The price of mainstream, triple-A video games is $70, but for Capcom president Harushiro Tsujimoto, games are still priced “too low” for his liking. Talking at last week’s Tokyo Game Show (according to Nikkei and translated by Kotaku), Tsujimoto believes games should increase in price to reflect how much they cost to make.
He pointed out, “Development costs are about 100 times higher than during the Famicom era. […] There is also a need to raise wages. Considering the fact that wages are rising in the industry as a whole, I think raising unit prices is a healthy option for business.”
Tsujimoto added that games should be priced more, even as various parts of the world face economic uncertainty. Those concerns have “little to do with the game industry,” he argued. “High-quality games will continue to sell. Just because there’s a recession doesn’t mean you won’t go to the movie theater or go to your favorite artist’s concert.”
Only recently did the games industry fully embrace the $70 price point, with Sony breaking the taboo for its first-party PlayStation 5 (and some PlayStation 4) games. Some developers have chosen to gradually increase prices by pairing them with their most in-demand releases; others, like Capcom, have stuck to $60, or addressed the balance with additional monetization methods like season passes, microtransactions, and pricy Early Access releases.
But Tsujimoto’s line of reasoning quietly gets at something else: triple-A games frequently take up a disproportionate amount of resources. It may be that instead of pricing games higher, projects should take less time and money to make. And maybe look a little worse as well.