Ready to pay 70 dollars for new games?

So it was just revealed today that nba 2k21 will be $69.99 usd for the next gen versions because they were "built from the ground up" for next gen. What do you guys think? I am up in Canada so I'm already at $79.99 per game and I already think that is expensive let alone $89.99.

This is definitely a no go for me. I will not be purchasing games at the new price point. I'll just wait for sales.

We've already been paying more than $60 for games for the past several years now.

Just means waiting for sales. Bet games drop quicker at a higher price

Well games prior to the second half of the Ps1 era were about that much so this is likely nothing new for most people. For me personally, I tend to buy the deluxe editions of games I care about so I typically spend 70-100 on some games anyway.

Depends on the game. Some games are worth that, some are not like already wait for sales on a lot of games so this will increase the number. Not sure why this is the line in the sand for some. There are definitely games worth $70 and accounting for inflation it’s still less than they cost in 2005 anyway.

Price is a factor in every purchase for me but I don’t have hard lines. Very few games are worth like $200, but lots are worth $70, though fewer than are worth $60.

I'm more than happy to pay more for games as long as they don't have a bunch of free to pay trash, season passes, overly long tedious game play, and Games as a Service nonsense. Also, having more original game play then the same copy past mechanics. Take out all the bullshit in games and just sell us a video game, and I'm more than happy to pay over $80 for a good product.

With Game Pass, I'm buying less and less. Curious how the sub model evolves next gen.

If we assume that games started to cost $60 about when the 360 came out in 2005 then with inflation games are still cheaper now than they were in 2005. $60 in 2005 is about $81 in 2020. If find it a bit hard to complain about games being too expensive when they've been getting cheaper in real dollars for a long time. A $50 SNES game in 1990 would be about $100 now. Also one of the reasons we've seen such a rise in micro-transactions is that games have gotten cheaper. Not the only reason, but one. My calculation is always the same, is what they're selling worth what they're asking. If BotW 2 is $350 I'll buy it. On the other hand if I could pick up State of Decay 2 for $10 I'd probably do it, but if I can't I won't. I wish people wouldn't treat this as some sort of moral issue.

Yeah, probably. Lots of games have been worth $70.

I went full digital with PS4 and the digital store for this market consistently charged 20% higher than local prices, so... guess I was the guinea pig ?

It feels like, at least in the US, there has been a needed increase in the MSRP of games anyway. So yeah, I'm fine with it.

As with most games already, it will be a case by case basis. But it will definitely make me more hesitant to buy new.

Frankly, it’s about damn time.

Raising the price of video-games has been a long time coming; what with the absurd amount of investment that goes into triple A games these days. I'm 100 % willing to play 70 or even 80 for a full-length game akin to LOU2 as long as that comes with the assurance of no micro-transactions of any sort.

Mind you; there is a far better alternative; minimizing the amount of people involved, resting cheaper studio space and doing motion-capture in-house. A perfect example of this would be Hellblade: Senuas Sacrifice. It is a full length game, which isn't just absolutely gorgeous, but brings extremely unique gameplay features to the table. It also has one of the best stories in games I've seen in a long time. I don't mean to shill for this game, so I'll just make one last point about it; it is the single,best depiction of trauma, anxiety I've seen in any medium, period.

They sold that game for 30 bucks, and it performed fantastically. Triple A development does need to change, but the solution isn't necessarily to throw more money their way, but rather for them to be more economic about their design.

Don't think for a second that any of the microtransactions or season passes or whatever are going anywhere though.

Yeah it's no problem to me. I think it'll be a cheek to charge that for anything that has Lootboxes/MTX but I don't buy that shit anyway. $70 for something like Cyberpunk or the next GoW/Spiderman seems totally fair to me though.

$70 isn't gonna make companies change jack shit. Not in their development process, not in their wages, not in their predatory practices, not in a single meaningful way aside from charging us extra. So no I'm not really ready for it and fuck them. I already bought used save for a few games but now that few games is going to be whittled down to either one or none.

I already think games are too expensive (especially here in Canada).

I'd much rather wait for the sales so that when I give up after a handful of hours, I don't feel like I had thrown away a week's worth of groceries. I play through maybe 1 out of 10 games I buy. If I have the power of time travel and can tell the past me which games I'm going to end up enjoying, then yes, I'd gladly pay the full price of admission for those. It's too much of a gamble as it stands.

Oh, no, those aren't going anywhere regardless of the price of games. Raising the price of games isn't going to do anything for the industry other than make us pay more.

...but I'm personally having a hard time building up the energy to give a shit. There are only a handful of games every year that I want to pay $60 for. $70 for new games is barely going to affect me, at least for the foreseeable future.

