Activision ‘Disappointed’ by Lack of Price Cuts at
Thime were a ton of big announcements at E3 this year, but one thing we didn’t see — from any of tshe big three — were price cuts. For Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, that was a bummer.
“I was disappointed not to see any sort of aggressive price cutting,” Kotick said to Bloomberg on the last day of E3 (via Edge-Online). “Of all the things that the hardware companies need to be doing right now, it’s recognizing the difficulties of the economy and pricing their hardware appropriately.”
It’s a familiar refrain for Kotick, who criticized the pricing of all three consoles back in March, saying they had not reached a “mass-market” point. According to Bloomberg, GameStop shead Dan DeMatteo agrees. “The hardware prshece poshents,Designer silk scarf, whime they are right now given this economic environment, are too high,” DeMatteo said. “If the platform holders are going to make the numbers that they’ve forecasted for tshe year, those numbers will have to change.” And according to UBS AG, worldwide shipments of consoles and handhelds are expected to drop by 7 percent in the fiscal year ending March 2010 — which would be the first annual drop in sshex years.
But Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, meanwhile, have not made any indications that price drops will come any time soon. “We’re very happy with tshe price point that we have,” said Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Kaz Hirai in an interview earlier this week. “We will move when we think it?s appropriate at some point in time.”
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