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The price of videogames in the UK is always a sticky topic. If we’re not being charged 50% too much, the retailers are ripping chunks out of each other in a desperate struggle for our attention.
One of the most recent examples of this was Asda selling FIFA 10 for less than £30. Talking to MCV Asda’s games category manager, Duncan Cross, said this wasn’t his company, and other supermarkets, working with publishers to lower the price. Instead he insisted that they simply sold the game at a loss in some extreme undercutting attempts.
This defensive stance comes, as MCV say, after comments by Konami’s UK general manager, Pete Stone, who said these low prices were “unnecessary and worrying”.
Still, cheap games is cheap games.
In a move that I can only hope will result in people referring to Square Enix as Squeenixdos, it looks like the venerable JRPG developer/angst ridden teen production plant will indeed be buying up Eidos. According to MCV, the transition will happen in the next few weeks and Eidos will be left as an independent development house, which implies that jobs on the Eidos side are more or less safe.
Having said that, there is definitely a difference between the implication that everyone will keep bringing home the bacon, and actually following through. Takeovers, even non-hostile ones, can be messy sometimes. But hopefully those crazy Brits living in the house that Lara built will be alright.
Now on the surface this may not seem like terribly important news. It’s not like they’ve announced that Eidos will be relocated to Japan or anything crazy. Basically all this means is that the people working at Eidos will now get their pay cheques from the other side of the planet and will have to commit seppuku if they let any game assets leak early.
However, wouldn’t it be awesome if they did some crazy-ass crossover project? Like, Hitman meets Star Ocean, meets Parasite Eve? Except it’s like, set in the past? And there’s like, this dinosaur scientist that’s trying to take over the world using Chocobos, and Aya Brea needs to team up with Agent 47 to use technology given to them by Claude Kenni (Original Star Ocean) to fight him?
Oh, and they could throw lady Crofts boobs in there somewhere.
Awesome.
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