Game prices should have increased with every new generation, former PlayStation US boss says
Game prices should have increased with every new generation, former PlayStation US boss says | VGC
One factor they don't seem to consider is that they are competing for a finite resource: consumer attention.
There has never been so much content to consume: not only games, movies, series, music, books, podcasts, and even old games.
New games have to compete with and stand above all that content to justify the price.
As others have said, purchase power is down, people subscribe to more services (net, mobile, streaming music and video), all that bites into the available budget to buy games.
Bottom line: it's getting hard to justify spending that amount on a game you don't have time to play.
yea, cant justify the orignal switch and shtty swsh games, and then theres the new switch too.
Yeah it's hilarious to me they wanna charge more and don't expect to sell less. Ppl would go from being iffy about indie games to checking them out more if 4 at base price cost what a AAA one does
There were more sports cars in the parking lot in the PS1 era than there were in the PS4 era
What a struggle. Should we then have tripled the prices so the poor publishers could afford 2 sports cars instead? Or, hear me out, just play indie games that's higher quality and doesn't have a useless middle man.
How many sports cars were in the CEO’s garage during each era though?
how many HOMES or yachts you mean.
The title should read "Playstation US boss is mad that spending a ton of money making games look slightly closer to real life didn't make people want to spend more to play them"
Not to mention the likely equal spending on advertising
Um.. show us how the salaries of game devs have risen compared with game prices?
“No” -John PlayStation
The min wage and salaries in general should have increased with every generation. Me says.
When I first started working it was still back in the days where you were given cash in an envelope. After we were paid we always used to go out to a pub together for a few rounds, I rarely used to get through all of the change I'd been given, I never got into the paper money.
You used to be able to get a pint for silvers, these days you need to give them folding money for a bag of peanuts.
It's a mad world.
as well as my salary. but it didnt.
He’s not wrong since games pricing hasn’t kept up with inflation. If it had we’d be buying $120 games. The problem is wages also haven’t kept up with inflation either. If gaming companies had increased the prices they’d have fucked themselves.
Instead, investors did the fucking, and now here we are.
Gaming is one of the cheapest hobbies and forms of entertainment there is. The price I have paid per hour for playing my favorite games is miniscule compared to something like seeing a movie.
I could also point out: If the main sales race was for the gold-plated base copy of a game, instead of nickel and dining people who only have nickels and dimes, then it’s possible we would have a gaming world entirely focused on churning out AAAA singleplayer experiences, back to putting out trilogies of obscure gaming experiences.
This is not blaming gamers for not accepting higher prices for incomplete games; publishers moved where the money was, and I don’t blame them. I blame the rest of OTHER industries for not updating their wages so the world is livable and people have extra for entertainment.
“There were more sports cars in the parking lot in the PS1 era than there were in the PS4 era, ..."
dude, fuck you, your parking lot and i wish that giant acme anvils drop on every fucking sports car you'll ever own.
I'm pretty sure the few overpaid execs that are "fuck you" rich are still there, and they're probably richer than ever. However now they probably consider themselves too important to park with normal people. It's all about private jets and helicopters.
Tells a lot about this guy and his ilk that he thinks you measure a healthy company to how many assholes actively flaunt their money with shallow luxury shit.
The quality of games did not improve, in fact game quality and diversity has deteriorated. The quantity of content has dropped off as well. Graphics fidelity and production costs have skyrocketed though.
Graphics are so superficial when it comes to games anyhow, why would anyone pay more for a pretty waste of time?
Edit: i am talking about AAA games here, obv there has been an extreme proliferation of indie titles
"Fancy graphics" also doesn't correlate well with how visually appealing a game is. I would take Ori graphics over CoD any day.
Neither quality nor diversity are objective measures, and I'd certainly disagree with you that they didn't improve.
Well, because purchasing power has also collapsed in that span of time, obvi
/s
a good case study is swsh, pokemon, starting from that, it lower and lower quality, yet people sitll buy it,.
Diversity and quality are both going to be difficult to measure objectively, and I'd argue both are still in better supply today. Quantity is far easier to prove objectively. Not only are there just far more games out there, but try some like for like comparisons of some of your favorite long-running franchises on How Long to Beat. Assassin's Creed II was 20-25 hours; Assassin's Creed: Shadows is 35-64. Halo 2 was 9-12; Halo Infinite is 11-20. Baldur's Gate 3 is close to as long as its two predecessors combined. Call of Duty is three games in one now.
The value of a game's Quantity is directly proportionate to its Quality though, starfield and its 1000s of repetitive planets are the perfect example of this. Would any halo fan rather play 20 hours of infinite or 20 hours of halo 2...?
