What will the cost be for next generation games?

With the expanding market of DLC, next generation retail copies should cost between $40 and $50. When developers set a time schedule for their current game, they are including after release DLC. This is so they can take less time working on the game and start making money from sales before completing the game. I think it is a sound business plan. Just don't screw over your customers will elevated retail costs.

Nope. If I were a betting man I would say that they are going to cost the same.

well i'm sure the jump to next gen will be a massive cost and risk to most developers. so im sure we will see a slight rise in the cost of NEW games to offset that. and also DLC.

that being said, games never go up in price with the cost of inflation like everything else does so were quite lucky really games are as cheap as they are.

Lots of threads created by you lately. They will still be $60 dollars, I guarantee you that. Just there will be more season passes, DLC and microtransactions. Raising prices would not be a smart business move with the main stream getting used to a 99 cent price tag for their portable games.

@xMEGADETHxSLY said:

$70

CAUSE THEY LOVE MONEY

My prediction also.

Better looking games require more work, which means that it is unlikely to see a drop in the price of games since developers need to get paid.

Although it would be nice to see cheaper new games again I don't think anyone will be willing to go the extra mile to make that happen. Why lower the price when they can maintain the status quo and make more money. They could try lowering the price for a digital copy like what Sony does on PSN.

$60, but designed with microtransactions in mind like Deadspace 3. But worse.

If Deadspace 3 sells well, I could even see a reduction in price. $39.99 for a game but with even more aggressive microtransactions and a voucher for some DLC. Gamers have been trained to pay $60 for a new game. When they take a game home at $40, I bet many will be eager to pull the trigger on $20 worth of DLC, especially if they have to plug in a code to "invest" into the game already. All of that money goes to the publisher/developer instead of sharing the money pie with stores.

You reduce the amount of money that goes to the stores. You reduce the value of used games. You get the cheers of gamers who just see upfront pricing.

A vial of human blood. It doesn't necessarily have to be your own blood, though.

Somewhere between 40 and 80 bucks. 
You know, like the good old SNES Games like Final Fantasy VI(which some idiots decided to call 3, for some reason? the fuck is wrong with those idiots?) 

If games were half the price I'd buy twice as many games

I don't know if the base price will go up anymore, but I can see them starting to cut more content to sell as DLC. They already raised the price of games this gen by $10-$20 by having all this day one DLC that in a lot of cases , Dragon Age/Mass Effect, is awesome content that's being cut from the game that makes it worse off by not having it. I'm predicting that stuff to get worse next gen.

$39.99

So long as I feel like I have a complete game and my $60 was well-spent I'm good.

Its unlikely that the price will go down with the increasing production costs...

The most likely is that it will be 60 dollars at first, until someone tries to impose $ 70 for a highly anticipated game (like the newest CoD), and when it works a lot more publishers will follow suit.

We saw something similar with PC games during this generation...

There's no way it's more than $60. I think that's crazy.

The down payment for games will likely still be $60, with easy payments of $15 per content package that was withheld from the initial release.

Not all of us have great paying jobs.

$50 without DLC -> I can see the trend of leaving even more out of the game and sell it as DLC and in microtransactions.

It will probably stay the same for retail copies. Hopefully they have day 1 digital copies at a slightly lower price. I'm ready to go digital.

I expect a split between boxed retail prices and online distribution prices as downloading full games becomes more pervasive. I think that boxed retail may, eventually, die off entirely. Long term, of course. Several years off.

Sixty dollars, though seventy dollars may get closer to reality later on.