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
So should the quality.
And not just graphical quality.
its an inverse situation with games. more expenisve lower quality, they tested how much certain fans will tolerate it, and then go higher.
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.
This is the fucktard that said he could not understand why people wanted to play old games
https://time.com/4804768/playstation-4-ps4-pro-psvr-sales/
"This looks ancient, why would anyone want to play this....?"
Fuck him
Um.. show us how the salaries of game devs have risen compared with game prices?
“No” -John PlayStation
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, because purchasing power has also collapsed in that span of time, obvi
/s
Neither quality nor diversity are objective measures, and I'd certainly disagree with you that they didn't improve.
Ask everyone shoveling money and then praising remasters incessantly.
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.
a good case study is swsh, pokemon, starting from that, it lower and lower quality, yet people sitll buy it,.
ahn they did? 40 and 50 USD on ps2 50 and 60 USD on ps3 60 USD on ps4 70 USD on ps5
Plus dlc and mtx nickel and diming, and special editions
Our wages too...
“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.
Supposed proponent of the "free market" thinks that the market was unfair to massive corporation. More at 11. /s
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.
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.
Former PlayStation US boss can go fuck himself!
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.
Video game budgets are still lower than film budgets and ticket prices for movies haven't steadily climbed, arent anywhere near $60 a pop, nor have there been all these freaks coming out of the woodworks to say movie tickets should cost more.
I don't know how universal it is, but movie tickets here have at least tripled since I was a kid, 20 odd years ago.
Meanwhile, me and 4 friends pooled our pocket money together to buy a video game that we could barely afford. Brand new video games are the same price now.
I'm not saying "they should increase their price", but it is wild how somehow they haven't in decades
they haven't increased because the cost of production has drastically dropped. cartridges were expensive as hell to make; the hardware was like half to cost of the game. disks were cheaper but you still had all the extras like bespoke formats, copy protection and manuals. with digital distribution, the production cost is zero. even when you buy a physical release, you get an empty box with an off-the-shelf bluray.
Wasn't GTA V more expensive than most movies?
That's the thing, a lot of investors almost don't like the idea that video games are low budget. They want to be able to double their funding and quadruple their success, like with a lot of growth properties.
Must be nice living somewhere where cinema prices did not climb. I can assure you its been different where I live.
You got to look at it relatively, a movie never cost even close to $60, so why would it end up there. It cost something like less than $10 but now the average is around $16. Games were maybe $60 and now could be $80, so it is actually a very comparable increase.
Edit: to be fully clear, I don't think there should be a comparable increase between those two things. Buying a video game and going to watch a movie are two very different things to do. Just pointing out that movie tickets did in fact get more expensive. There's also the "creative accounting" often being done in the film industry, I don't think that's a thing in the gaming industry. So many differences.
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.
Lol
The longer they take to lower the price of their game, the longer it takes me to buy it.
in a way it did with dlc
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.
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.
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...
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.
Uhm, they have?
N64 game prices were $60-75 back when the console came out in 1996… so no, they’ve been static for almost 3 decades.
But they production cost has gone way down with digital releases, no more shipping and inventory in many cases. Can reach way wider audiences with just internet. Plus all the kids that grew up gaming in the 90s now have money.
They made $2 billion in profits in 2023 in their gaming division. Sony can suck my tiny little dick dick, and I'll even dip my nuts in soy sauce just so they can get a taste of home while they're at it.
N64 games were upwards of 90-100 dollars for some.
What do you mean? Our generous corporate overlords have kept the price steady for us at 60. We're lucky they haven't done scumbag things like a Deluxe edition for 80, a complete edition for 100, a ln ultimate edition for 120, an ultimate collector's edition for 200, season passes for an extra 40, 10 different "micro" dlcs for 10 each, or cosmetic packs for 7 each. They've also definitely not cut content from the base game either!
The more expensive Sega Genesis games were $90.
Someone needs to start cracking Denuvo again.
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.
By all means, every increase in price is welcome, it'll be that much less of a temptation. How are Concord and Fairgames doing?
Except costs went down when they switched from cartridges to discs, and then again to mostly digital.
So, no. It should not have.
Costs have ballooned, but on the production side, not the distribution side. Perhaps the reduced costs on the distribution side are partially responsible for prices remaining so stable in the face of inflation.
The costs only ballooned because the companies keep bloating themselves. It's gotten cheaper to make games, but more expensive to run giant companies that pay ludicrus amounts of money to executives.
Yes, companies have made very bad decisions in what aspects of production to focus on in the last decade. They're pouring more and more into ever decreasing rates of return on visual fidelity.
You can't seriously think something like Cyberpunk or God of War or even Half Life 2 costs less than Super Mario World because they sell more digitally.
Cartridges to discs were definitely a massive savings... and happened basically one and a half times (Sega to the CD and Sony from nothing to the Playstation)
Digital... is complicated. It definitely benefits the platform holder and lowers production costs for the major publishers (and makes indie games viable) but it also fundamentally changes marketing. Because people generally don't browse the PSN Store to find new games. They only get recommendations from influencers. Whereas plenty of us have fond memories of standing in a Best Buy or Circuit City and picking what game looked good on the shelves.
But yes. I agree that not every single generation should have led to a price jump. But I can definitely see an argument for most of them to have raised the price of "AAA" games with tiered pricing beyond that. Because it really is a problem and not just for the major publishers. Indie games basically need to launch at an effective price of 10-20 bucks on PC to stand a chance and... that is great money for the small dev teams but not so much for a medium sized C/B tier game.
The huge win in digital for them was killing the resell market.
No used games means no competition from previous owners. Prices can stay at $60/70/80 forever without any user market forcing prices down.
Every media vendor wants digital only to cut production costs, but it's really to own the market. Consoles did exactly that for decades. The shift to subscriptipns for not only online at all but also to "dont own games, just give us a monthly part of your invome forever" was them pushing this advantage to its maximum conclusion.
Only now, with falling sales and falling interest due to "quick media" like tiktok/instagram/etc, is microsoft giving up on its console moat and sharing all games across devices. Only a loss of relevance as an entertainment medium is forcing them to open the market up again.
Who chooses to buy games based on influencers? I rely on reviews.
People don't browse the PSN store, because it's crap. I mean, the steam store is pretty bad, but I still manage to just browse and bookmark some games there to get back to later.