Yes there have been outliers of increased quality and quantity over the last decade, but in the full priced AAA space nowadays, that is the exception not the rule.
ahn they did? 40 and 50 USD on ps2 50 and 60 USD on ps3 60 USD on ps4 70 USD on ps5
Supposed proponent of the "free market" thinks that the market was unfair to massive corporation. More at 11. /s
Our wages too...
So does piracy
Fucking why? These dudes always cite the cost of making games increasing as a reason for this nonsense but they never talk about the many many factors working in their favor already.
First, most people are probably not buying physical games very much if at all anymore. And because of that people don't really buy games used anymore either since used games in general are much rarer. So more people are buying games directly from company storefronts. These same storefronts that also make games stay more expensive for longer periods of time. Not only that but there are literally more people playing and buying games now than have ever done so in the past (at least up until very recently)
All of these factors should be increasing Sony's profit margins. If anything games should be getting cheaper. Not more expensive.
And I don't buy that a ps5 game is significantly more expensive to make than a ps4 game. There's barely a difference between each system's capabilities in terms of graphical detail in the assets a team needs to produce. Most of the benefits of ps5 come in the way of higher resolutions and higher frame rates. I have yet to see a game release on ps5 that couldn't have also been ported to ps4 with lower resolutions and frame rates.
Even the games they said needed the ps5's speed were eventually ported to PC and run on the Steam Deck just fine. (Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart for example)
These statements aren't anything more than a company executive trying to gaslight people into accepting unacceptable pricing strategies.
We make billions, but we want trillions
Don't forget that game development is increasingly shoving the hardware burden onto the consumer by using poorly made tools to streamline development (thus cutting costs) with garbage optimization which is why a gaming rig now has to be powerful enough to simulate a gaming rig from 10 years ago down to the atomic level but the graphics haven't gotten appreciably better.
While thats definitely true for many games it's less relevant for console makers and its hardly true universally; definitely not true for the insomniac games I mentioned.
Plenty of games are coming out that are optimized very well. Unfortunately, UE5 has gotten way too popular and devs often don't seem to really know how to optimize games developed on the engine. Kinda the downfall of having an engine that appeals so much to artists but not so much to engineers. I think the only remotely well optimized game I can think of that was made in UE5 is Hellblade 2. And even as impressive as that game is from a technical standpoint (nothing can fix how boring it is) I still have stuttering problems with it. Though my rapidly aging R5 2600 is not helping things there.
But there are still impressive PC games out there. Recently Doom The Dark Ages, indiana Jones, and Kingdom Come Deliverence 2 come to mind as games that are impressively well optimized on PC. Especially KCD2, that game feels like black magic to me.
I think this is less of an issue of cost cutting by devs and publishers, though it's definitely a factor, and moreso just devs not being as knowledgeable about optimizing games as they used to be.
Can't say I agree with you there. The handful of games I get around to in a given year that are pushing the state of the art still run well at high settings on my machine built four years ago. The number of games pushing that threshold are so few that I might get a longer life out of my machine than usual.
Former PlayStation US boss can go fuck himself!
What is with these people?
They are CEOs of company's, yet they don't seem to understand how capitalism works. What's something is worth is depending on what the market will bear. If the market won't bear a $90 game then it isn't worth $90.
It's a double edged sword
The factors that influence development costs in order to keep up with the quality of the times is no doubt complex, but at the end of the day you're spot on. It's only worth what the consumers will pay.
Shhhh! Nobody tell him about Steam and GOG...
I want to see the Playstation brand implode on itself like the PS3 price shock again, so people move to PC!
XD
This just shows execs do not understand why piracy diminished
You can price your game however you want. But it doesn't mean I need to buy it. I still have a choice.
Not sure about the future where we will work for corporations for free and they will pay us with products we don't want, because we're heading this road pretty fast.
I've recently decided that I'm not spending more than $10 on a game until I've cleaned out my backlog.
There's hundreds of games in my backlog, so it's going to be a while.
Nope, not going to argue against obviously dumb points from executives. Do it. Raise your prices yearly. Fuck it, you think prices need to increase? Increase them.
It takes me five clicks to close Steam, open Firefox, open my favorite piracy site and download your game. Raise the fucking price, test how much I value my money versus five clicks.
Well if they're gonna charge those prices, they're probably gonna opt for Denuvo and then we can't pirate it. But if enough of them do it, then we might see a concerted effort into breaking denuvo
There's a handful of people out there cracking Denuvo games.
