| Shadow1980 said: Honestly, it's been a long time coming. Inflation is a simple fact of economic life, and games are not going to stay at $60 forever. A price increase was inevitable. $70 isn't anything new, either. That was a price tag that existed in the 16-bit era, when a dollar was worth almost twice what it's worth now. Adjusted for inflation, those $70 games are well over $100 in today's money. Granted, the high cost of cartridges was almost certainly a contributing factor, but even when focusing strictly on disc-based games, the price of new games have been declining. $60 was already a common price point for early PS1 games, though later in the generation the average price point dropped to $40-50. $50 was the norm in Gen 6. And then $60 for disc-based games was reintroduced with the 360 & PS3. And there is sat for the past 15 years while inflation has decreased the purchasing power of a dollar by 23%. If game prices were to increase to $70 by year's end, that would put them roughly on par with the average price of PS3 & 360 games circa 2010.
With that being said, I don't mind the idea of a price hike in and of itself. At least here in the U.S., games are already cheaper now than they've ever been, especially since prices for most PlayStation and Xbox releases tend to drop more and faster than they used to. However, I would prefer that an increase in the base price of a game will come with less aggressive monetization efforts from publishers. If premium digital add-on content is how we've been subsidizing the declining base price of games (which is certainly plausible), then if games cost $70 microtransactions need to be severely reduced if not eliminated from such games (honestly, they never should have found their way outside F2P games in the first place), and any DLC should be reasonable in price and have a substantial amount of content. No nickel-and-diming the customers anymore. |
I'm curious, do you think base prices rising will stimulate free to pay, game pass, gaas, and streaming?
This is what happened to the movie market:
And this is what happened to Trackmania...
Rising prices only drive people away as is evident in this thread alone. The market hasn't been growing much anymore for console games (even slightly shrinking nowadays), while the number of competing releases still seem to go up. 
Revenues shrinking is also partly due to many sales, EA access, Game pass, etc driving revenue down.
Together with the economic recession, full new game sales might be on the verge to follow DVD sales from '08 down. At least for now the further move to digital puts more money into publisher's pockets making it less of a necessity to raise prices while still putting in the development budgets gamers expect nowadays.
I think we're entering a downward spiral. Increase new game price -> more people wait for sales or getting it through a subscription -> Overall revenue keeps going down -> Increase game prices.
On the other hand, Tlou2 set records at the full price.
