Retail giant Tesco has launched a major price cutting campaign on its games offering, selling titles for as little as £3.00 online – prompting angry reactions from the trade.

A number of high profile titles such as EA’s The Sims on PC and a range of £6 PS2 games, £10 DS and PSP games and £15 Xbox 360 titles are all included in the deal.

Chips boss Don McCabe blasted the cuts: “Tesco has seen a slowdown on non-food items so they are reacting in the only way that they know how to, which is to slash prices,” he told MCV.

“Over the last quarter their non-food sales have just lost ground. They’ve reduced the amount of space that they give to DVDs now because they’ve effectively screwed that market up, and they’ve stopped doing CD singles as well.

“If you devalue a product enough it turns consumers off and they stop buying. There’s a risk that they could do that with games. There’s a limit to how much the publishers out there will devalue their product. I’m sure they could go even lower, but this might not be with publishers’ blessings,” he added.

Mastertronic’s Garry Williams predicted that the price slashing could reflect badly on games publishers, as well as the retail giant.

“Supermarkets have a thing called basket spend to underwrite any discount in the games sector,” he said.

“You have to ask the parties concerned what the long term benefits are. If they did fund this they will have some serious repercussions from their High Street accounts.”