I’m willing to accept that AAA games should often be sold at a higher price to help deal balance the increasing cost of development. Do you think that companies would do better to raise prices quickly and wait out the sticker-shock or to try and raise prices very slowly to attract less attention?

boynextdoornews

I'm pretty sure that, as an industry, we've mostly already moved beyond that. Haven't you noticed just how many AAA game releases these days aren't about a single sale but live service? The live service model is the price increase. The cost of development for AAA fidelity games is mostly too high now to be profitable on their own. The only real exceptions are grandfathered franchises (e.g. Elder Scrolls) and first party prestige titles to help sell systems (e.g. God of War, Sony's Spider-Man). Even former mainstays like Nintendo titles and Grand Theft Auto have embraced paid DLC, ongoing content drops, and a live service model.

Everything else is basically a live service or approximates a live service (e.g. Call of Duty's annual release) with regular content updates alongside battle passes, cosmetics, and microtransactions. Lifetime spend on these games per average player is already much higher than anything we could feasibly ask for up front. Raising prices would hurt initial sales, which would also hurt long-term earnings through the forthcoming content updates. Instead, for the bump in initial sale we offer cheap plastic toys, other inexpensive pack-ins, and maybe an in-game cosmetic and call it a "collector's edition".

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