Happy New Year! 🎉
Super Meat Boy was very good. It was a very challenging game made tolerable through forgiving design decisions. I actually don’t know much about its sequel, Super Meat Boy Forever. I hear it has auto-running now? I don’t know when I will get around to playing it, but it is currently on sale on the Epic Games Store for just $7.99 with the $14 off Epic Coupon. If I didn’t have a whole slew of other games to play, I would probably take advantage of it.
Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 just snuck in before Cyberpunk 2077 and got completely smothered by it. I enjoyed Puyo Puyo Tetris, but never finished that single player story mode. I haven’t kept up and have no idea what’s new and exciting in Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, but I’m sure it’s a fine game considering its pedigree.
Happy Holidays!
It’s time look back at the last 10 years of Boxing Days and see how they stack up with one another.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare marked the highest Boxing Day sale price in franchise history with its $59.99 price tag. It was an extremely very popular instalment of the long running franchise, so it’s not that surprising to see Activision keep the price relatively high.
Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint continued its Black Friday 2019 pricing of $29.99. Priced to move and yet it will continue to hover around that price for the majority of 2020.
Seeing The Outer Worlds for $50 two months after release was expected. Everything else was a repeat of Black Friday 2018.
There used to be a brief break between Black Friday and Boxing Day sales, but several titles including Sony first party ones kept their Black Friday sale price right through Boxing Day; the likes of their Greatest Hits, The Last of Us Part II, and Ghost of Tsushima continued to be on sale.
With that said, there are some (and likely will be) Boxing Day exclusive deals. Boxing Day isn’t a complete repeat of Black Friday, but that Venn diagram has never been closer to being one.
Immortals Fenyx Rising is already on sale. Ubisoft’s latest release saw multiple price drops down to $45, then $50, and it’s already $40 on Epic Games Store with console versions following next week. This game came out 14 days ago.
Cyberpunk 2077 is finally here. It’s a little hot, not quite ready, might be a little short for some people, but it’s here and we can finally move forward with our lives. I won’t be playing it until the next-gen patch is in and even then I might wait for the dust to settle with that. With CDPROJEKT RED games, it never hurts to wait.
Spider-Man: Miles Morales would have been a game that I would be playing with my PlayStation 5, but I don’t like its price tag. It’s $64.99 and that’s a lot for a video game. It will come down in price and when that time comes, I will be there. I have no idea how this Miles Morales portrayal is, but I hope they borrowed many queues from the Into the Spider-Verse movie.
Xbox One
Xbox 360 & Xbox One
Walmart and EB Games announced the release of their PlayStation 5 inventory for December 4, 2020 @ 11am ET / 8am PT.
Everyone was prepared. Credit cards were ready.
…and then everything came crashing down.
Some made it through to the other side with smiles and a dent in their credit cards, but chances are you’re disappointed, frustrated, and wondering why this is still a problem in 2020?
Well, the first obvious answer is that it’s 2020 and we’re in the midst of a global pandemic. As a result, retailers and manufacturers are encouraging all prospective buyers to visit online stores. In a pandemic-free timeline, consumers would have been able to buy consoles across online and retail stores which would have alleviated some online stress.
The reason why websites are buckling under the tremendous weight of demand is money and the annoying reality that it is finite. From a retailer’s perspective, it is cost prohibitive to beef up server and network capacity for an event that occurs once every 6 – 7 years.
Retailers are trying to work within their budgets though. They’re putting in queues, and waiting rooms, but it’s obviously not perfect. Retailers certainly want to sell you things, and not have to endure being ratio-ed.
Wondering why Apple and the like don’t buckle as badly? They have annual launches with predictable data. They’ve had plenty of practice to wrestle with these launch spikes.
This is one area that I believe all retailers should be counteracting. Why isn’t there a built-in CAPTCHA is a head scratcher. If anyone has any insight to this, I would love to know. (Something tells me the reasoning comes down to money though.)
Retailers like Walmart have stressed they’re restricting purchases to 1 per household, but it doesn’t fill consumers with confidence.
To make it worthwhile for the retailer. The profit margin for console hardware is small, so they want make this headache (it is a headache!) worthwhile.
At least they’re no longer bundling with third party controllers these days.
Sony saw increased demand for the console and boosted supply, but despite their best efforts, they are still selling out.
One could argue that they should have built up even more inventory before launching, but it’s a numbers game. Sitting on inventory doesn’t pay the bills, so Sony needs to recoup their investment as soon as possible.
Nobody wants this situation to happen:
Logistics is tough in the best of times, so you can imagine how much tougher it is to pull this off while keeping everyone safe during this pandemic. So while it is incredibly frustrating to have something slip through your virtual shopping cart into nothing, please be cool about this situation.
We all want happiness.
Yakuza: Like A Dragon looks like a solid time and I would love to play it despite its departure from the brawler combat that was with the series since its inception. To be honest, I don’t think I would miss it; even though the combat was a series staple, it’s not the draw. Seeing ridiculous things happen: that’s the draw of the Yakuza games.
PlayStation 5 & PlayStation 4
“Worst Black Friday ever.”
“Last year’s deals were better.”
Remember 2019?! It’s been so long… Remember Black Friday 2019? It was pretty good. There were decent deals. Ubisoft didn’t release an Assassin’s Creed game last year and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s demand was high enough not to prompt the usual discount.
Let’s take a closer look at how Black Friday 2019 stacked up.
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey may have had the steepest Black Friday discount for the franchise last year, but it sold rather well compared to Ghost Recon: Breakpoint which was described as disappointing:
For Ghost Recon Breakpoint, while the game’s quality appeared on track – based on E3, Gamescom, previews and our latest internal playtests –, critical reception and sales during the game’s first weeks were very disappointing.
I don’t know if the steep discount swayed enough people to redeem the game’s sales figures, but 50% off the MSRP a month later? It truly isn’t wise to pick up Ubisoft titles on day one.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was a return to form for Activision-Blizzard and Infinity Ward. You have to go back eight years to the last time a Call of Duty title was $59.99 on Black Friday. (Granted, it was not on sale in 2011, but still…)
Considering its high sales numbers, it’s safe to assume demand was sufficient that the publisher did not see the need to cut a deep discount on Black Friday.
Here are an assortment of other titles from 2018 and 2019. Titles were selected based on the discount, popularity, and availability. There’s little value in highlighting the door crasher sale of a niche title.
Q4 2019 wasn’t a hot bed of new releases. In fact, the only major third party release was WWE 2K20 which saw a steep discount due to its poor reception.
Wolfenstein: Young Blood Deluxe was the biggest Q3 release to see some sort of discount during Black Friday. It was on sale several times already, so it wasn’t a surprise to see it hit such a low price.
Ubisoft discounting Division 2 this aggressively wasn’t surprising considering it too was a commercial failure. It sold so poorly that Ubisoft was practically giving it away in February 2020.
One of 2018’s best, Red Dead Redemption 2, would regularly hit this $40 price point after Black Friday 2019.
Black Friday isn’t meant for “full time” bargain hunters; it’s for the masses who don’t keep tabs on the latest deals or did not get a chance to use the usual E3 pre-order discounts.
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla looks like a very solid entry by Ubisoft. I won’t be checking it out, but I’m glad fans of the series received a solid effort on all platforms. That game is on just about every platform out there and it looks to be a quite a looker and performer on the new consoles.