Game prices are too low, says Capcom exec angielski

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.

Oneeightnine,
!deleted4231 avatar

“Man who stands to gain from an increase in game prices advocates for increase in game prices”.

Seriously though I’m not sure there’s much more room to go on the top end when it comes to prices rises. I’ve got to think at some point you’ll just push more people into buying at sale, or waiting for a game to hit their subscription platform of choice.

Maybe it’s time we re-evaluate what makes a AAA worth £75 in the first place? And, what role do micro transactions have in this system, because anyone who’s ever spent £75 on a new AAA game will know there’s plenty of other ways they try to skin the proverbial cat.

sadreality,

If anything market got so big, we should be getting efficiency of scale...

Greed clowns can't help tho

ProfessorProteus,
@ProfessorProteus@lemmy.world avatar

As the great Jerma985 once said, “Fuck Capcom!”

ezures,

You listening to a psycho?

Gabu,

Over a company of psychos? Probably.

Jaysyn,
@Jaysyn@kbin.social avatar

If the market could support higher prices, they'd already be charging them.

I honestly don't care what Capcom does. I couldn't tell you the last time I bought a Capcom game.

Gabu,

Capcom lives off of their good IPs from the 90s and Devil May Cry, nothing else.

Redex68,

To be fair, he is partially right. It’s insane that games have basically been the same price since forever, the only reason they stayed the same is cuz more people could afford computers/consoles and in contrast to every other industry, making a new either physical or digital copy of a game is dirt cheap, so the more users the more profit.

Idk if it actually makes sense for games to be more expensive yet tho.

Gabu,

Prices are comparable because a cartridge in the 90s was as expensive, comparatively, as an SSD is today. Have you ever bought a game and received a free SSD with it?

ryathal,

You also have to ignore economies of scale. Nintendo was a huge consumer of chips globally just for gaming. That market is now mature, and gaming isn’t as big of a piece as it used to be. There’s also way more games being sold now, call of duty gets more day one sales than most n64 games ever sold, which made disc’s super cheap. Now you have digital distribution which is practically free, and companies are getting more of a games price than ever before and it’s still not enough.

Itsamelemmy,

Some are. BG3 could have been double and still worth it. I’d say most capcom games are overpriced as is.

adept,

Quality can only increase. If people have to think twice about buying games and don’t preorder every half- finished game

Rand0mA,

Ah. The old preorder my bullshit game before you realise we stopped putting effort into it to finish the fucking thing scam.

Ensign_Seitler,

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.)

bpmd,

Resident Evil 2 sold about 4.5 million copies on PS One, Resident Evil 2 Remake has sold around 12.5 million copies so far and climbing.

They’re making more money now than they ever did, even with games costing more to make. More customers is supposed to equal economy of scale, not fuck it lets charge out the ass so executives can make more money than they’ve ever made in history.

godot,

The economy of scale is what lets companies operate at higher costs. According to Wikipedia RE2 cost about $1 million to make. $1m might still buy a PS1 caliber game, but the remake cost at least an order of magnitude more. Many games now cost nine figures; GTA6 apparently cost $1 billion.

I’m not saying games should haphazardly inflate with everything else for the sake of share holders, but I’m open to the idea that the formula used twenty years ago to decide that AAA games should cost $60 might be out of date.

bpmd,

That formula has to include charging what the market will bear. They can certainly increase the price and sell fewer copies, and maybe that’ll be more profitable for them in the end, but they certainly can’t jack up the price and assume all their current customers will stump up to grow their profits.

People’s income hasn’t increased all that much, the wealth gap in many countries has only grown. Games cost more when they were a niche product, and cost less when the audience and potential sales grew. Maybe they’d prefer their billion dollar industry went back to being more niche and only for the wealthy.

snooggums,
@snooggums@kbin.social avatar

Online sale have reduced distribution costs and unlimited scaling compared to physical media, so successful games are far more lucrative now than they were and unsuccessful games don't have losses from overproduction and returns from stores.

If selling at the current rate wasn't profitable, gaming companies would have stopped making games by now.

godot, (edited )

Online sale have reduced distribution costs and unlimited scaling compared to physical media, so successful games are far more lucrative now than they were and unsuccessful games don’t have losses from overproduction and returns from stores.

Certainly a factor that should be included in determining what a game costs, as is the 30% off the top taken by Steam, Microsoft, and Sony for most digital sales. Distribution in 2023 was not a factor in determining the current max price for a standard edition non-sports game, which was set in the early 00s.

I’m also comfortable seeing games that cost less to produce carrying lower price tags, as in many cases they do, Hades and Hi-Fi Rush coming to mind.

If selling at the current rate wasn’t profitable, gaming companies would have stopped making games by now.

