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Games might be $70 next gen.

CastletonSnob

Smash Cadet
Joined
May 4, 2020
Messages
45
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/2/2...ions-70-dollars-next-gen-price-increase-games

2K Games has announced that it’ll sell the next-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X versions of the upcoming NBA 2K21 for $69.99, a $10 increase to the current-gen Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game. And it’s the first indication that the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 may be bringing a price increase from the standard $60 that major video games have been sold at for years when they arrive this fall.
Most video games have been sold at a $60 price since the “seventh-gen” console era of the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, and the Nintendo Wii, which was a $10 price increase from the $50 standard that had preceded it. But if NBA 2K21 is any indication, that $60 era is about to be over: assuming other game studios follow 2K Games’ lead here, the PS5 and Xbox Series X could see $70 games become the new norm for AAA titles.
This might set a new trend of games costing $70. AAA developers might charge more for games that have less content so they can cram them with microtransactions, because that's how the industry works now; they try to see how much they can get away with. At what point do gamers say, "Enough is enough."?

You might say I'm jumping to conclusions or overreacting, but the game industry has done nothing to deserve the benefit of the doubt in recent years. I fully expect games to cost $70 next gen.
 

Diem

Agent of Phaaze
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Luminoth_Prime
There are two sides to this argument.

1) The price of games has hardly gone up in the past 30 years. And by that, I remember games used to be $50, and apparently that's how expensive they were MSRP back in the NES era, too. Games have been $60 for the past 14-15 years or so, so that's a $10 increase over 30 years. Meanwhile inflation has not followed that slight of a trajectory. $50 in the 80's is a lot more than it is now. Game consoles back then were $200 or $300, typically, whereas nowadays $400 is the minimum for new consoles, so inflation has affected those prices.

This is in addition to the costs of games going up higher and higher. It's not cheap to keep increasing the graphical fidelity of the visuals and the overall scope of the games. As games keep pushing for bigger and prettier, the budgets get bigger and bigger as well. It's rumored, for example, that Halo: Infinite's budget is to the tune of $500 million, which is half a billion dollars. However, that can be justified because they built a whole new state-of-the-art engine, which might be the most impressive engine in the industry and be used across Microsoft's first party studios,

Of course, the concern many people have is that gaming budgets and scopes like this simply aren't sustainable, and there's a lot of merit to that. These games that require huge budgets and huge teams sometimes have trouble breaking even, and almost universally require some degree of crunch to finish on schedule. The bigger and more expensive the games get, the worse that will get. While technology has gotten better, it hasn't made making games that much quicker or easier.

Which is part of why the $70 idea exists. Games are becoming so much more expensive that it requires more sales in order to break even or make a profit, despite a game that cost a few million to make being priced the same as a game that cost a few hundred million to make. But should games have such oversized budgets and scopes? That's a different discussion.

2) The gaming audience is bigger than ever, so prices don't have to go up. Games on the Nintendo Switch, for example, are outselling their predecessors' lifetime sales on the Wii, because more people are part of the gaming demographic now than 14 years ago, and it'll only continue to grow as it becomes less stigmatized in the future. As such, that $60 pricetag is earning more now than it was 10 years ago, because the volume of sales is larger even if the price isn't.

This, of course, depends on the game actually selling proportionately to that increase in the demographic, which is not always the case. Just as the gaming audience is bigger, so is the gaming industry. There are a lot more games worth buying on a month to month basis than in the past, so all that competition means that it's a bigger fight for customers when there are so many big releases all throughout the year.

Games still underperform despite the bigger audience, even good ones. You can invest millions of dollars into marketing and still not get very many sales. Just look at Nintendo last generation. Their whole platform underperformed, despite the PS4 and Xbox One taking off. Just because there's a larger demographic to sell to, doesn't mean they're all going to buy.

Overall, there's a lot of angles to this issue, and it's not entirely certain what the right call is.

This might set a new trend of games costing $70. AAA developers might charge more for games that have less content so they can cram them with microtransactions, because that's how the industry works now; they try to see how much they can get away with. At what point do gamers say, "Enough is enough."?
Gamers say "enough is enough" when they actually stop feeding these companies billions of dollars in microtransactions. They exist because they work, like it or not. There are more people out there who will either pay for microtransactions or condone them because "well it means updates and new content are free" than take a stance against them with their wallets.
 
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