The controversial boss of Embracer Group has discussed the topic of increasing the price of video games beyond $70 amid rising development costs and an increasingly competitive market.
Plus you'd think that with distribution costs, shelving costs, CD stamping costs and printing manuals, they'd already be cutting our costs... but it's not about us.
On the one hand, games have stayed the same price for a long time, well below the rate of inflation.
On the other, wages have also stayed well below inflation for a long time. I don't expect they'll see the growth they want when a game purchase takes a larger and larger bite out of someone's paycheck.
It's a good example for how inflation isn't something constant that affects everything equally. Game development costs are mostly wages, if wages stay below inflation then development costs stay below inflation unless teams get larger, and especially game development is known for paying rather low wages.
That's a significant portion of the cost of a brand new console! That's two weeks worth of electricity for my house! That's 6 months worth of my mobile phone service! Jesus wept.
I'm not paying more than ÂŁ40 for a video game, and at that price it had better be a GREAT game.
I mostly wait until they're in the ÂŁ20-30 range anyway, even if that means waiting for sales. I'm not in a rush, I've got plenty of other games I can play in the mean time after all.
Sekiro still sell for 60 dollar. The industry figured out they can use scarcity in a form of limited time discount to encourage customer to make purchase, so there's no need to lower the base price forever.
@nanoUFO I’m still not used to new games costing $70 USD yet since I buy most of my games used. In my head, $70 games are still the “Deluxe Editions”. If someone released a $100 game, I’d probably think of it as the “Super Deluxe Edition” and wait for it to be $60.
I pretty much exclusively play and buy indie games nowadays but in Canada it's around $80 to $90 for new games not including tax. Don't think any AAA game would draw me for that kind of price. I could get selaco, crow country and probably world of goo 2 for that price.