I'd say that's its because there's only really 1 country that's going to buy it in large numbers but the reality is it's the standard ea tax. Stop buying it every year or stop complaining.
They know that people are going to pay for it. For exactly the same reason I haven't bought a Formula 1 game in a few years. Every year it's just not quite worth the 60-70 euro's for me. I'm not even that mad about the 70 euro price tag if I get something nice for it in return, everything has gotten more expensive and games have been 60 euro since forever, but last year's game with some small changes is not going to cut it for that price.
If people buy it anyway at the full price, then the game publisher will correctly deduce that it indeed worth at least that much money for enough people (otherwise those people would not part ways with that much money to get it) to get that game as soon as it comes out.
In Economics, perfect pricing (which is not yet possible but, damn, they're really trying hard) from the point of view of a seller (i.e. for maximum profits) is when they get exactly as much money from each individual as that person is willing to pay for it, so the "ideal" world for them would be individually-tailored prices going as high as it could possibly go for each person whilst still managing to sell to that person.
As they can't as of yet sell at different prices to each and every individual, they've gone as far as they can (regional pricing, different prices in different stores with different audiences and, maybe more importantly, time-from-publishing pricing) and then push prices up and up slowly whilst checking if in total the price increase has yielded more money or not (they have no issue with loosing customers due to higher prices if in total they still make more money at the price point than at a lower price point).
IMHO, in the face of this, the easist and best reaction for somebody who wants the game but does not think it's worth $70, is to wait until the price falls down to how much they're willing to pay for it (even better, let it fall some more and buy a couple more games with the savings). In fact if enough people do it the price will fall much faster as the publisher's sales data analysis will signal to them that they've put the game at too high a price point and they'll lower it trying to pick up the "money left on the table" from those who are interested but not at that price point before those people lose interest.
I loved sports games growing up, but they are absolutely terrible now. Over priced, full of cash grabs and needlessly complex. I just want to hit x to pass. I don't want a fucking story line, I just want to play the game.
Anytime I consider buying a Madden game, I watch a YouTube video of competitive play for the latest version. It always reveals how garbage the football sim part is. It's all audibles and hot route spam and exploiting the useless AI in the same ways over and over again.
I'll never buy a Madden game while all that crap is in there. They should make it so that spamming audibles and hot routes causes players to blow assignments and false start all the time, but the average "competitive" Madden player would probably die from nonstop crying and pants-soiling if EA did anything like that.
The only sports game worth buying is nba 2k. The graphics are way better. The franchise mode is a million times better. There is less glitches. Stop buying madden. Tell the NFL you dont want EA anymore
Yeah I have a version of Madden from 2015 that works perfectly fine and seems to be more or less the same game, have been very happy with it. I refuse to pay $70 for a game that I know is riddled with microtransactions for really.... nothing else changing