They have when you factor in DLC.
The purchasing power for myself and other consumers has never been lower.
Tell me more about how your profitable company is entitled to more of my shrinking money...
in a way it did with dlc
I mean, inflation exists. That said, they just use dlc and other microtransactions to recoup costs (plus in some ways production is cheaper, just not overall).
I like to remind people that they're taking advantage of a thing called consumer surplus. In short, any given person will spend X amount of dollars for a product, be it $60, $30 half off, or $120 collectors edition, etc. Hell, "free" gets the most heads, hence how mobile market works.
Flat $60 (or the shift to $80) will inevitably cut off anyone unwilling to pay that price, which at a certain point is bad for business and why you get sales. Plus, most sales are digital now, so it's not like there's a per unit overhead. Keeping a dynamic pricing structure is simply better in spite of inflation, which obviously this former boss apparently doesn't get.
I think even if they did, we'd still have arrived at exactly where we are right now. They sold more copies of games because, after inflation, the games became cheaper and more accessible for the average consumer. Now that prices are rising again, that average consumer is getting priced out, and they're not making up for that volume in the higher price. $70 seems to be what the highest tier of production value can get away with in 2025 if they're maximizing sales, GTA and Mario Kart notwithstanding, as they're outliers.
Capitalism and the free market is supposed to encourage efficiency and innovation in order to remain competitive in order to keep prices low... Is Sony against capitalism? Is it against the free market? Is in adverse to innovation? C'mon Sony ... Stop being lazy.
Sony, Nintendo and Xbox are not true capitalism because their consoles are not free markets so of course they don't like capitalism when they benefit from absolute control and can fix the prices for everything in their ecosystem.
The only true capitalistic store front is steam and funnily enough it's doing laps around all 3.
Part of why steam is so successful is because they regularly do enormous discounts.
People come to steam because of how good the deals are but they end up buying quite a lot at full prices as well.
Yes, yes, and yes. By securing a monopoly you will have the highest possible profit at lowest possible investment. That is the ultimate goal of every publicly traded company.
I predict an increase in market demand for sea shanties.
It’s hard for me to imagine anyone buying brand new AAA games these days. Between the huge back catalogues of previous gen consoles as well as the PC and the insane prices for new AAA games which don’t innovate very much anymore, I can’t see much reason spend that kind of money.
I have a hacked New Nintendo 3DS and it can basically run every console emulator up to and including PS1 as well as natively run GBA, DS, and 3DS games. The library for the thing is enormous and with a 128GB microSD card you can store a ton of stuff on it.
Oh and it can also run DOSBox and SCUMMVM games though I haven’t tried them so I can’t vouch for the play experience. I should think the stylus would make a decent mouse replacement but I’m not sure how well it works in practice. Arcade-style DOS games that use the keyboard only (Duke Nukem, Crystal Caves, Commander Keen) should work great though!
From what I understand, with the 3DS, you had to get roughly 'Version 1' of those before they changed the actual hardware to make... basically 'rooting' it more difficult... or maybe I'm thinking of the Switch?
Either way, what I'm trying to say is basically 'thats impressive' if you were the one to actually uh... cough, install the sea shanties.
I went the easier route and just have a Steam Deck, and yep, they are perfect for emulating basically everything up to roughly current gen - 2... and most stuff within the last two gens can be made to run on it in some way...
... I was doinking about with the 3DS remaster of OoT earlier, and was actually very surprised to find that with my setup, the touchscreen... just worked as a 3DS touchscreen, I didn't even think to intentionally configure it, accidentally poked the screen and oh well there ya go, lol.
Anyway, yep, we are absolutely gonna see a uh 'return to tradition' so to speak, as many high budget high fidelity modern games... basically suck, and are outrageously expensive.
As to a stylus as mouse for DOSBox and SCUMVM... i don't know what the actual software configuration solution would look like there, but if the touch screen is high enough dpi dense... then it should at least conceptually work, as most of the games from that era that use a mouse are like, point and click adventures.
If anything Steam showed us thay 60$ game is a stupid idea. Free markets pay what they feel like paying and thats when creators and consumers are the happiest not with price controll.
Sounds like a guy who can eat all of my hair and shit.
So should the quality.
And not just graphical quality.
Unfortunately you get half of the games and the other half is splitted in DLCs, season pass, and pre order bonus.
Which is to say that prices did increase every generation.
yup 60-70 for the base game, 10-30ish for DLC, and then more for online play.
its an inverse situation with games. more expenisve lower quality, they tested how much certain fans will tolerate it, and then go higher.