Baldur’s Gate 3’s publishing director Michael Douse has revisited the topic of video game prices, noting that prices in certain markets have not kept pace with inflation (the general increase in prices and goods) and thus the production costs of blockbuster games like Star Wars Outlaws.
I mention Outlaws because this game got Douse thinking. On the artist’s Twitter account formerly known as Twitter, he shared an image of the Ultimate Edition of the new Ubiworld game, which includes the “base offering” and a ton of season pass content and collectibles like a digital art book, along with the now-standard promise of early access. Douse suggests that special editions like this are a way to “artificially” inflate prices without strictly saying that’s what you’re doing.
“I’m not a fan of the artificiality of post-retail pricing structures,” Douse wrote. “Using the inflated base price to sell a subscription, and using vague content promises to inflate Ultimate Editions to make the base price look better, all of this seems a bit dangerous and disconnected from the community.”
Douse added, “I think a game should be priced according to its quality, breadth and depth,” and publishers should be more open and honest about charging more for games, rather than releasing special editions that cloud the picture. “Almost all games should fundamentally cost more because manufacturing costs (inflation, for example) outpace price trends,” he wrote. “But I don’t think we’ll get there with DLC promises, but rather quality and communication. Everyone is just waiting for GTA6 to do it, lol.”
It seems important to remember here that Larian’s own Baldur’s Gate 3 Also had more expensive special editions with a mix of digital and physical bonuses. Presumably Douse thinks these editions are flawless – I’ll leave that to you. That said, he’s far from the only high-profile industry figure to argue that the cost of making games like Outlaws is inconsistent with the prices.
The mention of GTA 6, which is due out in 2025, reminds me of comments made by Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick on a quarterly earnings call last year. He said that prices in the industry are “very, very low” compared to the number of hours of play the games offer and players’ perception of their value.
However, Zelnick added that this belief in getting a lot for a little money “doesn’t necessarily mean the industry has pricing power or wants to have pricing power.” In other words, Take-Two and other publishers aren’t going to force huge price jumps on their audiences, although I can 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 the industry should adopt any broader new pricing models, either.
Capcom president Harushiro Tsujimoto has gone even further than Zelnick, noting via Kotaku that development budgets have increased “a hundredfold” since the Famicom’s heyday in the ’90s. Speaking at last year’s Tokyo Game Show, Tsujimoto spoke specifically about the Japanese games industry, arguing, “Given that wages are rising across the industry, I think raising unit prices is a healthy option for business.”
Here’s an article on the price/budget issue from the Financial Times, published in January of this year, which includes an analysis of pricing trends specifically in the US by JPMorgan. “The cost of developing a AAA game has increased roughly tenfold in 15 years, and the customer probably hasn’t noticed much of it,” it says. “Due to weak pricing power, the standard retail price has only increased by 17 percent since 2007, from $60 to $70.”
I don’t want to pay more for games like Outlaws, and I’m suspicious of statements from people in higher positions about what their flagship games should cost. Among other things, it seems unlikely that the actual developers of these games would automatically benefit from an increase in revenue – if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that rank-and-file developers are seen as expendable, while executives are not.
It’s also worth noting that there’s a difference between whether a video game recoups its costs and whether it makes enough money for its investors. As one developer told me in an interview about Embracer’s smashing of Chorus developers Fishlabs, “We make a ton of money, but it’s not going back into the games.”
I agree that the cost/price ratio for blockbuster games like Star Wars Outlaws looks very unhealthy on paper. Attempts to close this gap have, among other things, led to the current flood of live service games with seasonal content that basically rely on players devoting time and money to them rather than trying something else. The cost/price discrepancy has also contributed to the current heavy promotion of generative AI technologies, which are often touted by publishers as a way to magically reduce budgets while remaining silent about the impact on their workforces.
But I think there are bigger, thornier questions at play that concern the culture and perception of “AAA” games as exercises in conscious unsustainability. Sometimes I think games like Outlaws are sold and bought pure based on the idea that they represent an unholy waste of resources – capitalism at its most decadent, disastrous and spectacular, where playing almost makes you feel like the game is burning a hole in the universe.
Before joining RPS, I wrote an article for Edge tracing the “AAA” concept back to its apparent origins in the ’90s, based on interviews with various industry executives. The closest that article came to a working original definition was that “AAA” games are games with budgets so big that they can’t possibly fail, which is not a phrasing that has aged well.
While the biggest of the big leagues toy with the prospect of price hikes, some publishers continue to experiment with various incarnations of “mid-tier” blockbusters that give the impression of “triple-A” largesse on a more reasonable budget. Here’s Techland, for example, explaining why shorter expandalones like the recently announced Dying Light: The Beast are “the future of gaming.”