There's so many games and genres that I enjoy playing clogging up my backlog that I'm not too concerned. It's incredibly rare that I buy a game when it's new, much less at full price. I beat Dark Souls 3 a couple months ago, and I loved that series, but not enough to buy it before the inevitable DLC pack-in and sale price.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but I don't have the time to play all the games that look neat to me already. An extra $10 on something I probably wont buy for a couple years (and only when I get the message that something on my wish list is on sale) doesn't really change the way I play games.

I definitely miss out on being part of the zeitgeist, but I'm mostly indifferent to spoilers and will probably forget about them by the time I get to a game anyway. I recently picked up Battlefront 2 for ~$11 and the lasers sound like Star Wars lasers and that's neat.

Mmm... No, sir. I don’t like it.

I rarely pay $60 for games now outside of the odd AAA game that i absolutely have to buy day 1(mostly some Nintendo games)

So yeah Devs can charge 70. I won't be paying 70 except maybe 1-2 games throughout the entire generation.

I think alot of people are willing to pay whatever price for a game if its something they really want.

The great season pass and DLC experiment was an example that people are willing to pay extra if the content seems fair and reasonable. This also showed that consumers are willing to shell out $20-40 for extra content.

Some people really don't care how much a game is because it can be worth it to them no matter the price. Those who buy limited and collector's edition of game are doing this already by paying more than what any game should be worth, but they still do it because they want that collectible statue.... or Dante's Jacket from DMC 5 that costed $8,000.... but companies wouldn't offer these collectible editions if they knew no one was going to buy it. So, what does that tell you?

Even if they raise the price to $70, they are still going to charge for loot boxes / cosmetics / season passes / battle passes / digital currencies / DLC / digital deluxe editions / ultimate editions.

I’ve never bemoaned this part of selling games and always felt like it’s up to the user if they want to buy X (as opposed to saying something like “Studios shouldn’t put DLC on the disc”.) I’m just saying this won’t stop them from doubling down on those other purchases. Going from selling a game for $60 (while hoping to get another $60 from players) to $70 (but still hoping to get another $60 from players) doesn’t really sell the next-gen reasoning for the price increase.

All that said, from my perspective it will probably lead to fewer impulse buys or pre-orders from me. It’s only $10 more, but whenever something gets in the $70-80 price range, I’m more likely to drag my feet on something or just not buy the thing.

This is a good point. I didn't have a Wii U, but Ill break this rule for certain Nintendo games (Odyssey and BoTW so far).

I live in the UK where new games are more expensive than that anyway, RDR2 on Steam is £54.99 which is CRAZY, it's currently on sale 20% which means it's still £43.99, which is closer to what i'd expect a full priced brand new game to be, i'm not paying that sorry, waiting for a better sale.

I wasn't ready to pay £45 so I'm sure not paying £55.

Here in Aus, new games digitally are often $99 AUD (68 USD); though you can get them cheaper physical. TLOU2 was 99 on psn, but I picked it up in store for $69 AUD (47 USD - so that seems like a good deal). For years we were stuck at the $99 range, even when our dollar was at parity with the USD, so more expensive games won't be a surprise for me.

The price of digital vs physical is the main reason I won't get a digital only console.

Honestly can't remember the last time i paid more than 30$ for a game. But i've been pretty firmly in the indie corner for the last few years. If there's a big AAA game incoming that i REAAALLY need to play, i can wait a few years.

But from a business & industry perspective? Yeah sure go for that 10$ increase. There are loads of people that need to have the new thing as soon as it launches and need to be out there talking with others about it day 1. Those people will buy the game no matter what. Just like you won't lose a significant amount of people going to the cinema if they added 16,7% to the price.

@do_the_manta_ray: This isn't really about the cost of creating games, it's just that they think that the market will bear an increase and this is the time to do it (though I think they are underestimating how bad the economy is for a lot of people right now.) A lot of games are still extremely profitable at $60 and the games industry is mostly doing fine. Where it's not doing fine I doubt a small price increase would fix things. Especially because it's not the big boys and huge games that are failing, it's the smaller and mid-sized projects, and that price increase is going to make it harder for them to find an audience.

Also I don't want to disparage Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, but while it's a good game and a fantastic looking game, it's not really a replacement for the AAA model. That game cuts a fair number of corners in order to exist and look that good at that price point. It works for the particular story they wanted to tell and it was a good marriage between design and subject matter, but it's not going to replace something like Grand Theft Auto or even the new Tomb Raider games in terms of scope and mechanical density. There is always going to be a market for big expensively made games and that market is actually doing fine.

