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Capcom president Harushiro Tsujimoto claims that the prices of video games need to increase to meet ballooning development costs.
Capcom president Harushiro Tsujimoto claims that the prices of video games need to increase to meet ballooning development costs.
Honestly, he’s right. Game prices are the same 60-70 dollars they’ve been for 30 years, but nothing else has stayed the same price that long. With inflation, a game should be around 200 dollars.
Super Mario Bros 3 came out in the last half of 1988 and costed $50 dollars, or around 127 dollars. It also costed about $800,000 to develop, which is about $2 million today.
Nowadays, it costs around $80 million (about 40x) on average to make a AAA title that costs $60 (about half). This is why all these games have cash shops and battle passes and paid dlc and whatnot: they need to make up that extra cost somewhere.
https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/finance/highlights.HTML Capcom had $340 million in profit in 2022. They are doing pretty well. Don’t believe their complaining, it is just greed.
Super Mario Bros also only sold about 2.5 million units in the first several month after release. Baldur’s Gate, for example, sold almost 6 million in 2 weeks. The NES sold 2.5 million units in its first year. The Switch sold 13 million. Even the worst selling modern console, the Xbox Series X sold 8 million in the first year. While individual game prices have not risen, the total number of sales has dramatically increased. So pardon me if I don’t think the cost of games not rising has been a problem for publishers and developers of AAA titles. Their real problem has been putting out good content that enough gamers want.
I can understand woth this information companies wanting to charge more, but I feel like standards need to be higher and refunds guaranteed. They can’t ask us to spend 100’s of dollars on half-complete, buggy messes of games AND also want to charge for DLC and have micro-transactions.
And don’t forget it’s just a rental of the game, at any time they could shut off the game or license servers because they don’t want to sell or keep that game anymore.
While i agree that prices have been stagnant, its also a game of companies wanting to reduce risk. You have unicorn examples like Baldurs Gate 3 which took its time to develop a game, and has stated they dont plan on making paid expansion content, meaning where they at they see the game as profitable, despite spending 5 years in development for it.
Part of the reason why some games have balooned cost is because of improper spending of the money. Many spend a lot of money on marketing which tends to have an overly inflated cost on its own, due to the fact that people have a preference to play whats familliar, however its been shown that also actually making a good game with little marketing also works, and a lot of dev studios havent gotten to that point yet.
I buy games that release for $40 and $50. They don’t have dlc. They don’t have microtransactions. They don’t have cash shops. They don’t have battle passes. I just pay my $40/$50, get my physical copy, often with a bundled goodie like cards or keychains, and play and enjoy my 40hr game.
It’s absolutely possible because the companies that release these titles are pumping out several per year. You just… have to stop spec racing and obsessing over 200hr playtimes and top of the line graphics and actually focus on making a decent, mid-sized game, with realistic expectations.
Distribution is getting easier and cheaper, the available talented workforce is larger than ever, tools are getting better and faster with every day and despite “no large increase in costs”, the gaming industry has grown to be one of the largest and most profitable industries in the entire world and everyone wants a piece of that cake.
$60 is fine and anything above that is pure greed.