See, you weren’t the only one. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick was also sad to see that none of the current-gen consoles had price cuts announced at E3 this year.
E3 has come and gone, and all the consoles still cost as much as they did last week. And it wasn’t just gamers who can’t afford or don’t want to pony up the asking prices for the PS3, Wii or 360 who were left with a bitter feeling of disappointment. GameStop CEO Don DeMatteo, for one, has been demanding, and, recently, downright expecting price cuts.
Now another CEO is getting in on the “tears for no price cut” party: Activision’s Bobby Kotick. “I was disappointed not to see any sort of aggressive price cutting,” Kotick told Bloomberg in an interview. Like DeMatteo, Kotick thinks that given the current economic climate, the consoles cost much more than they should.
Kotick seems to think that instead of revealing fancy new tech and thinking about the bright future, maybe hardware companies should have spent some time addressing the problems of now. “Of all the things that the hardware companies need to be doing right now, it’s recognizing the difficulties of the economy and pricing their hardware appropriately,” Kotick said.
Of course, if prices drive sales down, that means people are going to buy fewer Activision games, which is bad for Kotick. But if he and DeMatteo are right and hardware really needs to be cheaper in order for the industry to perform as well as it thinks it will, then maybe the ramifications stretch beyond the bank accounts of a couple of CEOs and to the entire industry as a whole, consumers included.
[Via CVG]