Also despite Hellblade doing well commercially the studio that made it was sold to one of the major publishers and now has the financial backing of literally one of the richest companies in the world, so that says something too.

Inflation and rising costs and so on, so yeah I guess it's about time for a price increase. I'm buying way fewer games anyway due to Game Pass.

Come to Canada, we've been paying 80$ for games for like 4 years now.

Did some math between when I started working (and paying my own bills) and now. If games go up that much, and if the price here (Sweden) keeps the same trend, games would be increasing it's price with about 41% on top of inflation while my wage would have only increased 20-21% on top of inflation. I don't really think that's reasonable. Not that I think game prices in general are reasonable as it stands, as I think I have already reached a breaking point on new game release prices.

I'm rich, so I have no issue with this. I'll be buying all these games on day one. (That is all a lie.)

God... I remember working at Babbage’s and seeing the industry standard price go from $49.99 to $59.99.

Of course I also remember N64 games that sold for $79.99 MSRP.

Nope. I already rarely pay full price for a game as sales happen so quickly now. I'm a fan of NBA 2K, I love the MyLeague. But it ships in a pretty bad state, you have to wait for roster creators in the community to do their work and make the game good, so to me that's never a game I buy for full price anyway as it ships in a bad state for MyLeague.

I also have such a backlog of games. Like I loved the RE2 Remake and want to play RE3. It's already been on sale for $40 but I'm waiting for it to get to $30 or below.

What i'm getting from this thread is that we're all pretty savvy buyers of games, i assume the general public is more like DAY ONE PRE ORDER PUT IT IN MY VEINS.

As has been stated in this topic, here in Canada 79.99 has been the base price for some time.

@bearhardt: Bunch of high profile SNES games too.. pretty sure I got my copy of Chrono Trigger for like $80 or more. Carts were the wild west in pricing.

@fugoy: Exactly.

Charging $70 - 80 USD for a game won't change a damned thing (besides how much more money overpaid Execs get paid and how much less these tax-dodgers hide in overseas tax havens). Companies like Activision-Blizzard will still boast record profits to shareholders, while devs are treated like disposable wage slaves.

Imagine a game in the UK being "cheap" at £50, that's where we're heading. Don't forget to buy digital so you can't sell the stinkers, too.

This won't really change my game buying habits. I subscribe to Game Pass and PS+, so I have a lot of options there--I'm finally getting around to playing Uncharted 4, for example.

In a given year, I might buy half a dozen games at $60+. I've done it twice so far this year, both for Early Access games that were $30. I'm okay with waiting for most games to go on sale. I'm picking up Doom Eternal and Jedi: Fallen Order for $30 each on Steam this weekend. Looking ahead, I think I'm getting Ghost of Tsushima, AC Valhalla, and Cyberpunk 2077 when each of those games comes out. A $10 increase in the price of games that I wait for to go on sale isn't going to have a big effect on me.

Don’t really mind, but I’m the special sort of idiot that looked over the bonuses offered in the digital deluxe editions of Red Dead 2 and Last of Us 2, thought to myself how little I’d get out of those extras, then spent the money anyway ‘cause it’d “show my support”.

Key seller websites hook me up

As others have noted, will be interesting to see how this affects sales and the used game market. I'd suspect this is mostly driven by Gamepass and other such services.

From a profit perspective, there was a strong logic in keeping them $60, as when there is a product with little physical assets involved where supply scales to whatever is needed with the digital marketplaces, a lower price point like $60 likely makes for more profit in a growing economy. Before Gamepass and a few years back, I'd guess $50 digital launch prices would increase profit even more, but this probably has more to do with Walmart and Amazon needing their cut. While I'm sure there are more people playing games now, services like Gamepass will encourage publishers to get all that they can from those consumers who are going to buy it asap. I'd guess they'll jump up to $80 within a few more years.

I can only imagine what the math is in the US where wages haven't even increased a lick. Not even mentioning the current state of the economy right now. People mentioning this is natural due to inflation forget the fact that inflation only works when wages also increase and we all know that isn't happening. So again I say, fuck this $70 price point and I hope they get major pushback. This is another huge reason why discs can never go away.

I don't mind, already paying a lot more for digital games than I ever did the last console generation anyway.

Maybe we can all go back to playing 1 game for months and months rather than tossing them aside the minute a new game comes out. I’m not saying this is a good thing but I wouldn’t mind the higher price point keeping my purchase decisions in check.

I rarely pay full $60 for a new game anyway, so I don't mind paying another $10 for the few I do. Everything else will just of wishlisted and wait for discounts like usual.

I already pay 69 Euros for a new PS4 game :jeffu