General Gaming Game prices likely to raise by $10 next gen (Update: CoD)

[crispy4000]

Quote

NBA 2K21 will have a recommended price of $69.99/£64.99 when it launches on PS5 and Xbox Series X this year.

That's $10 more than the PS4 and Xbox One version, which has a recommended price of $59.99/£59.99.

It's the first hint that the next generation may lead to higher software prices as development costs are expected to increase with the new machines.

And because 2k gonna 2k:
 

Quote

NBA 2K21 has multiple versions, including one that crosses the two console generations. The Kobe Bryant-fronted Mamba Forever Edition is available across all platforms for $99.99/£84.99, and will feature a host of extra digital content. In addition, anyone who purchases this version can get the standard version of the game on the other generation at no extra cost (within the same console family) -- so if you buy the PS4 Mama Forever Edition of the game, you can get the standard version on PS5 as part of the package.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-07-02-nba-2k21-price-is-usd10-more-expensive-on-xbox-series-x-and-ps5

 

Presents an interesting problem for games releasing cross-gen.  Do you still charge the extra next-gen $10 for an edition that works across both?
 

Also, will subscription costs rise too?

[Dodger]

As sales go more and more digital, it kind of knee caps the argument for the need for $70 games. And of course, if games do become $70 we still know they will be riddled microtransactions from all the big publishers because no amount of money is ever enough. 

 

Sure, I'd pay $70 for Last of Us 2 or Spiderman 2, but I ain't paying $70 for the next fucking Assassins Creed that will promptly take me to a screen to spend real money on fake currency to make the game "easier"

[SaysWho?]

3 minutes ago, Dodger said:

As sales go more and more digital, it kind of knee caps the argument for the need for $70 games. And of course, if games do become $70 we still know they will be riddled microtransactions from all the big publishers because no amount of money is ever enough. 

 

Sure, I'd pay $70 for Last of Us 2 or Spiderman 2, but I ain't paying $70 for the next fucking Assassins Creed that will promptly take me to a screen to spend real money on fake currency to make the game "easier"

 

Weirdly enough, most of my cheapest purchases are physical.

[heydude93]

$70 seems a bit much for cross gen titles, indies and remasters but I'm cool with paying an extra 10 for next gen AAA games 

[Dodger]

3 minutes ago, SaysWho? said:

 

Weirdly enough, most of my cheapest purchases are physical.

 

 

Even on PSN and XBL you can get deals on digital. I just got Days Gone for $14.99 during the last sale, I got SPiderman for $19,99 whenever it was on sale. Sure you might have to wait a little more for a digital sale than just going on Amazon and getting a used copy, but digital games go on sale all the time now. 

[skillzdadirecta]

I haven't payed full price for a physical game I bought Day One in forever. That said, this sucks if true.

[Keyser_Soze]

Since consoles are so easy it's the easy tax.

 

 

[Kal-El814]

Game prices have remained stagnant for what... almost 20 years at this point? We’re long overdue for an increase. My ass paid $70 for FFIII and Chrono Trigger on the SNES.

[TwinIon]

I feel like we've heard this over and over again, and I always do think it makes some amount of sense, but at the same time it seems the market pushes back really hard against it. Maybe this time it will happen, but I'll believe it when I see it. When you already have enormous games like Cyberpunk selling for $60, it seems more difficult to justify a yearly sports game costing $10 more.

 

It would also make things pretty difficult for Microsoft, where their whole deal is you buy it once and play it everywhere.

[gamer.tv]

The pricing model in the UK is just so wrong when compared to the US. I don't mind spending money to support game development, but I feel a bit aggrieved when those in the US will spend $64.99 and I'll have to spend $81 for the same game. 

[Bloodporne]

I'll buy it on sale later when I can get the not-fucked-up and fully patched and improved version for $20 or more less.

[skillzdadirecta]

26 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

Game prices have remained stagnant for what... almost 20 years at this point? We’re long overdue for an increase. My ass paid $70 for FFIII and Chrono Trigger on the SNES.

Pretty sure I paid $75 for Streetfighter 2 for the SNES...Actual Cartridges were expensive to manufacture though.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

30 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

Game prices have remained stagnant for what... almost 20 years at this point? We’re long overdue for an increase. My ass paid $70 for FFIII and Chrono Trigger on the SNES.

I would have thought the sheer number of copies being sold has offset the prices not increasing. The number of consumers buying games is far higher than in the 90s, and even early 2000s. 
 

Game development may be getting more expensive, but that’s only part of the driving force of this price increase. Games are expected to make more and more revenue with each new installment, or at the very least the company has to make more and more revenue with each new fiscal year. It’s not nearly enough to simply make a profit. 
 

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the price increases are more due to companies assuming loot boxes will get legislated out of existence, and they won’t have a good excuse to increase prices mid-generation. 

[Kal-El814]

5 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

I would have thought the sheer number of copies being sold has offset the prices not increasing. The number of consumers buying games is far higher than in the 90s, and even early 2000s. 
 

