Capcom’s president and chief operating officer has said he thinks game prices should go up.
Haruhiro Tsujimoto made the comments at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, Nikkei reported. TGS is sponsored by the Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association, a Japanese organisation which aims to support the Japanese industry, which Tsujimoto is currently the chairman of.
“Personally, I feel that game prices are too low,” Tsujimoto said, citing increasing development costs and a need to increase wages.
To be fair, he is partially right. It’s insane that games have basically been the same price since forever, the only reason they stayed the same is cuz more people could afford computers/consoles and in contrast to every other industry, making a new either physical or digital copy of a game is dirt cheap, so the more users the more profit.
Idk if it actually makes sense for games to be more expensive yet tho.
You also have to ignore economies of scale. Nintendo was a huge consumer of chips globally just for gaming. That market is now mature, and gaming isn’t as big of a piece as it used to be. There’s also way more games being sold now, call of duty gets more day one sales than most n64 games ever sold, which made disc’s super cheap. Now you have digital distribution which is practically free, and companies are getting more of a games price than ever before and it’s still not enough.
The MSRP for Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges in the mid-80s, adjusted to today’s U.S. Dollar, would average around $150-200.
I don’t think games should cost that much, but we stuck with the $60 price point for literal decades so it’s not completely unreasonable for someone to talk about raising prices.
(I also write this while having only bought one game? two? In the past year.)
How much of the cartridge sale was profit to the developer?
The hardware of the cartridge cost money. Distribution to retailers cost money. The retailers took their cut.
I wouldn’t be shocked at all if the publisher’s net revenue per game is significantly higher in real dollars than it was in the NES era.
Resident Evil 2 sold about 4.5 million copies on PS One, Resident Evil 2 Remake has sold around 12.5 million copies so far and climbing.
They’re making more money now than they ever did, even with games costing more to make. More customers is supposed to equal economy of scale, not fuck it lets charge out the ass so executives can make more money than they’ve ever made in history.
The economy of scale is what lets companies operate at higher costs. According to Wikipedia RE2 cost about $1 million to make. $1m might still buy a PS1 caliber game, but the remake cost at least an order of magnitude more. Many games now cost nine figures; GTA6 apparently cost $1 billion.
I’m not saying games should haphazardly inflate with everything else for the sake of share holders, but I’m open to the idea that the formula used twenty years ago to decide that AAA games should cost $60 might be out of date.
That formula has to include charging what the market will bear. They can certainly increase the price and sell fewer copies, and maybe that’ll be more profitable for them in the end, but they certainly can’t jack up the price and assume all their current customers will stump up to grow their profits.
People’s income hasn’t increased all that much, the wealth gap in many countries has only grown. Games cost more when they were a niche product, and cost less when the audience and potential sales grew. Maybe they’d prefer their billion dollar industry went back to being more niche and only for the wealthy.
Online sale have reduced distribution costs and unlimited scaling compared to physical media, so successful games are far more lucrative now than they were and unsuccessful games don’t have losses from overproduction and returns from stores.
If selling at the current rate wasn’t profitable, gaming companies would have stopped making games by now.
Ah, sorry. It stands for “Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price.”
In the U.S. the law doesn’t allow a manufacturer to require that retailers sell their product at a particular price, but they’re free to “suggest” one so that’s how we ended up with the MSRP.
It doesn’t carry any real weight, but it generally serves to anchor consumer expectations for a product’s value. (It also gives retailers an easy metric to compare sale prices against.)
The problem is the game industry, in the meantime of never going beyond the $60 threshold, found a far far more lucrative way of making money than just raising the MSRP. In fact, they found multiple ways of making money: skinner boxes, loot boxes, micro transactions, season passes, FOMO storefronts, etc etc. And even though we may agree that the MSRP eventually has to increase, they won’t suddenly give up on those anti-consumer, predatory practices.
