Call Of Duty Invades The Mac App Store at $50 | Hacker News Reader

Call Of Duty Invades The Mac App Store at $50

techcrunch.com

17 pointsapress28 comments

I'm not sure how telling a 3 year old game hitting the Mac App Store at near-launch prices will be.

Hmm. I had assumed that it was the latest Call of Duty: Black Ops juggernaut. You're right - trying to sell Modern Warfare at this price is silly. This has the fishy smell of an experiment designed to fail...

That's the point, right? If COD:MW1 does decently at this pricing in the Mac App Store, the argument will then exist that the Mac's distribution system makes up for some of the slack in its market share; it'll incentivize more game ports to the Mac.

>"Apple wasted little time in featuring it in a main store banner today."

I don't know which is worse. Apple featuring a 2+ year old game at the app store, or TechCrunch writing an article about it.

Some apps are appearing in the mac app store at what look like bargain prices (Aperture for $80, but due for an upgrade soon). But Call of Duty, which is years old and available online for like $30, went up yesterday at $49.99.

Why should Aperture be due for an update soon? It was only updated a year ago and has had a much longer release cycle than that in the past.

Aperture 2.0 came out in Feb 2009. Aperture 3.0 came out in Feb 2010. But I am basically speculating that Apple is following a very common software pricing strategy of significant cuts ahead of a major update...

I think it'll be interesting to see what Apple does regarding upgrades. Personally, my guess would be on them providing Aperture 4, next version of iWork, &c, without needing a repurchase to whoever purchased it on the App Store.

Aperture 2 came out in February 2008, not 2009. Aperture 1 came out in November 2005 and 1.5 (a big update) in September 2006.

The Mac App store really has no chance against Steam when it comes to games. It is a better platform and not tied to a single operating system. Never-mind their approval process not being so finicky.

I find Steam to be unstable and frustrating on my Mac. I would certainly prefer to use the Mac App store.

But who's got more advertising and marketing power? Apple deserves a lot of credit for its high quality products, but people seem to forget they also sell a lot because they sell hard.

Given the comparatively small number of games for the Mac pricing situations like this have existed for some time (visit your local Mac Store to check out the exciting line of 5+ year old games for sale at full price).

The other way to interpret this is that the $50 price isn't the "full price" of the game so much as it is the same discounted price as elsewhere plus the 30% EA would otherwise lose to Apple.

As far as the second, I'd wager that Valve's cut on Steam is not significantly <30%, even for publishers the size of Activision.

I recall the split between publisher or developer and Valve on steam is determined per game, but for many indie games it hovers around 40% to Valve. For larger publishers and franchise games, this starts to drop considerably.

So if MW1 is available for Mac, why isn't it available on Steam? MW1 for Windows is listed at $30, perhaps EA won't sell the Mac version at that price and Steam doesn't want to endorse a precedent of multiple price points for different platforms?

I try not to presume ill-will, but there does seem to be something amiss here.

Steam has a policy of "purchase once, play anywhere". EA likely doesn't want to give the mac version away for free for those people who bought the PC version.

The Call of Duty series is published by Activision, not EA.

woops - good call. A few years ago, I think I just started assuming everything was published by EA by default.

I still dont get what drives people to pay more for a digital download than an actual boxed version of the game. I also dont get why publishers dont try to reach a bigger audience with lower prices instead, which should roughly equal to the same amount of revenue.

> I still dont get what drives people to pay more for a digital download than an actual boxed version of the game.

Convenience. People pay for convenience all the time. That's why Starbucks can charge $2.50 for a medium coffee that you could make at home for $0.10. Or why the corner store milk is $2 more than the grocery store milk.

Driving to a store takes up to an hour out of your day. You buy the game, accumulating more garbage and shit that you don't need. Then you have to keep it safe and not scratch the disc. Care must be taken.

A digital download is incredibly more convenient. You don't have to leave your home, it's faster, safer, easier, and even better, you don't have to take care of more garbage or carefully handle optical discs.

You still pay more for less. Id argue that for a game you would want a good buying experience, and original box and stuff like that. That why people pay more fore Gold Editions etc. But paying more for just a download, i dont know...

Its not that its something you badly need like something to drink, its on the market for 3 years after all.

I get access to the game immediately, that’s pretty sweet. I can absolutely see paying more for a digital download than some box with a load of crap in it. Who wants to still use CDs or DVDs?

From my perspective, I’m paying more for more.

This doesn’t really apply to this particular game which is shamelessly overpriced and old but it applies to other games.

It's also convenient not to need to have the disk in your computer.

It is probably just price differentiation. Probably app store customers are less frugal, and others will appreciate the illusion of a good deal and go and by the boxed copy.

Determine price by value, not cost. No one cares how hard a business has to work, only what it can do for them.

Ridiculous on its face, but probably just an effort to feel out the top-end of the market (and ignore all the great market data Valve has been collecting over the years).

The game is also massive in size, at over 6 gigabytes, so it’s going to take a while to download even on a fast connection.

That's pretty small these days.

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