Tuesday, May 16th 2023
Sega Contemplating AAA Game Retail Price Increase, Could Adopt $70 Industry Standard
Sega Sammy Holdings CEO Haruki Satomi and CFO Koichi Fukazawa were took part in a Q&A session last month, as a follow-on to the company releasing its financial reports for the past fiscal year. An English translation of the event's notes has only just become available this week, with news outlets picking up on a key item - computer game pricing. General life costs have been climbing in recent times, and games publishers have been adjusting MSRPs due to the rising expense of developing new content, especially in the AAA sector.
The Sega executive team has noticed this industry trend and is pondering over the options - the session notes state: "In the global marketplace, AAA game titles for console have been sold at $59.99 for many years, but titles sold at $69.99 have appeared in the last year...We would like to review the prices of titles that we believe are commensurate with price increases, while also keeping an eye on market conditions." Nintendo has recently joined the likes of Sony, Activision, 2K and Ubisoft in bumping up MSRP to $70, but this pricing decision has only affected the latest Legend of Zelda title - Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo of America's CEO Doug Bowser defended the move (prior to the game's release) - he argued that the direct sequel to Breath of the Wild would offer fantastic value for money.
Source:
VGC
The Sega executive team has noticed this industry trend and is pondering over the options - the session notes state: "In the global marketplace, AAA game titles for console have been sold at $59.99 for many years, but titles sold at $69.99 have appeared in the last year...We would like to review the prices of titles that we believe are commensurate with price increases, while also keeping an eye on market conditions." Nintendo has recently joined the likes of Sony, Activision, 2K and Ubisoft in bumping up MSRP to $70, but this pricing decision has only affected the latest Legend of Zelda title - Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo of America's CEO Doug Bowser defended the move (prior to the game's release) - he argued that the direct sequel to Breath of the Wild would offer fantastic value for money.
48 Comments on Sega Contemplating AAA Game Retail Price Increase, Could Adopt $70 Industry Standard
The raw reality is that companies are spending more to make products but need to catch up at the sales price point. They also realize that all the temper tantrums, especially from the PC crowd, are all bark and no bite tantrums of man children, and if push did come to shove consoles are where the money is at anyways. So you have no threat or leverage here, outside of creating a really good reason for more shitty ports or not porting to the PC at all. Sane people do this. The griping about the cost is "but moooommmm, I want it and I want it now, and no I won't do my chores" followed by throwing a screaming fit. But you know, PC gamers gonna PC gamer.
I paid over $70 (CAD) back 30+ years ago for NES/SNES/N64 games
Also, back in the 90s your console development kits were $30000 hardware debuggers, CD emulators, SGI workstations, MIPS cpus, etc. Today they are all x86 PCs.
You also have professional crossplatform game engines to build games in, you can jump into making a games content almost immediately, you don't have to spend a year creating a game engine for each console first.
If anything, the cost of making games has been steadily declining over the decades.
What increased is the complexity of games, which require more people to work on content. But that doesn't warrant games costing more, what warrants it is that every publisher is retarded and wants to make the next GTA/Skyrim/Cyberpunk, which take more time to develop than Duke Nukem Forever.
And Capcom still makes you want to buy 4 different versions of every Street Fighter for full price so there's no change there.
It is actually a misnomer that companies are spending more to make products. It has never been cheaper to make a game. The prior references you made about SNES are not really relevant as that was due to chip scarcity and shortages that made the cartridges expensive to produce, but that does not exist with modern titles. Physical media is much less common and discs are not expensive to procure or make. It is a bad faith to just label a group of people as an "other" and say that there concerns on the value of the money they earned amounts to a tantrum. The PC market is the largest gaming market on earth, I am not sure where "consoles are where the money is at" comes from. All games are developed on computer and all modern consoles are x86 devices. The fact bad ports exist is one of the greatest mysteries of our time, but if a company makes a bad port, then it won't sell.
As for commenting that it is "sane" to only buy a game when it is 75% off is the weirdest self own I have seen. If you agree with the sentiment, then it would make sense to say that you only value the game at 25% of it's original value and that is the case, why are you arguing a $70 dollar game is a good thing or necessary when you personally think it should only cost $17.50.
The general attitude reeks of the old console war people and by your comments it appears that like many who try to engage in discourse on the internet, you are just going to label a group and dismiss. It is better to engage with the spirit of the argument, then it is to strawman and try to "win".
Mortal Kombat 3 was extremely rushed which is why they needed to make UMK3 to fix it. Mortal Kombat Trilogy was a case of "hey, we don't have space limitations now on the Playstation, so why not throw in every art asset we have for a megamix game?", the game was so unbalanced and broken it was hilarious, and gave you a ton of content and the ability to play as bosses straight from the get go. Going from UMK3 to MKT was like going from MvsC1 to MvsC2.
None of those come close to SF2 being released five times in two years (three years if you count the arcade releases), only adding tweaked profile and ending pictures, a few new moves, and 4 new characters.
Also back then you could rent or trade games, so that $80 wasn't that bad. Can't trade in a DLC today.
"It is cheaper to distribute software with no physical media" So they said... and lied.
The catch all is that they failed to tell people the landscape can change and they don;t bother to appease those who hate change.
The responsibility lands square on the ones selling and a lack of backbone to be responsible and hold marketing to higher standards. Not when they are not putting anything worthwhile out.
All it takes is a post in a Sega retro forum to make more noise than this industry can deafen, make Sony soil their britches and Microsoft descend into outright panic plus a call to AMD for a quote on a batch of Z1 Extreme CPUs for your new console and a eventually a reborn Game Gear. And don't forget to market it in Brazil - after all, we still have licensed Master System consoles which actually sell, that's right, the 1985 Master System never died in Brazil.
...just don't screw up marketing and developing it like Atari did.
Vanilla game you get Orcs and Space Marines / The Empire. Every time.
store.steampowered.com/developer/Sega/list/34214/
store.steampowered.com/developer/Sega/list/34215/
Missing (that were previously available) from that are certain Sonic titles that got remastered with Sonic Origins
Also arcade board games aren't on Steam at all :/
But that's not the issue, the issue is PC gamers wanting to be treated like prom queens. Most are too stupid to realize that GPUs cause more becuase they cost more to design, fabrication costs more, and well here lets look at the PCBs and how they have changed.
But the notion is always that even though the costs and complexity to make anything has skyrocketed due to the demands of PC gamers, the cost that PC gamers pay must never go up! Because master race. When it's really bunch of autistic incels throwing fits and not understanding shit about shit. I demand you make better shit for me and pay more to make it, and I demand I don't have to pay for it and you suffer, and I deserve it, because I game on the PC. Que tantrum when realizing the world does not work like that.
Not to mention that; the entire point in technology advancement is to bring costs down.
I waited until Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was 80% off to buy it. And I refuse to play it until EA removes their bullshit Origin requirement. I had enough with Assassins' Creed Origins requiring Ubisoft's shitty launcher. Don't throw autism into this.