A district judge has cleared a class action lawsuit against Electronic Arts this week, which means it should eventually become a jury trial.
The class action suit claims EA illegally increased the price of the Madden NFL series after it won exclusive rights to the NFL license, in 2005.
Any purchaser of a Madden game from 2005 until now is eligible to register as a plaintiff in the wide-ranging suit.
In 2004, Take-Two released NFL2K5 for just $19.95, taking on the behemoth Madden, which was forced to drop its prices to $29.95, down from the standard $49.99.
EA won the exclusive NFL license the next season and returned Madden prices to $50, and eventually $60 when the Xbox 360 and PS3 were launched.
Says plaintiff lawyer Steve Berman (via GI):
“Consumers now have a legal standing to demand that EA refund consumers millions of dollars it made from Madden NFL and other sports titles through what we contend was an illegal price-gouging scheme.
“We believe EA forced consumers to pay an artificial premium on Madden NFL videogames. We intend to prove that EA could inflate prices on their sports titles because these exclusive licenses restrained trade and competition for interactive sports software.”
Result for: videogame
Microsoft has unveiled their Kinect motion control system’s launch titles this week, with the highest touted game being “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part 1 The Videogame.”
Kinect is set to launch early next month.
Says Microsoft directly of the Harry Potter title: “Playing as Harry, you are on the run from the opening sequence, fighting for survival on a desperate and dangerous quest to locate and destroy Voldemort’s Horcruxes.”
There are 22 moves within the game that require the Kinect system, allowing users to control the action with hands-free motion controllers.
The other games to be released at launch are Kinectimals, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved, Kinect Sports, Kinect Joy Ride and Dance Central.
Kinectimals allows users to interact with zoo animals, Fitness Evolved is a fitness game, Sports is (you guessed it) a sports game, Joyride is a racing game, and Dance Central is a game that lets you “hone your dance skills” to pop hits.
Result for: videogame
According to the latest figures from market research firm NPD Group, U.S. videogame industry sales took a dive in August, falling 10 percent year-on-year (YoY).
Overall sales fell to $819 million USD, with software revenue collapsing 14 percent and hardware falling 5 percent.
Almost reaching the point of saturation, the Nintendo Wii saw its lowest sales since November 2006, falling 12 percent to just 244,300 units sold for the month.
The perennial hardware leader, the Nintendo DS line, fell 38 percent to 342,700 units sold. DS sales have now fallen in each month since April.
Dead-in-the-water handheld PSP sales dove 43 percent, with Sony selling just 79,400 units for the month.
Microsoft’s Xbox 360 rose to the top, seeing 66 percent growth thanks to the release of their updated, slimmed down console. Microsoft sold 356,700 units for the month. The Sony PlayStation 3 saw 7.6 percent growth YoY, selling 226,000 units for the month.
Says Anita Frazier, senior analyst for NPD: “This month reflected the lowest sales for August since 2006. While all categories are down in both dollars and units, the portable portion of the industry is down to a greater extent.”
