It's probably coming in the next few years. $80 games anyway. 

When budgets go from $180 million to $300 million and probably in a few years that will be now $400-$500 million as standard (some games already cost this much like Cyberpunk 2077) ... get ready for a price hike again. 

Either that or they will force you to pay some other way, ie: locking content behind DLC paywalls that normally would have been in the base game and getting your $$$ that way. 

This is why all these companies (Sony included) are professing their love for the GAAS model, they don't want to just get a one time payment of $70 anymore, they want to shift the industry to something where you pour $100-$150 into a game but they yank you along for a few years to get that extra money. 

I usually stick with USD but used CAD there. 

With the rest of the price increases across the industry, and especially since PS has gotten away with it, since it's not just greed and has enough legitimacy behind it, at least from the consumers perspective, I'm a little surprised they haven't hiked the price of the biggest budget games. As long as they left the rest alone as they are, especially with some games like HD2 priced the way it was, I don't see it really hurting them, but helping, and if this meant less layoffs, I don't see why they wouldn't do it.

...I'm honestly curious how Nintendo is going to approach prices. On the one hand they do keep their prices at full for longer and do have Tears at 70, but Wonder was still at 60. I'd have expected they'd have started the price rise on the Nintendo top line games (NNN?) seeing as 70 dollar Pikmin 4 would be...an interesting argument.

At the same time, the Nintendo price strat is partially operating on the value perception of full price games, so does that metric still stand at 60, or do they need to have them at 70 to keep that perception?

Except SNY drops GoW Valhalla DLC not all that long ago and gives it away for free, then lays off almost 1000 people and closes a studio. HD2 is also cheap and isn't an MTX money pit.

With moves like this, it makes more sense why they aren't charging more for blockbuster AAA though.

They should have charged at least a reasonable price for Valhalla and they could totally charge $80 for the biggest AAA games.

I grew up close to the US/Canada border, I remember my dad paid $90 for Super Mario Bros. 3 back in the day, lol. Street Fighter 2 on the Super NES was marked up by some retailers to that as well. $80 CAD/pop for N64 games for 3rd party games was pretty standard too. 

They do want to hike the price of games, Capcom's president even openly admitted that he feels games should cost more, it's just a delicate balancing act for them, it's coming, but in the mean time they really like that GAAS model. Why settle for $80 when you can sucker gamers into getting $100+. 

I imagine GTA6 is going to have a heavy GAAS component. 

Those decisions were probably made a while ago, recently now Sony themselves came out and said they must invest more into GAAS titles, so that basically tells you where their head is at today. 

Their new president is talking all about how they must get higher margins and wants more multiplatform games. 

Rising prices could sound like a solution but in reality, it is possibly to only make things worse. The market is price sensitive, so they will be more selective regarding their gaming purchases, or even don't spend nothing at all.

That's why I think it's weird. The industry is calling for higher prices, yet SNY isn't doing it. They typically lead when it comes to moves like this. Maybe just because their image isn't as peachy as it was for PS4 so they're more careful about making these moves perhaps.

I agree, GTA VI online is going to 'bankrupt' many casuals. I have to assume SNY and MS are battling for some type of partnership for that very game. The profits are going to be astronomical.

I can't see why they couldn't go from let's give it away free to let's charge $20 or $30 or whatever, as they got closer to launch and realized more income would totally be beneficial and not just from a pure greed perspective considering the layoffs.

That's why you don't raise them across the board. Only for the biggest AAA games, assuming there's a bright outlook for them. If you've got a AAA game that didn't seem to hit the mark before launch, don't charge more for it and upset people.

This is from the Capcom president from this past September:

“Personally, I feel that game prices are too low. Development costs are around 100 times higher than they were in the days of the Famicom (NES), but the price of software hasn't risen so much.”

And I doubt Capcom is even making the biggest budget games or close, they're probably still in the 80-120 million dollar range for their bigger titles, asking a company like Capcom to go to 300 million/game would probably cause their president's head to explode.