The official price for Last of Us Part II is still $39.99, but there are always discounts for $19.99. It was typical for Sony's first-party games last gen to be marked down to $19.99 after almost 2 years.
Makes me believe they want to keep the price at a certain range because they still have plans to release the director's cut. Wouldn't make sense to officially mark down the price to 19.99 and then release the director's cut for 39.99 with a $10 upgrade. So it seems like the director's cut is going to be a least $49.99.
Theres multiple reasons for them to keep the price high. When they do eventual sales or price cuts they will be 50 dollars instead of 40 dollars, they also want to push people to subscribe to the service after a while. It’s better to pay the subscription fee to play ghost of tsushima, returnal, and spider-man rather than buy them for 50-60 dollars each.
I’m actually surprised that sony even marked its games down as fast as they did. It’s short term thinking, especially for a platform that prides itself of its “premium-ness”
What they were doing before was better for the consumer, but then they probably saw how people treat nintendo and its games and thought why aren’t they doing the same thing when their games cost a lot more to make. They were essentially throwing away money marking down a game like GoW as fast as they did to push more unit sales when they could have extended its legs at a higher price through other marketing.
Thats why they are doing the tv shows, pc ports, remasters…it works. People will see your games as more valuable if the platform holder treats them more valuably. Theres no reason why Arms, Links Awakening, Yoshi, etc. should sitll be 60 dollars but they are, and people deem them as being valuable and fans boys will pride themselves on the fact that the money they spent hasn’t been super devalued. When people talk about nintendo sales they say, “yeah, and they sold them all at full price” knowing Nintendo hacked consumer spending.
Thats why people stopped viewing Ubisoft games as big events because they get marked down super fast. You can wait a month and get their biggest games for half off, people that buy them at full price feel like suckers.
Its just all around bad marketing and bad business to have a game with the hype of god of war ragnarok end up being 30 dollars by early next year. Sony referencing Nike was the first hint that it was changing the way they were gonna sell and market their games