Sony Interactive Entertainment was not the only publisher to increase the price of next-generation games. Sony however did consider to raise the price even higher than $70 on PlayStation 5.
According to a report by Bloomberg earlier today, a large number of publishers have been playing around the idea of setting a higher standard in pricing for several years now. The advent of next-generation consoles provided a perfect opportunity to make that price-hike official.
While every publisher settled down for $70, which is a $10 increment from the prior retail standard of $60, Sony wanted to go even higher for games releasing on PS5. The report however refrains from mentioning just how higher before Sony decided to accept $70 as the new pricing standard for upcoming games.
Sony was not the first publisher to announce a raise in price for its first-party games. That honor went to 2K Games which confirmed NBA 2K21 to cost $70 at launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X. Other publishers like Activision followed suit, with exceptions like Ubisoft that decided to only raise prices to $70 after the end of the holiday season. Watch Dogs: Legion and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla hence remain priced at the same $60 on next-generation consoles.
Increasing retail prices of games from $60 to $70 is how publishers plan to keep up with renewed development costs which have kept increasing over the years. Grand Theft Auto 5, for example, had a development budget of nearly $300 million, which probably implies that Grand Theft Auto 6 will have an even larger development budget in line with next-generation visuals.
Something of interest and which most consumers might be unaware of; the $60 price tag was raised from $50 with the start of the last generation around 2006. $60 has hence stuck around for nearly 15 years while development costs kept ballooning. Sony considering PS5 games to cost more than $70 is pretty understandable. The publisher probably thought that a price-hike of $10 after 15 years is too low.