They continue to make $60 games, yes. No one can say whether some company would have made the greatest game of all time last year if they’d been able to sell it for $70, or $80 or $100. Maybe they’re making it now as GTA6.

ryathal,

Brick and mortar stores are closer to a 50% cut, so 30% is actually a better deal.

thetreesaysbark,

Can you help me understand your comment? What does MSRP mean?

Arbiter,

Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price

Ensign_Seitler,

Ah, sorry. It stands for “Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price.”

In the U.S. the law doesn’t allow a manufacturer to require that retailers sell their product at a particular price, but they’re free to “suggest” one so that’s how we ended up with the MSRP.

It doesn’t carry any real weight, but it generally serves to anchor consumer expectations for a product’s value. (It also gives retailers an easy metric to compare sale prices against.)

HarkMahlberg,
@HarkMahlberg@kbin.social avatar

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,

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.

Pxtl,
@Pxtl@lemmy.ca avatar

Okay but PS1 games were similar prices and printing CDs is cheap.

Bluescluestoothpaste,

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

MomoTimeToDie,

deleted_by_author

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    Bluescluestoothpaste,

    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.

    insomniac_lemon,

    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

    bouh,

    They sell vastly more games than before. And there isn’t a media anymore. And they should have increased their productivity in all these years.

    Video games are not a good. They’re a digital product, a service. The cost is completely decorrelated from the amount you sell. Which is why it is so profitable.

    Gabu,

    The MSRP for a NES cartridge includes the circuits, the manual, the box, the physical space, the license and a finished game. Do you get any of these with modern AAA games?

    baatliwala,

    As long as my country gets regional pricing I don’t care, raise them in the US all you want they have plenty of money.

    madcaesar,

    Right, we’re all millionaires over here. Yup, not living paycheck to paycheck at all! No sir!

    baatliwala,

    And the fun part is, you’ve still had a decades long lifestyle of having low prices by exploiting weak labour laws in poor countries! And if they raise prices by using your local labour you’ll still cry capitalism. Isn’t it fun?

    MomoTimeToDie,

    deleted_by_author

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    sadreality,

    How many units are sold today v units sold in 1994 ;)

    MomoTimeToDie,

    deleted_by_author

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    NightOwl,

    More resources are put in because there is an incredible amount of money to make with the game industry being bigger than movies and music combined. It’s no longer a niche upcoming industry but mainstream. And companies put in those resources because the market is that much bigger with more potential return on investment.

    MomoTimeToDie,

    deleted_by_author

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    NightOwl, (edited )

    Game would $100 but the same as they are now. Could be $200 and it’d be the same as they are now and still have mtx, since why would a company leave the option to get more money. Few companies operate with the approach of this is enough money we are content.

    And games have only gotten worse if you are looking at triple a titles the same way someone might say movies have gotten worse because they think high budget super hero movies are the only ones that exist.

    If the market could sustain $100 it would be, but barrier to making and releasing games has never been lower. So consumers would just move to alternative games that are cheaper or old titles they haven’t gotten around to. And worst of all to these comlanies the top sellers aren’t always these high budget titles, but some indie title that’s not even 3d. Then there’s game pass people would just turn to if game prices went up moving more people to subscription.

    MomoTimeToDie,

    deleted_by_author

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    NightOwl,

    Most companies needing $100 per unit for a game to be profitable aren’t going to bother approving that type of game to begin with over a game that can be priced $100 and have much broader mainstream appeal.

    MomoTimeToDie,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    NightOwl, (edited )

    Why would a company want to risk putting money into a game so niche it needs $100 per unit over a game that can make more money despite being priced $60. And you know… Just price it $100.

    ryathal,

    As a dollar amount, more. As a percentage of the total market for hardware or developers, significantly less.

    Mnemnosyne,

    If a game today came with a nice solid box, a cloth map, a 250 page manual that actually explains almost everything about the mechanics of the game, and WAS FUCKING FINISHED WHEN I BUY IT, getting maybe one patch and otherwise never changing, then I might be willing to pay more.

    MomoTimeToDie,

    deleted_by_author

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    ryathal,

    The ability to patch games has been a huge improvement, but it has also caused most games to release in state that is worse than older games ever were. Maybe after 6 months to anyear a modern game is at a comparable level of finish to older games, but only if it sold well. Lots of games don’t get the patching they need.

    MomoTimeToDie,

    deleted_by_author

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    ryathal,

    Many triple A games released this year have featured game breaking bugs on release, that was practically unheard of in pre internet games.

    MomoTimeToDie,

    deleted_by_author

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    ryathal,

    Yes Mario 64 has a lot of glitches, but it’s playable all the way through. Similarly superman 64 is notable for being a buggy Ness because it was uncommon. BG3 released with multiple game breaking bugs, same with Stanfield. Payday 3 has several crashing bugs, but nothing gamebreaking beyond overloaded servers.

    The difference is magnitude not numbers.

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