Capcom's president and chief operating officer has said he thinks game prices should go up.Haruhiro Tsujimoto made the …

Capcom’s president and chief operating officer has said he thinks game prices should go up.

Haruhiro Tsujimoto made the comments at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, Nikkei reported. TGS is sponsored by the Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association, a Japanese organisation which aims to support the Japanese industry, which Tsujimoto is currently the chairman of.

“Personally, I feel that game prices are too low,” Tsujimoto said, citing increasing development costs and a need to increase wages.

  • Ensign_Seitler@startrek.websiteEnglish
    05·
    1 year ago

    The MSRP for Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges in the mid-80s, adjusted to today’s U.S. Dollar, would average around $150-200.

    I don’t think games should cost that much, but we stuck with the $60 price point for literal decades so it’s not completely unreasonable for someone to talk about raising prices.

    (I also write this while having only bought one game? two? In the past year.)

    • insomniac_lemon@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      Adjusted price is a common talking point here, but it ignores the other side of inflation… that wages have stagnated and rising prices obviously means that people have less spending money.

      Consider also that there is a lot of choice with the back catalog on PC as well as free games (that people can make in their spare time at no cost thanks to FOSS tools and free information). Pre-broadband, gaming was more of a take-it-or-leave situation.

      So yeah, I think most people already see increasing prices as being motivated by greed. And some people likely see the $60 price as already greedy when games are often filler and spectacle (with poor QA testing on top of that, because they know people will pre-order it anyway, and then buy the later DLC or cosmetics).

      @MomoTimeToDie

    • HarkMahlberg@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      The problem is the game industry, in the meantime of never going beyond the $60 threshold, found a far far more lucrative way of making money than just raising the MSRP. In fact, they found multiple ways of making money: skinner boxes, loot boxes, micro transactions, season passes, FOMO storefronts, etc etc. And even though we may agree that the MSRP eventually has to increase, they won’t suddenly give up on those anti-consumer, predatory practices.

    • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
      21·
      1 year ago

      How much of the cartridge sale was profit to the developer?

      The hardware of the cartridge cost money. Distribution to retailers cost money. The retailers took their cut.

      I wouldn’t be shocked at all if the publisher’s net revenue per game is significantly higher in real dollars than it was in the NES era.

    • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      It’s not unreasonable but at the end of the day, we buy these games to waste time. There’s not a whole lot of justifying why im going to spend more on something i use to just unwind when i can buy plenty of 20$ games that will give me hundreds of hours of entertainment

        • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I get that and i bough baldurs gate full price on release, but as the games start creeping up past 70 to like 100, it’s like for what? I can just not spend this money. It’s not like a car i need to get to work and car prices were skyhigh last summer and fall for example, or food, etc. If gaming companies cant compete on wages with other tech businesses that need programmers, they’re just gonna have to make do with less manpower. Long winded way of saying inelastic market.