D_987 said:
It's more of a common knowlege thing. The allegations of price fixing and a lack of competition are right there in front of you. All the new games coming out have the same price, despite having differant budgets. When games DO release at the same time you'll
notice they rarely compete by lowering their prices. The idea of the market in the US being for all the people producing a type of product to compete directly to deliver the highest quality product they can at the lowest possible price. You don't see that, you see coordinated efforts to avoid direct competition as much as possible (what we've seen here is the exception, usually you see games pushed up to avoid competing with other games like what happened when Modern Warfare 2 came out), and in the end we get buggier games at a consistnatly high price as a result.
This is corruption because when other businesses do it, it's a crime. Look at the investigations over gasoline in the US with the federal goverment crawling all over the oil companies due to price setting and not competing. The only reason why the game industry gets away with it is because the goverment hasn't yet had it brought ot it's attention as a big enough deal. Whether they are dancing on the edge of some kind of legal exception or whatever, this kind of thing is usually dealt with pretty quickly, with the laws being adapting if need be... but first something has to get the right kind of official attention.
It's not really disputable, unless somehow your going to tell me where you are the new games coming out vary greatly in price based on relative quality, and as a result of direct competition everyone is lowering their prices as much as they feasibly can.
As far as comments on critics and such go, I *DID* make a referance to the whole Jeff Gerstmann thing, which brought it out to the forefront. He was pretty much fired from IGN for not giving "Kane and Lynch" a high review despite the site having been paid tons of money for advertising.
This lead to a lot of examinations of the industry, and look at it this way. Game sites and periodicals make money by selling advertising. Game companies buy advertising to sell their game. A game company is not going to want to pay advertising money to a source that is going to cost them money. As a result reviews are VERY top heavy, and the strength of reviews as many people will point out oftentimes winds up being directly proportionate to the advertising budget of the game in question.
We've also seen things like the whole "Arkham Asylum" incident, where they managed to control information so only people willing to review the game with a very high number (9 or 10 if I remember) were being allowed to put up reviews so long before release. Basically giving those sources a leg up to generate hits/increase circulation for people wanting to hear about the game, but also ensuring that all of the information was positive so as not to influance sales negatively.
Now granted, the reasons for these problems are not easily addressed, but that doesn't change the fact that they exist, and amount to large scale corruption.
The point here is that "Enslaved" was pretty heavily advertised, they even had a multi-page spread talking about the game and hyping it as an article in Game Informer and things like that. With the money being paid out most (but admittedly not all) sources of reviewers/critics are going to basically bite the hand that feeds them. They do that and then they lose out on that company buying any moe advertising, and then they are out of their jobs.
