Rubbish, I love cricket and I'm not buying it. For me a cricket game is something I will play casually around other games, I don't want to pay 99 for a casual game I'm not sure how much I will get out of.
Then you have games like PUBG, Rocket League... cheap games that sell a ton (hint: because they're cheap) and have a heap of replayability.
Indeed. I don't think Ross knows how economics for game buyers works. The higher the price, the more potential people you price out of buying it. Obviously if you do make it too cheap, you bugger yourself, but there is a decent balance, and it's clear that BA have missed this by a mile with their pricing.
Since the most players use a game within the first few weeks, we can already make the following comparison, data courtesy of SteamDB:
All-time peak players online:
DBC14: 286
DBC17: 232
AC: 111
Anyone that says this decline has nothing to do with pricing, is lying to themselves. Maybe the price for DBC17 was similar in the UK to DBC14, but it was already quite a bit higher here, as it probably was in various other countries. And then AC comes at an even higher price point. I really wish I could get sales figures for each of these, but the above is the best we have to work with.
So, what are the reasons for the game being so much less popular than its predecessors, if not price? Is it gameplay? I don't think so, because it looks pretty solid from what I've seen, with the usual bugs that will likely be sorted out. Is it a general lack of interest in cricket? If that's the case, that would indirectly mean the price is too high anyway. Nobody will be paying top dollar for a knitting game, no matter how good the physics are.