CEO: Current-generation game price-drop likely

Activision's Robert Kotick tells conference that older-console software will become cheaper; publisher will release 40 Xbox 360 games in 2006.
It's a sad fact of life that games for the Xbox 360 will not be cheap. Though no official software price point for the console has yet been announced, every online retailer is taking game pre-orders for the platform at $59.99 a pop. That's on top of the $399 for the tricked-out 360 (which is the smarter buy) and the thousand-plus dollars for the HDTV and A/V setup required to take full advantage of the console.

This week, though, a major industry player predicted that gamers will soon be able to save money for a change. Speaking to the Bank of America Investment Conference in San Francisco, Activision CEO Robert Kotick told the audience that in 2006, "You're likely to see price declines on the older-generation software."

Unfortunately for current-generation holdouts, Kotick also said that publishers will quickly shift their development efforts away from today's consoles. That's been the case in the past, when the introduction of the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube titles saw PlayStation and Nintendo 64 development plummet. "I'm a pretty big believer that history is likely to repeat itself," he said.

In other next-generation-console-and-Activision-related news, Kotick said the company plans on releasing a whopping 40 games for the Xbox 360 during 2006, including its anticpated free-roaming Western, Gun. That's over two times as many as it released for the current-generation Xbox in 2002, the year after its launch.

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I think aswell, well its a bit obvious that the prices are going become cheaper!

I'm thinking about hiring games initially when I get my XBOX 360, (have one pre-orded on Play.com). Probably CD-WOW's

I'm not paying

I think it's obvious that a price drop in this-gen software is likely. Sometime next year it'll drop to