Microsoft Teases Xbox Spring Sale 2023, Now Confirmed For This Week

@EliJapan or it'll be the game+dlc for the same price you paid. I get stung by that one a lot

Sonic Frontiers for 14.99 or less and I'm on it.

Otherwise can happily wait another couple of years for it to come down.

Too many other games to play.

The article mentions reductions on movies - wonder why the Xbox store never discounts telly series 🤔

A bunch of OG Xbox games on sale would be nice.

@abe_hikura That's a new trend in sales I'm seeing a lot and really hate, companys never putting the base game on sale at all, and only putting the "Digital Deluxe" which was $10-20 more at the start on sale, forcing you to pay more and reducing the value of the sale, so that a "$60" game goes 30% off.....from the $70 or $80 digital deluxe starting price.

I remember a time when gaming wasn't about squeezing every penny from customers, and was just about selling products.

@NEStalgia Ironically, there's a fair argument to say that games today are way undervalued. In the UK at least, a SNES game in the mid 90s would typically cost between £40 and £50. Vividly remember paying £49.99 for Yoshi's Story on N64, 25 years ago. A brand new Xbox Series X/S game these days is, what, £60? I've never understood why we aren't seeing prices of £80+ for a base game, considering how many developers and resources are involved now.

@WBMusic People keep continuously repeating that line of thinking but it doesn't really flesh out at all.

Games in the 80s and 90's weren't just software, you were purchasing entire daughter boards, ROM memory that wasn't cheap at the time, often graphics co-processors, etc. That wasn't the amount of money that was paying for software development, it was the amount of money to buy parts of a video card and storage device with every purchase. The devs didn't get the entire windfall of that, there was a hardware cost, more retailer and distributor costs, and no add-on sales via mtx, etc, along with a significantly smaller potential market. It's not a true comparison in prices from then to now.

Beyond that people like to cite inflation however discretionary spending has decreased as a result of inflation, not increased, as cost of essentials has dramatically risen, and the number of essentials (smartphones, internet service, etc) has increased overall, it leaves most with less discretionary spend for entertainment, fashion and the like, and the retail landscape has dramatically changed as a result. The public trend in entertainment has been lower costs/higher value, thus the rise of streaming video and music services, subscription bundles, F2P games, etc. Gaming can't just start jacking up prices to the equivalent because "people paid that back when they were getting processors with the game, inflation adjusted" without cratering the sales market of the game. People paid that, but it was a different product, for a smaller market, in a time when rental dominated the games landscape meaning, often, a large portion of the players did not pay that pricing at all, and didn't even consider it.

That's a key difference. It was more expensive then. And as a result less people purchased it, less people engaged with it, and among those that did, many merely rented, which the games companies fought, and lost, against back then, too!