Game development may be getting more expensive, but that’s only part of the driving force of this price increase. Games are expected to make more and more revenue with each new installment, or at the very least the company has to make more and more revenue with each new fiscal year. It’s not nearly enough to simply make a profit. 
 

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the price increases are more due to companies assuming loot boxes will get legislated out of existence, and they won’t have a good excuse to increase prices mid-generation. 

 

Yeah that’s all fair. I think it’s a lot of that and the mountain of evidence that suggests gamers are willing to pay more than MSRP with the correct hook; throw in some tchotchke that costs seventy five cents to make and you can charge $80 for a special edition, etc. Loot boxes are like coin blocks in Mario games, but people are super willing to pay for cosmetics and other content with a developer friendly cost / benefit ratio.

 

It’s interesting to think if TLoU2 would have sold less at $70 than at $60, and if so, would it have been enough to actually have hurt ND’s bottom line. Something like a sports game seems like the worst possible type of game to justify increasing their cost for a vanilla edition.

 

Who knows.

[Brian]

46 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

Game prices have remained stagnant for what... almost 20 years at this point? We’re long overdue for an increase. My ass paid $70 for FFIII and Chrono Trigger on the SNES.

The front end costs have, but with the addition of back end costs (DLC, loot boxes, micro transactions, etc) prices as a whole have risen. 

[number305]

NBA2k is the worst example of a company to raise prices.  The game is kneecapped without a constant connection to their shitty servers and the whole deal is just set up to collect micro-transactions.  Then for them to say they won't support Smart-delivery or any cross gen purchases - yea get out of here with that.

[XxEvil AshxX]

 Dear giant publishers, stop paying your CEO's like, 30 million dollars a year. Problem solved.

[ort]

1 hour ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Pretty sure I paid $75 for Streetfighter 2 for the SNES...Actual Cartridges were expensive to manufacture though.

 

I think it was $90 if I remember right... (Looking around I might be remembering wrong, but for some reason that number is burned in my brain)

 

I definitely got $90 bucks worth of entertainment from that game though, that's for damn sure.

[skillzdadirecta]

1 minute ago, ort said:

 

I think it was $90 if I remember right...

 

I definitely got $90 bucks worth of entertainment from that game though, that's for damn sure.

You could be right... It was so long ago  I think the first Zelda game was pretty expensive too because it had Battery Backup built in. My stepfather bought that for me so i have no idea how much that game cost.

[number305]

1 minute ago, ort said:

 

I think it was $90 if I remember right...

 

I definitely got $90 bucks worth of entertainment from that game though, that's for damn sure.

With all the different versions I don't want to think about the total I paid for SF2.  There was regular, championship edition, turbo... plus I purchased it for more than one console.  Not counting the summer I spent throwing countless quarters at the arcade machine.

[ort]

Yeah, it's funny, because that's probably the most I've ever paid for a video game and also probably the most I've played a single video game. Broken down by the hour it might be the best bargain ever.

 

I think I may have paid $90 after tax. The internet seems to think it went for $70 on release, but that $90 price tag is really something I remember quite clearly and talked about for years afterwards. I'm not sure.

[Boyle5150]

2 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Since consoles are so easy it's the easy tax.

 

 

Maybe something your mom can charge? 
 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

IDG: Other publishers are considering raising game prices for PS5 and Xbox Series X (GamesIndustry.biz)

Quote

Other game publishers are considering raising the price of games for PS5 and Xbox Series X, says games research firm IDG Consulting.

 

It follows the news that NBA 2K21 will be priced at $69.99 on the next consoles, $10 more expensive than it is on the current devices.

 

Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz, IDG President and CEO Yoshio Osaki says that game pricing has remained flat since 2005, whereas TV and movie pricing has increased significantly.

 

[johnny]

Nba 2k does not need to up prices. They make a shit ton of money on micro transactions. And frankly they don’t work hard enough year to year for any justification. If you told me the last of us part 2 was 70 dollars I’d say ok. But Fuck something like 2k raising their prices when they do the bare minimum. 

[Bjomesphat]

I only buy Nintendo games at full price.

 

I'm fine waiting a year or two to get a game under $20.

[Brian]

My subscription to GameFly will continue 

[crispy4000]

2 hours ago, Emperor Diocletian II said:

Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz, IDG President and CEO Yoshio Osaki says that game pricing has remained flat since 2005, whereas TV and movie pricing has increased significantly.

This is exactly why the whole corporate greed idea some of you are tossing around makes no sense.  Inflation is a thing, and there’s no logic in driving up the cost of hardware alone.

 

2 hours ago, johnny said:

Nba 2k does not need to up prices. They make a shit ton of money on micro transactions. And frankly they don’t work hard enough year to year for any justification. If you told me the last of us part 2 was 70 dollars I’d say ok. But Fuck something like 2k raising their prices when they do the bare minimum. 