It’s not unreasonable but at the end of the day, we buy these games to waste time. There’s not a whole lot of justifying why im going to spend more on something i use to just unwind when i can buy plenty of 20$ games that will give me hundreds of hours of entertainment
I get that and i bough baldurs gate full price on release, but as the games start creeping up past 70 to like 100, it’s like for what? I can just not spend this money. It’s not like a car i need to get to work and car prices were skyhigh last summer and fall for example, or food, etc. If gaming companies cant compete on wages with other tech businesses that need programmers, they’re just gonna have to make do with less manpower. Long winded way of saying inelastic market.
Adjusted price is a common talking point here, but it ignores the other side of inflation… that wages have stagnated and rising prices obviously means that people have less spending money.
Consider also that there is a lot of choice with the back catalog on PC as well as free games (that people can make in their spare time at no cost thanks to FOSS tools and free information). Pre-broadband, gaming was more of a take-it-or-leave situation.
So yeah, I think most people already see increasing prices as being motivated by greed. And some people likely see the $60 price as already greedy when games are often filler and spectacle (with poor QA testing on top of that, because they know people will pre-order it anyway, and then buy the later DLC or cosmetics).
They sell vastly more games than before. And there isn’t a media anymore. And they should have increased their productivity in all these years.
Video games are not a good. They’re a digital product, a service. The cost is completely decorrelated from the amount you sell. Which is why it is so profitable.
As long as my country gets regional pricing I don’t care, raise them in the US all you want they have plenty of money.
I think regional pricing is unfair. A company can use regional labor, to sell a product in a market where the labor is more expensive. At a higher price.
So the company gets to take advantage of geographic arbitrage, but the customers can’t. That feels unfair
Right, we’re all millionaires over here. Yup, not living paycheck to paycheck at all! No sir!
I remember getting Donkey Kong on release for the Super Nintendo and it was more expensive than most games are right now, 66 usd. Name one thing that has the same price in 2023 that it did I 1994. It’s insane.
My dad still reminds me that when he bought me Dr. Mario for NES on release, it was $90USD. I remember seeing many a game at Toys R Us with price tags of up to $120.
But I can name plenty of games in 2023 that cost more $66. Shittons of console titles are $70 now!
But I can name plenty of games in 2023 that cost more $66.
None of which come with the media used to play, most don’t even have a box. If you think games are cheaper now, you’re being scammed.
$66 in the 90’s vs $70 in 2023 isn’t cheaper because games are digitally distributed now? What are you smoking? Can I have some?
I buy physical copies of ps4 games for under $10 pretty regularly. You can find some absurd sales if you know where to look and how to keep an eye out.
The Donkey Kong you bought in 1994 had to pay not only for development, but also for the package, for the circuits (think a 1TB SSD in 2023), for distribution, etc. Do you see modern companies having to pay for any of that?
You seem to miss the point it was almost 30 years ago and they spend 18 months developing with a team of 20 people. Read those numbers again. Damn, the electrical bills alone to create Starfield most probably surpasses the entire development cost of a handful of SNES games combined. Yes, old games had manuals and came in physical form but those components where cheap at the time.
I’m not saying game SHOULD cost more. I’m just claiming games haven’t become a lot more expensive.
They were a lot cheaper to make back then too.
Rare spent 18 months developing Donkey Kong Country from an initial concept to a finished game, and according to product manager Dan Owsen, 20 people worked on it in total. It cost an estimated US$1 million to produce, and Rare said that it had the most man hours ever invested in a video game at the time, 22 years. The team worked 12–16-hours every day of the week.
These days that’s indie game territory.
Everyone: “Games are getting WAY too expensive.”
Out of touch executive: “Games are too cheap! Why are our sales going down? I promised the shareholders infinite growth!”
Games haven’t gotten more expensive since ever. Like I said above, The Original Donkey Kong for the SNES was 66 usd. It releases in 1994.
That’s a very US-centric view, at best. I paid about 23 dollars for a brand new copy of Half-Life 2 in 2004.
I live in Sweden. But saying it cost 799sek in 1994 might not give you a good idea of its cost.
That was as expensive as it was back then because the game released on what is effectively a PCB. Which was expensive to make.
How expensive? Because accounting for inflation, $66 in 1994 is worth about $136 in 2023.
