Sony's Playstation Network (PSN) has been down for three weeks after hackers breached the online gaming network. Sony is working to bring the network back online, but in the meantime PS3 owners can't play any of their games online. No online multi-player in Call of Duty Black Ops. No online basketball games in NBA 2K11. And no online missions in Battlefield Bad Company II.
Online multi-player is one of the most popular features in lots of games. With this feature disable on all Playstation 3 games are gamers changing their buying patterns? Do they decide not to buy PS3 games and instead buy the Xbox 360 version?
We analyzed the resale prices for the ten most popular online games on PS3 and Xbox 360. Looking at prices the day the outage started and three weeks later to see if demand has changed for PS3 and Xbox 360 games.
Resale Prices During PS3 Network Outage
It looks like demand for PS3 online games has decreased while demand for Xbox 360 online games has increased because of the Playstation Network outage. Without the online features the Playstation 3 online games are not as valuable.
Data Sources:
The list of most popular online games came from data published April 11th by Major Nelson.
The prices came from VideoGamePriceCharts.com for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 on April 20th and May 11th.
4 comments :
Great analysis. The comparison between the two consoles makes the change really obvious. Thanks.
there does appear to be a price-dropping trend for ps3 but most of the games listed above are pretty old now (gta4, rdr, mw2, bfbc2) and prices should be coming down regardless. btw, your bar graph makes the drop seem even bigger when it's really only showing about $1.50-$1.75 price difference, which isn't going to get me up off this couch to go to gamestop any time soon lol... i'd be curious to see how prices fair a week from now if sony can't get psn back online and also, how the prices change after psn is operational again.
@anonymous - You are right that some of the games are older (though still popular online). But they all came out at the same time on the PS3 and the 360. So the relative change is the important part. The Xbox games increased on average while the PS3 games decreased.
Good ideas about seeing how prices change after PSN comes back online. I will make a note of that and do a follow-up article to see what happens.
Nice, nice! Now I get what I’m looking for. This post helps me now on what to do about online games. Thanks a lot for sharing your time and effort to people like me. I hope I can read more of your incoming post.
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