Ubisoft to Not Increase Price of Next Gen Games This Fall - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 04 October 2020 / 2,075 Views
Ubisoft in today's earnings call announced they will not be increasing the price of their next generation games this fall. The games they plan to release in Fall 2020 will be priced at $59.99 for current generation and next generation consoles.
This is in contrast to Take-Two Interactive who announced the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 versions of NBA 2K21 will be priced at $69.99, up from $59.99 for the current generation versions.
Big news: Ubisoft said on today's earnings call that their next-gen games this fall will be the same price as current-gen games ($60). Take-Two had announced that NBA 2K21 will be $70 on PS5 and Xbox Series X.
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) July 22, 2020
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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This is how you do it 2K. $60 gets you the game on both current and next gen. 2K by comparison is charging $60 for just current gen, $70 for just next gen, and $100 for both. Plus you know NBA 2K21 is going to be littered with lootboxes, just like the last one. Greedy 2K sucks ass.
It's still stinking rotten Ubisoft though. The pub that has it's devs make games too grindy so they can sell you a solution to a problem they created. The pub that makes you sign up for Uplay to access online components of their games, so they can collect information about you and sell it to their cockroach friends. And on and on.
All publishers are shitty to some degree in my experience. But you can rank them from least shitty to most shitty, and Ubisoft is towards the "least" end of that spectrum imo.
I'm not the biggest fan of open world games, but AC is quite enjoyable and never even seem any issue with grinding. Actually in the greek and egypt ACs as far as I remember all enemies are scaled to be near your level so grinding is pointless. You at most can define the level of challenge and it will determine the gap in level from enemies always being over your level to being moderately bellow.
How long will they keep that up, and without MT's I wonder.
Not surprising, really. Wouldn't make much sense for them to support smart delivery on Xbox, and free next gen upgrades on PS5, only to then announce that the next gen versions of their games will be more expensive. Everyone would just buy the current gen version, and then take advantage of the free upgrades to get around the price hike.
I'm actually curious if lastgen versions will be playable on nextgen, since they are largely backwards compatible. Shouldn't be hard, and they should theoretically be able to show benefits from the new hardware, even if not comparable to newgen, the higher quality assets for Pro/BoneX should provide good basis. While that should probably "just work" normally, there is also the possibility that 2k uses the API hooks meant to enable improved performance with backwards compatibility for the opposite purpose, either outright refusing to run lastgen versions on newgen consoles, or hard locking performance to be same as last gen. Although fair to say, the latter still is a fully playable game that may be reasonable purchase for anybody unwilling to pay higher price for nextgen exclusive version... Probably not even a bad experience, again since it would be leveraging Pro/BoneX assets/etc (albeit Pro version is probably weaker than BoneX, and so doing this on PS5 may be worse than XSX)
@ mutantsushi: From how I understand Smart Delivery, what you are describing is actually NOT possible, which is interesting. Let's say you buy AC Valhalla on Xbox One disc. You put the disc into an Xbox Series X. Because the game has Smart Delivery, it would automatically install the Xbox Series X version. Next scenario: you buy AC Valhalla on Xbox One through the digital marketplace. You boot up your Xbox Series X console, go to your library and download AC Valhalla there - again, because of Smart Delivery, it would automatically download the Xbox Series X version.
The only possible workaround, is maybe if you insert a Xbox One disc of AC Valhalla into a XSX while the console is offline - then, maybe since it wouldn't have any way to download the XSX version, it would have no choice but to let you play the Xbox One version through backwards-compatibility.
@NextGen_Gamer ...To be clear, I was imagining how 2K's NBA2K21 more expensive nextgen version might be avoided if able to run less expensive lastgen version via backwards compatibility... if 2K doesn't sabotage that.
I'm not solid on the exact nature of "automaticity" in crossgen upgrades (sorry, I refuse to use marketing lingo for what is same concept, Sony or MS), if the digital distribution would automatically force itself to inject new version, using physical install with internet disconnected does seem likely way to bypass that if you prefer running oldgen version in backwards compatibility mode. Question would just be whether it later gets over-written with newgen version once internet is reconnected, or whether "crossgen upgrade" only occurs at installation and so if you disconnected internet during install it would just leave oldgen version alone.
''This fall"' If they really needed to mention that,can that mean their games will go to 70 dollar next year?
Yeah... I have a feeling this is simply to stir up positive hype for Ubisoft, based on the absolutely horrible sexual abuses that came out to light. I hope they wake up or go fuking bankrupt. I am not paying a penny for any shitty AC they put out, and this looks to be the worst in a while.
And AC is a much better game and for me with much more work put than NBA.
That's nice, but on PS store Assassin's Creed Odyssey is and has been €69,99
Not to defend 2K, but it's absurd to compare situation with NBA with any other game.
The nextgen console version is totally different engine, even PC is based on lastgen version.
(because the marketshare of high spec SSDs / new arch GPU is too small to justify requiring it)
Nextgen console market won't be huge right away, so wont' pay off developing new game engine.
It's like Neo Geo whose small marketshare meant everything for it was expensive also.|
Difference is just that eventually marketshare will grow and most of market will join nextgen.
But that doesn't help a game released in 2020 make a profit on just nextgen console sales.
In contrast, every other 3rd party game is being released across newgen, lastgen, and PCs.
Even MS' "exclusives" don't require those nextgen features on PC, so are really crossgen games.
Of course, 2K are also scumbags and shouldn't need to care about price with their microtransactions.
But nobody else is making fundamentally nextgen games that aren't back-portable to lastgen.
NBA isn't "higher price", because there isn't other pure-nextgen 3rd party games to compare to.
Eventually mid-way thru gen, that may start to happen, along with higher requirements on PC.
Are you telling me NBA 2K21 is built for the ground up for PS5/Series X and this cost them so much to build they had to hike up the price from one generation to the next, despite the graphical leap being notably smaller than the jump from PS2 to PS3? And you're right, its absurd to compare a game which barely has any unique environments to actual games where the number of assets going into next gen will cause significant impacts on the dev cycle. 2k are just being greedy opportunist. Nothing to do with what the next gen game will offer. We've seen the in-engine character models and no ones talking it because its nothing new.
I don't' disagree that there really isn't much point to new engine when game concept is so constrained and unimaginative. Maybe 2K shouldn't have bothered developing distinct newgen version if it doesn't really offer real benefit. My point is just that there is no point to making comparitive statement about this, since nobody else is making comparable effort... and whether or not they actually deliver on the promise of nextgen engine doesn't remove the costs of developing it, which they want to recoup and make their desired margin on.
I'm not really sure if/how lastgen version will be playable on newgen consoles (or not), that should probably work automatically and even offer minor improvements, but 2K could explicitly sabotage it to not work (in order to boost sales on new version). If they don't, that is easy alternative for people who don't give a shit about the improvements and prefer to save $10.
Building new engines is not something you charge consumers for, it happens all the time, its just a re-occuring cost of game development every 5-10 years and is a long term investment. Every major publisher/Dev showed off new engines this gen (Ubisoft/Activation/EA/Square/Capcom), some even showed off engines and then cancelled them (Capcom Panter Rhei) or went on use others like UE4 instead of the one they spent years building (Square Enix). This is never reflected in the cost of a game, its just part of the cycle. The cost of an engine is just man hours and I know that this game/engine hasn't been in development longer than any of the AAA games we've seen come out recently.
And you're right, that could be a decent loophole. It's mandatory for upcoming Playstation 4 games to work on PS5 so that are options for people to keep paying on PS5 without supporting this shady money grab. Hopefully PS5 boost mode can offer some increase in resolution at least.
