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I don’t know what audibles are, but I’ve become increasingly interested in action-strategy type games that find ways to directly punish players that have high Actions Per Minute, encouraging people to take fewer, more deliberate movements. Kinda like combo rhythm in Arkham, rather than mashing X to attack.

Same for FIFA. Or EAFC.

I got Madden 22 for free. It was the first Madden I've played since the 360. It was fun for about half a season and then everything falls apart.

Are these still cut down releases based on last-gen console versions? That seems to be the historical trend with EA PC ports.

But even if not, that price is still high.

This PC release will actually be next Gen. Only reason I'm considering it. I didn't buy the last release but purchased the previous one on sale and was dismayed at it being old-gen.

Are you maddening?

madden should not be

Yeah I have a version of Madden from 2015 that works perfectly fine and seems to be more or less the same game, have been very happy with it. I refuse to pay $70 for a game that I know is riddled with microtransactions for really.... nothing else changing

I am curious as to why you say the game riddled with microtransactions? The only microtransactions I have ever seen is the card pack shit and that is incredibly easy to not pay for by just playing the other 95% of gameplay features they offer in the game that are completely free of microtransactions.

The only sports game worth buying is nba 2k. The graphics are way better. The franchise mode is a million times better. There is less glitches. Stop buying madden. Tell the NFL you dont want EA anymore

*Wii Sports has entered the chat
- I also enjoy FIFA. Certainly wouldn't buy it full price but $5-$10 is worth it.

You can get cheaper tickets to a real game.

lol have you seen ticket prices lately?
Maybe nosebleeds at a bottom 5 NFL team, and even that is questionable. Football tickets are very expensive these days.
Let's say you score a 20$ ticket to a 3.5 hour game. That comes to $5.7 per hour of entertainment. Meanwhile, this game at $70 means you only need to put in 12.5 hours of playtime to get the equivalent, and after you can continue to play as much as you want unlike the in-person ticketed experience.

I buy Madden on sale every 2 years. Last year was the first time I bought it new since Madden 25. Same game with betterish graphics

This post reminded me, probably time for a new softdrinktv video on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/ka0OQPTr8rA

Not gonna lie, Madden shouldn't even be 7 dollars.

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And yet for years sports fans have enjoyed themselves.

Christ you fuckers are pushy.

IT'S NOT FOR YOU. GET OVER IT.

Elitist twat.
- Lolol YOU'RE (royal) the one constantly telling Madden fans how dumb they are. 🤷‍♂️

people should be paid more for their work!

things shouldn't cost slightly more money!

Gotta pick one chief.

Cut the CEOs' pay and you'll be able to get both
- EAs CEO makes $20MM. They have 13k employees. That's an $1100 raise, give or take, if you take every penny from the CEO. For the vast majority of their employees, that is less than a 1% raise.
  
  So no, it won't get you both, in any meaningful sense.
EA chose neither.
- Do you have a source on that? Because EA pays in the top 20-25% for their market.
  
  https://www.comparably.com/companies/electronic-arts-e/salaries