Does your expectation change at $70? If yes, how?

It's a 17% price increase so games should be...20% gooder?

I don't think my expectations change but because it costs more I will be somewhat more cautious about buying games at launch. In the end this is a small nominal price increase after like 15 years.

I don't like these poll options because I definitely don't think it's overdue (the game industry has increased revenue through other means in those 15 years and won't stop so this probably isn't necessary) but it doesn't change my expectations. I doubt it will have any impact on game budgets at least for a while until they see what effects it has, so it won't change the games we get just how much they cost.

Not at all. I expect games to remain exactly as they are, or rather I expect the product quality curve over time to maintain it's current trajectory. The $10 price increase is a drop in the ocean as far as improving the "unsustainable" triple A gaming market, and is a significant price hike for the average consumer. All that will really change is we will be paying more for games.

If Im going to pay $70 for a game I expect the whole game at least. Non of this in-game store in single player, its bad practice anyway but when a game costs that much its unacceptable.

Games have been having a more than $60 buy-in for the past several years, so...

Game prices are artificially static and have no relationship to the content or quality of the game. So an increase doesn’t change my expectations at all. I just want games to get away from the static price point, honestly.

If new games hit a hundo $CAD yeah, I'll start being a whole lot more discerning. They already increased to $80 here a few years back, which was tough to swallow.

i mean- for the amount of value/good times i get out of the games i love- $60 feels criminally low. for games i love- i'd pay significantly more. i think i paid something like $75 at retail for the snes street fighter II cart when it was new. but i also don't buy many games when they're brand new (animal crossing and TLoU2 are the only two thus far in 2020).

it's not a particularly original opinion- but if the choice was between a $20 game with a ton of upselling vs. $80 or $90 all-in- i'd rather go all-in. but i also don't play any real competitive multi games- so i don't encounter many of the low buy-in titles.

if the question is really- do i expect 'more value' from a price increase- the answer is a definitive no. animal crossing and TLoU2 gave me more than enough game at $60- if anything i'd like to see the dev wages increase so they can retain talent (though god knows that's unlikely).

I don't expect anything new and if it means faster load times due to PS5 hardware then I'm all in.
And ofc some of us payed $100 for games like thirty years ago.

Honestly I've not paid full price in long while. Given the status of my backlog, I have no problem waiting for price drops or definitive editions. So if a small increase is required for a more healthy industry I'm okay with it. Especially since it wouldn't really have an impact on what I spend on games.

Games have never been more profitable. The publishers don't need to change from $60 to $70 when 90% of video games have DLC the player MUST pay for and when most games are now sold online cutting our all middlemen.

GAMES HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE PROFITABLE!!!

@monkeyking1969: I mean it feels like if you are gonna be bullish about it it's best to back your words up.

This is pretty much exactly how I feel. There are many games that don't justify their $60 price point, and others that I would easily pay more than $60 for. So I'll keep doing what I do now - evaluate games on a case by case basis based on my immediate level of interest and how willing I am to wait for a sale.

Games are already fucking 80 dollars here fuck that. Like that's the end of me buying games new

No, as in for the moment, I feel that I am in tune with consensus reality, and I don't for a moment believe quality will go up in terms of dollar value. What I will hear is that it is long overdue and I am lucky to have such games and so on. I do not have a handle on how triple A games are doing profit wise, but Even I am convinced they are hard to make. And I do want people to have decent jobs for it.

So I don't know, it's probably time that games cost 70U.S. But $70.00 to me is a whole lot of money. So it is hard for me to think and say without real knowledge of how things really are..

Nothing changes for me. Generally if there's a game I want at launch, I don't even think about price when considering getting it. If I don't want it at launch, I'll wait for a sale whether the base price is $30 or $60 already so the starting price is also irrelevant to me there.

Doesn't really mean much to me, I always look at games as the complete package, so when a triple A game gets released i only pay attention to the game+season pass(they have them more often then not) so I already associate big games being 90-100 dollars most of the time already. Just means I won't be buying many triple A games on launch which is how it's been for years for me(so far I've only bought 2 triple A games at launch this year, RE3 and the PC port of Death Stranding).

the industry has never been more profitable. the extra $10 added to the base price is just extra $ for the c-suite. it isn’t going to curb gambling mechanics or anything.

i’ll expect the industry to continue to nickel and dime for deluxe editions and every possible micro transaction

It will be the end of me buying games new except the occasional one that I really need to play since I'm Canadian and games are already ridiculous here at $80.

No. I just won't buy most games at full price.

To be fair, I already wait for sales on 90% of games anyway since most games these days are full of boring filler that is not fun to play and is mostly the reason I will quit a game without finishing these days.

Now if they stopped having sales I'd probably stop buying most games. I'd only buy the games I really really want with no exception.

But Jeff is right, we gamers buy too many games these days as it is. I don't know. I think that's more of a problem with saturation, but it's a fair point anyway.

