Stack with US one hundred dollar bills isolated on white background.
I feel like this had to happen at some point, even if the regular rules never seem to apply here. But for 15 years, the price of an AAA video game has been standardized at $ 60 for a new release after bouncing around in the early days of the industry. Not anymore, it seems. NBA2K21 It will cost $ 70 for Xbox Series X and PS5, and many hope this is part of a trend that will spread to other next-generation AAA games. So after $ 15 years, it seems likely that the standard price is increasing by $ 10. Overall, not too unreasonable.
Again, we only know this title, but many see it as an indication of a broader change to come.
But it is also important to note that the price of video games, even more than other digital products, is crazy. The standard dollar price of AAA video games has not increased in over a decade, despite inflation and the fact that the cost of producing these games has skyrocketed. Some of the largest games in the world are literally free, despite costing tens of millions, if not much more. Those games can earn money by charging $ 20 for an in-game cosmetic item, but elsewhere, people may refuse to pay that same price for a full game with dozens of hours of content made by a smaller team. On mobile devices, a game priced at $ 1, less than the price of a coffee at Starbucks, is considered “premium.” And so.
Even for the AAA boxed games we’re talking about with this price increase, that $ 60 figure is only part of a complex equation. You can pay more for bonus content, cosmetic items, subscriptions, collector’s editions, and more. That same game, priced at $ 60 in today’s market, could be as low as $ 20 just one year after launch.
So while this seems like some kind of radical change in the industry: “video games are getting more expensive,” it actually only captures a small part of the way we pay for video games. I will be very curious to see if an increase in the launch window price has a big impact on the offer price: it is easy to imagine that we will start to see $ 50 in the first cut, when now it is generally $ 40. But later From that, I bet we’ll see the same games slashing around $ 15- $ 20, which seems to be where the older but still respected titles live. Except with Nintendo, which almost never discounts, as I said, it is complicated.
I wouldn’t expect to see a lot of this too soon, due to intergenerational games and free update programs. If I buy a $ 60 PS4 version Cybeprunk 2077For example, I can upgrade for free to a PS5 version. In that case, there would be no point in making the next generation version cost more, and I predict the same will be true for all multi-generation titles with update programs. This will most likely be a gradual transition, with more and more titles rising in price as the next-generation install base increases and eventually standardization.
The other main question concerns what, exactly, it seems to buy video games at any cost in the murky economic conditions of the fall of 2020. It will be much more difficult to predict.
