Wal-Mart Stores Inc is cutting prices on popular video games by $10 each and offering a $50 gift card with the purchase of a Nintendo Wii video game console as the retailer tries to lure shoppers to its U.S. stores ahead of the Christmas holiday.
Now through December 24, Walmart will sell "Rock Band: Beatles" for the Wii for $40, down from $50, and it will offer "Left 4 Dead 2" for Microsoft's Xbox 360 for $50, compared with its previous price of $60.
From December 5 until December 12, Walmart also said that shoppers who buy a Wii in its stores for $199 will also get a $50 Walmart gift card.
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
INDIE Live Expo, Japan’s premiere online digital showcase series , will debut never-before-seen games & content updates across more than 100 titles on May 25th.
"The best games of the year and the creative teams behind them were in the spotlight at the grand award ceremony of the German Computer Game Award 2024." - German Computer Game Awards.