Baldur's Gate 3 publishing director Michael Douse has reopened the topic of video game pricing, noting that prices have not kept pace with inflation (the general increase in prices and goods) in some markets, and thus, the cost of making blockbuster games like Star Wars Outlaws.
I mention Outlaws because it’s the game that sparked Douse’s thoughts. On Twitter, the artist shared an image of the Ultimate Edition of the new Ubiworld game, which includes the “base” offering and a bag of season pass content and collectible goodies like a digital artbook, along with the now-common promise of pre-release access. Douse suggests that special editions like these are a way to “artificially” raise prices without, strictly speaking, saying you’re doing it.
“I don’t like the artificiality of post-retail pricing structures,” Douse wrote. “Using the inflated base price to sell a subscription and using vague promises of content to inflate the Ultimate Editions to make the base price more appealing. It all feels a bit dangerous and disconnected from the community.”
Douse added, “I think a game should be priced based on its quality, breadth, and depth,” and that publishers should be more upfront and honest about their willingness to charge more for games, rather than offering special editions that confuse the issue. “Almost every game should cost more to begin with, because the cost of creating them (e.g. inflation) outpaces pricing trends,” he wrote. “But I don’t think we’ll get there with promises of DLC, but rather with quality and communication. Everyone’s just waiting for GTA6 to do it lol.”
It seems important to recall here that Baldur's Gate 3 by Larian himself Also There were more expensive special editions that included a mix of digital and physical bonuses. Douse probably considers these editions to be fair – I'll let you be the judge. That said, he's far from the only prominent industry figure to argue that the cost of creating games like Outlaws is disproportionate to the price.
The mention of GTA 6, which will be released in 2025, reminds me of Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick's comments on an earnings call last year that industry prices are “very, very low” relative to the number of hours of play that games offer and players' perception of their value.
Zelnick added, however, that this belief in giving you a lot for little “doesn’t necessarily mean that the industry has the power to set prices or wants to have the power to do so.” In other words, Take-Two and other publishers aren’t about to impose a major price hike on their audiences, though I imagine GTA 6 could get away with it. A Take-Two spokesperson also reached out to me later to clarify that Zelnick wasn’t suggesting that the industry should adopt new, broader pricing models, either.
Capcom president Harushiro Tsujimoto went further than Zelnick, pointing out via Kotaku that development budgets have increased 100-fold since the Famicom's heyday in the '90s. Speaking at last year's Tokyo Game Show about the Japanese games industry in particular, Tsujimoto said that “considering that wages are increasing across the industry, I think increasing unit prices is a healthy option for companies.”
Here's an article on the issue of price and budget, published by the Financial Times in January of this year, which includes an analysis by JPMorgan on pricing trends in the US in particular. “The cost of developing a AAA game has increased about tenfold in 15 years, and the customer probably hasn't noticed,” it says. “Weak pricing power means that the standard retail price has only increased 17% since 2007, from $60 to $70.”
I don't want to pay more for games like Outlaws, and I'm wary of statements from higher-ups about how much their flagship games should cost. Among other things, it seems unlikely that the developers of these games will automatically benefit from increased revenue. If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that core developers are seen as disposable, while executives are not.
It's also worth remembering that there's a difference between a video game making its money back and a video game making enough for its investors. As one developer told me in an interview about the demolition of Fishlabs, the developers of Chorus, by Embracer, “We're making a ton of money, but it's not going back into the games.”
I agree that the cost-to-price ratio of blockbuster games like Star Wars Outlaws looks very unhealthy on paper. Attempts to fill this gap have led, among other things, to the current glut of live seasonal content games, which essentially rely on players spending time and money on them at the expense of other endeavors. The cost-to-price gap has also contributed to the current heavy promotion of generative AI technologies, which publishers often present as a way to magically reduce budgets while evoking the implications for their employees.
But I think there are larger, trickier issues at play, involving the culture and perception of “AAA” games as, fundamentally, exercises in being deliberately unsustainable. Sometimes I think games like Outlaws are bought and sold purely based on the idea that they represent an ungodly waste of resources – capitalism at its most decadent, doomed, and spectacular, where you can almost feel the game burning a hole in the universe as you play.
Before joining RPS, I wrote a piece for Edge that traced the apparent origins of the “AAA” concept back to the 90s, based on interviews with various industry executives. The closest I got to an original, working definition was that “AAA” games are games with budgets so huge that they can’t fail, which is not a formulation that has aged well.
As the biggest major-league game publishers contemplate price increases, some continue to experiment with various incarnations of mid-tier blockbusters that give the impression of “triple-A” generosity for a more reasonable budget. Techland, for example, explains why shorter, stretchier games like the recently announced Dying Light: The Beast are “the future of gaming.”