When I pay £55 for a Tsushima, or an Animal Crossing, or FE: Three Houses, it better be BLOODY BRILLIANT

(They usually are)

Stop charging for a bunch of useless pay to win crap and maybe live in a country where you have a livable wage then we can talk about how $70 or more for a game is reasonable. Til then, this is just greed to make more money while these companies will continue to over charge for services and DLC, season passes and the like. Sadly, we as consumers will just continue to buy this garbage and nothing will change. The industry is to large to fail, and when they do, they blame it on anything else other than itself for being awful to consumers.

No different honestly, it sucks a little but it should happen.

You, sir, are NOT living up to your username!

I couldn't find any info re: straight profits, but revenue for sure keeps going up. So I agree. Especially (tho I do admit these are solely PC) with things like EGS taking less of a cut, that forcing Steam to do similar, big publishers having their own stores so they get 100% of the sale, yeah. This just doesn't sit well with me. The few good apples that put out amazing value don't justify fucking NBA2k jumping to $70.

All the major publishers and platform holders have had record profits this generation, EA, Activision, Take 2 and Ubisoft.

Its frankly absurd game prices should rise EA/Activision posted $4b profit with $1b for Take 2/Ubisoft these are annual figures.

Game prices may not have increased in the US for a while but sell on a vastly bigger scale than they use to, and have many more revenue streams with dlc, mtx and streaming/rental etc.

It depends on the game, i feel like charging 70 bucks for new versions of Madden and the like is bullshit because its not like theres anything new there besides some up-resed graphics and shaders. If the game is truly groundbreaking or massive i have no issues with it. It dose make me even more selective then i already am with what i buy though. Publishers better realize that charging more might mean people actually buy less games overall.

THIS

The #1 bullshit justification for splintering games up and adding F2P microtransactions to full-price games has been because game prices "haven't gone up," which was largely bullshit (wages haven't either, so...).

Not like we can do much, other than not buy as much, but I have a sinking feeling we're going to be looking at "$70 gets you the bare minimum version, $80 for the "deluxe" version, microtransactions aren't going anywhere."

Absolutely, sure it's "long over do" but at least here in the states wages haven't matched inflation so people are making less money.

I haven't even paid 60 in years tbh, If I'm paying 60 I want everything in the damn game I don't want microtransactions and multiple dlc's that complete the game. expansions are cool but they need to actually be expansions. Gaming as a hobby is just too expensive now at full price. Thank God for steam sales lol.

Nope. As a rule, the games I buy at full price are games I would be willing to pay much more than $60 for to begin with (and have...back in the day I happily paid $80 to get Red Dead Redemption 1 overnight mailed when my isolated town didn't have any in stock at the local KMart on launch day). Everything else I always wait for price drops on anyway.

I'll start paying $70 for a game when AAA publishers start doing proper QA testing, stop releasing the same games with a slightly different coat of paint and a higher number, remove all monetary transactions for buffs, "time-savers", and loot boxes, and also remove the artificial time sinks they put in to incentivize buying them.

I haven't paid $60 for a game since last year when Resident Evil 2 Remake came out. I normally just wait for a $60 to hit $30 which has given me a huge backlog of PS4 games. I think $70 will likely scare people away from paying that amount for a new game if it's a sports game like NBA 2K21.

Yes. It better be a freaking fantastic game if I'm paying $70 for it, with actual improvements rather than a new coat of paint over the same old thing. And no microtransactions at all. Ever. Otherwise I've got years of older games to catch up on. I could spend the rest of my life playing old games and be perfectly satisfied.

I can afford to pay for it, so if there's a game I *really* want at $70, I will buy it. However, as I get older, I become much less interested in the kind of epic 60-hour AAA games that might go along with this pricetag, and I'm not that inspired by extra pixels either. So I'm much more likely to buy $30 indie games or occasionally a $50 first-party Nintendo game. Not because of the price tag, just because I tend to like those kind of games.

I voted yes. New games here in Canada are already sitting at $80 so the price increase is likely going to push new releases into the $90 and $100 ranges. A new console is like $500-600. It's just...ugh. Yeah I'll expect more from any big budget game I spend that kind of money on, but at the same time...I don't know how much buying I'll be doing not in a sale.

Considering the lack of creative output mechanically coming out of big studios right now it's really a tough sell for me. The AAA scene has gotten so streamlined that realistically speaking there is a huge amount of similarities between releases. It really would depend on mood/if it's something I'm pretty hyped to check out to shell out that much money. I'd like to hope an increase price would at the very least mean more of these big games don't launch broken or maybe studios practice less crunch. I'd be willing to shell out money for either of those cases without fail. But I don't know how likely that is to be. Just seems to be the size/scope of things, and the overall studio size is large enough that they probably think they can justify a price increase without losing too many consumers.

But I do think some AAA devs are going to be surprised to see in this generation just how willing people are to hold off on buying things until sales. Paying a huge premium to play something faster in a world where by the time a year has gone by most things are patched/better anyways, and on sale, doesn't seem super sustainable to me. But I'm not a business guy so we'll see what shakes out.