They’re in a better place to charge $70 (or more, for their ridiculous cross gen solution) thank just about anyone else.

 

Sports games fans are already so used to getting poor deals.

[Xbob42]

 

Still relevant.

Game prices have not "remained stagnant" at all. Stop willingly and happily offering to pay more money for literally no reason. At least be apathetic before gleefully announcing how you'll be "cool" with paying more money for the same shit. Come on, guys, at least try a little bit. Games sell way more copies on average than they did in 2005, WAY more. Then you've got 30 versions of every game, then the micro transactions. Then the season passes. Then the battle passes. Then the expansions and DLC packs.

 

In 2005 when I paid $50-60 for a game, that was the end of the transaction. There IS no end to the transaction anymore. Game companies are posting record profits. Stop fucking pretending they're gonna end up in the poor house if they don't charge us more for the base game.

[crispy4000]

1 hour ago, Xbob42 said:

 

Still relevant.

Game prices have not "remained stagnant" at all. Stop willingly and happily offering to pay more money for literally no reason. At least be apathetic before gleefully announcing how you'll be "cool" with paying more money for the same shit. Come on, guys, at least try a little bit. Games sell way more copies on average than they did in 2005, WAY more. Then you've got 30 versions of every game, then the micro transactions. Then the season passes. Then the battle passes. Then the expansions and DLC packs.

 

In 2005 when I paid $50-60 for a game, that was the end of the transaction. There IS no end to the transaction anymore. Game companies are posting record profits. Stop fucking pretending they're gonna end up in the poor house if they don't charge us more for the base game.

They won’t.  But they’ve also stretched their bullshit as far as they could reasonably take it this gen.  Everyone backpedaled after BFII.

 

To keep ahead (of inflation), it’s much easier to price hike the things they’re already charging for than to reinvent the wheel.

[Xbob42]

3 minutes ago, crispy4000 said:

They won’t.  But they’ve also stretched their bullshit as far as they could reasonably take it this gen.  Everyone backpedaled after BFII.

 

To keep ahead of inflation, it’s much easier to price hike the things they’re already charging for than to reinvent the wheel.

 

Haha, yeah, everyone backed off of loot boxes and yet every other game I've played this year has a battle pass, with the seasons getting shorter and shorter. It's like they're constantly reinventing the wheel when it comes to monetization. Every fucking Roblox game I play with my daughter has a battle pass in it. Don't let anyone convince you this is necessary. The companies should be falling over backwards trying to show what great value we'll be getting by paying more, but instead they're gonna let consumers convince each other that this is some long-overdue change, which we see in this very thread again and again.

The absurdity of it is mind-blowing. People haven't just drank the Kool-Aid, they've donned little aprons and are helping make more.

[crispy4000]

I never said the extra charges are needed, or ideal for us.  The industry would adapt without them.

 

But again, it’s much easier to do a price hike than to figure out how to make battle passes, loot boxes, etc more profitable.

[Paperclyp]

I have stopped buying almost all games at full price. 

 

The Last of Us is one of my top 10 games of all time, and I will wait for at least one price drop before buying the sequel. 

 

There came a point where I hadn't finished Persona 5, which I bought day one, and it was on sale for $10 and I was like WTF am I doing. 

[EternallDarkness]

It's rare that I buy a game at launch. The ones I do tend to be first party Nintendo games that almost never see a price drop anyway. But for the vast majority I just wait a month or two and get them on sale. 70 seems crazy to me, but if a company can get it...why not try I guess. 

[XxEvil AshxX]

The fact that there's practically no manufacturing overhead nowadays (even the physical copies cost pennies to produce) throws off the whole "inflation" argument.

 

N64 games were $60 back in the day, and they were made of expensive plastic and silicon, had full-color printed booklets, came in full-color boxes, and had the "nintendo tax" on top of them. Not only that, but if it wasn't a Nintendo first-party title, it was lucky to sell a million copies back then.

 

Sure, the cost of game development has gone up.. but other costs have gone down. Hell, nowadays they don't even need to finish the game before they sell it to us. They literally have us pay to play test their games and they use those sales to determine whether or not they'll actually bother. If they decide to release a broken game and it sells like shit, they'll cut their losses and sweep it under the rug and move on to the next project.

 

There are too many medium sized, very successful developers out there for the "it costs too much" argument to hold any water. They release great games that sell a ton and they don't break the bank in order to do it.

 

The only ones complaining about this are the EA's and the 2K's that have to buy their CEO's another yacht.

 

 

[Jason]

9 hours ago, gamer.tv said:

The pricing model in the UK is just so wrong when compared to the US. I don't mind spending money to support game development, but I feel a bit aggrieved when those in the US will spend $64.99 and I'll have to spend $81 for the same game. 

 

Keep in mind our stated prices never include sales tax. While your 20% VAT is. 

 

I know it doesn't completely explain the discrepancies, but it explains some of it.