Former PlayStation president Shuhei Yoshida has claimed it’s not a surprise that game prices are going to rise sooner or later. Game prices started rising in roughly 2020 and, ever since, have slowly risen to keep up with the rising production cost and to keep up with the gamer’s expectation of ever-evolving video games! Prices may look to become more normalized in line with the release of new video gaming equipment and the upcoming releases of large Triple A games (I’m looking at you Rockstar).
Yoshida has expressed, while speaking to PlayStation Inside, has stated that inflation and production costs are the root cause of games becoming more expensive. Adding to this, Yoshida said “a balance must be found between production costs and game prices”. While Yoshida is speaking factually, does this water down as being fair to the average gamer?
Nintendo were the first to lay down their hand with the recent cost of Mario Kart World coming out at a whopping $80! It came as a surprise to many of us because we all thought it would be the giants of the industry that would likely look at hiking the price of the games upwards. However, we all didn’t expect Nintendo to be the front-runner. Even Yoshida expressed his surprise at Nintendo being the first to pull the price of games up.
Just last week we saw Microsoft increase their prices for their hardware which I previously spoke about here – Xbox Price Hike Amid Earnings Call!. There seems to be a very obvious shift happening in the gaming world and, unfortunately, for us, we need to pay for it to be able to keep up with the current trends which hit us hard, as not just the gaming industry is becoming more expensive, but everything outside of gaming is also becoming more expensive!
Seeing Nintendo setting their standard for the new games released, especially for the Switch 2 console, puts into question if the upcoming GTA VI will come out at a whopping price or if we will see Rockstar stay at a happy medium which will see gamers rejoice, however for now we have to wonder and wait for the eventual drop of the pre-orders to be able to confirm either our fears or our rejoice! Speaking of GTA VI, be sure to catch the new trailer here – https://everything-nerd.com/gta-vi-trailer-2-just-droped-to-new-beginnings/
Let us know what you think in the comments below about the price hikes going on right now in the gaming industry! Do you think it’s fair? or do you think its foul?
