How was Boxing Day steeped in a pandemic year? Let’s take a look.
The Annual Franchises
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War stood its ground at retail and kept its MSRP price — PlayStation 5? PlayStation 4? It didn’t matter, Activision Blizzard weren’t discounting that game at retail. Very strange to see.
Watch Dogs: Legion continued its discount journey from $49.99 of Black Friday to $39.99 for Boxing Day. Not surprising.
Other Releases
A whole $5 was chipped off Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time’s Black Friday sale price, but everything else was largely the same…
Bloxing Months?
A handful of games may creep back up by $10 or so, but the likes of Sony don’t even bother changing sale prices between Black Friday and Boxing Day. It might as well have been a temporary price drop between end of November until early January.
I’ve been keeping tabs on these two big holiday sales periods for the last 11 years now and it’s pretty safe to declare the two sales events as one and the same.
I’m not sure if there’s any point to keep this going…
Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade made its way to the PC by way of the Epic Games Store which is great for the PC. However, Square Enix made the bold move to charge $93.49 for it. The Epic Coupon deal makes it a tiny bit more palatable, but what a bold move by the publisher. They strike a deal with Epic Games to make it an EGS exclusive, and also have the balls to charge PlayStation 5 game tier prices on the PC. Baffling.
Halo is back. It might be missing co-op campaign or the ability to select levels after playing through the campaign, but it’s here and it should be a time of celebration. I’m looking forward to trying it out. I can try it out right now, but Metroid Dread and Apex Legends are sapping my play time these days.
I never played a true blue MMORPG before; I just don’t like the idea of paying a subscription for a single game. However, if I were to play one in 2021, it would be this Final Fantasy XIV that everyone raves about. I hear the best of Final Fantasy can be found here including the best music, stories, characters, and even artwork. All of that isn’t enough to sway me though. I’ll just be happy for all the folks who’ve been waiting for Endwalker to arrive.
A Pokemon game came out last week and I barely noticed. I know it’s a remake, so it’s not going to set the world on fire, but it’s still a Pokemon game. I checked out of Pokemon games after Sword/Shield. The game was fine for what it was, but I’m just done with those games.
I used to be a Battlefield fan. I bought a PlayStation 4 for Battlefield 4. I didn’t really touch another Battlefield game since 4 and was looking forward to giving Battlefield 2042 a go, but that beta just didn’t do it for me. It wasn’t the bugs or glitches though. It was the formula. I realized I was done running from point to point and whittling away at tickets.My multiplayer go-to games will continue to be Apex Legends and the increasingly dead Overwatch.
Let’s take a look at how the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic affected Black Friday deals.
The Annual Franchises
Watch Dogs Legion launched a few weeks before Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and apparently that and the slight dip in Metacritic was enough for the Watch Dogs to receive a Black Friday discount. It was your standard sale price, but it was a sale nonetheless.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla would have to wait for Boxing Day.
Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War did not receive a hint of a discount at retail during 2020’s Black Friday. Not since Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 did we enter a Black Friday without a retail sale for the annual military shooter.
Other Releases
The rest of the titles were selected based on the discount, popularity, and availability. There’s little value in highlighting the door crasher sale of a niche title.
Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time receiving a $20 discount was to be expected. It would have been nice to see a $30 reduction instead, but it looks like Activision are content with slowly milking sales off it. In fact, we’re just getting a $39.99 (50% off) discount on PSN Store in the middle of November 2021!
Marvel’s Avengers was a bit of a bummer, so it wasn’t surprising to see a high profile game like this get a discount. I honestly though it would be $29.99 by Black Friday considering the collective groan and rejection of the game.
If Microsoft didn’t buy Bethesda in September of 2020, I would have pulled the trigger on Doom Eternal at $29.99. I loved Doom (2016) and was waiting to find out how the sequel turned out. I waited for the game to hit Xbox Game Pass instead and discovered that I didn’t like it at all.
One of 2019’s most unique game found itself at the $29.99 price point regularly, so it wasn’t a surprise that it found itself there again during Black Friday 2020.
Takeaways
Patience wasn’t rewarded for Call of Duty fans — 2020 was the first year in a long time where waiting for a physical copy of Call of Duty to go on sale during Black Friday was pointless
Patience wasn’t rewarded for Assassin’s Creed fans either.
Combination of new consoles and pandemic demand probably didn’t force many publishers to hit that sale button
I liked Forza Horizon 4 and found myself getting pretty far with it before losing interest to another game. Admittedly, I have less interest in Forza Horizon 5, but I’m willing to give it a go after hearing all the positive buzz about its visual wizardry.
