Buzz
Clearly, no gamer wishes to spend more on video games in the future.
It cannot be denied that the global gaming industry is progressively evolving with positive changes and advancements in the quality of games and new projects. From content, image quality, graphics, sound to AI technology in games, all have been significantly upgraded and improved. This is undoubtedly good news for gamers, but at the same time, it also creates a greater financial burden. This is said because alongside investing in hardware upgrades to cope with the increasing size of games, game publishers themselves do not conceal their intention to raise the prices of their games in the future.
In fact, a slew of major publishers have uniformly raised the prices of their AAA blockbusters from $59.99 to $69.99. Starting with Take-Two's NBA 2K21 and then, Sony quickly followed suit with games like Demon's Souls and Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales Ultimate Edition. It didn't take long for this $69.99 price point to gradually become the standard for AAA games thereafter, with the most recent being titles like Dead Space Remake, Baldur's Gate 3 on PS5, and Mortal Kombat 1. However, it seems this is still not the final price point.
Recently, Haruhiro Tsujimoto, CEO of Capcom - one of the world's largest publishers, stated that the $69.99 price point still does not truly meet the demands from publishers. In fact, he believes that such a cost is too low and typically the amount that developers have to spend on a project is more than 20 years ago by 100 times. Not to mention, the cost of salaries for the development team also needs to increase to attract talent.
Despite the statement, Capcom has not taken any specific actions yet. In fact, this publisher is among the few names that have never raised the prices of their games. Their two biggest projects released this year, Resident Evil 4 Remake and Street Fighter 6, are still being sold at $60.
