Capcom President: 'I Feel That Game Prices are Too Low' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 October 2023 / 4,451 Views
Capcom President Haruhiro Tsujimoto in an interview with Nikkei feels that game prices are too low as development costs continue to rise and the need to raise wages.
"Personally, I feel that game prices are too low," said Tsujimoto via a translation by VideoGamesChronicle. "“Development costs are around 100 times higher than they were in the days of the Famicom (NES), but the price of software hasn’t risen so much.
"There is also a need to raise wages in order to attract talented people. Given that wages are rising across the industry as a whole, I think the option of raising unit prices is a healthy form of business."
Capcom has yet to increase the price of its games from $60 to $70, which is something several publishers have done since the launch of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles in November 2020.
Tsujimoto doesn't feel like the current economic climate was affecting the sale of video games.
"Business confidence and high prices have little to do with the games industry," said Tsujimoto.
"Just as the recession doesn’t stop people from going to the cinema or going to their favourite artist’s concert, high-quality games will continue to sell well. Even during the Lehman Brothers collapse, games sold well."
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 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Generally, I agree with with him. It's a hard thing to admit but if we as gamers want games, fully complete, without being riddle with microtransactions, costs at some point have to reflect how the industry has changed. In PS1 era, costs of games came down due to a new media, the CD, it was cheaper to produce but games could be made by like 20-30 people and sell for £40. Now they are made by 200 people and we moan when they sell for more than £60 yet based on inflation they should be selling for £75-80.
Which capcom game is made by so many people??
Generalised statement but I'd be rather shocked if development teams are the same size as they were in late 1990s.
This is the credits (according to this website) for SF3 on Dreamcast, it has apparently 7-8 programmers. https://www.mobygames.com/game/5051/street-fighter-iii-3rd-strike/credits/dreamcast/
Here is SF6 credits: https://www.mobygames.com/game/203910/street-fighter-6/credits/playstation-5/
It has 27 programmers that don't have fancy titles alone.
Bullshit, gaming companies and publishers are making more money than ever by nickel and diming gamers with mtx. Increasing the cost of video games isn't a measure to stop them from sinking but it's to create an even bigger profit margin.
This might ring a bit truer if games were reliant on retail pricing like the past, but we all see the hundred of ways
that game companies now nickel and dime us, why give us rich and complete game worlds when they can sell it piecemeal, I no longer feel gobsmacked when I see a range of cosmetics that took a intern a couple of hours work being sold for a third or more of the whole games price .I could go on talking about the multitude other ways they make money off games today, but you have experienced most of them for yourselves so don't need me to tell you.
Now if record sales and profits weren't being made and the sales model was unchanged then I could agree, but instead in this day and age where buying a new game means that you're actually just buying a licence to play what's on the disc or are after fully downloading it if the game disc is just a proof of purchase disc. and in a environment where when and how I game and how long (even for games without any online gameplay) is becoming more and more out of my control if they want a rise they can go and ( insert your own words after the beep).....
Money = price * sales
Ultimately there may just be too many games on sale. In the NES days, you didn’t have Steam and the Internet. (Also much of the money was the cartridge)
The entire US NES library is 600 games or so.
Your stocks value has only increased by 11.5X in the last 10 years and 21X in the last 18 years but hey I guess you guys aren't making enough money there Capcom.
They are a for-profit, publicly held company that has a legal (and, arguably, ethical) duty to shareholders to make as much money as possible. There is no amount of money that is "enough".
As a consumer, I understand how that fact can be off-putting. But, it is a fact.
That is true but come on, the S&p which is considered one of the best safest investments in the market is up 2.4X in the last 10 years, hell even Apple is only up 8.7X in the last 10 years compared to the incredible 11.5X for Capcom's stock!
He’s not wrong, but this is terrible PR.
Game prices are one of the few things not impacted by general inflation. I’m fact, games are still cheaper today than the 1980s and 1990s. Nowadays, there are a large variety of prices for games, but in the past they were all very expensive - even a simple snoopy game would cost something like the equivalent of 100 USD (before inflation). Including inflation, official game releases in the 1990s probably cost around 200 USD in 2023 money, and higher for import. Today, many games cost under 5 USD, sales reduce them to as much as 0.01 USD. “But those are bad games” you might say; bad games in the 1980s and 1990s still cost full price.
There were certain places you could go to get games cheaper, but even then, it would have been no lower than the equivalent of about 50-70 USD in the 80s and 90s (around 100-160 USD today). But the opposite is also true—in some countries, much higher than the numbers I’m stating.
So, he’s right on the data, but bad on the PR.
They could just keep the prices at full a la Nintendo and see if that works. It would get backlash, but less than 80 dollar games would give them
I actually agree on his point that compared to inflation, games have not kept up. But what are you going to do? If you take a look at NES games, and you adjust for inflation, today's games would need to have an MSRP of about $179.99 USD. That's simply not going to fly, regardless of whether or not it's accurately adjusted. The industry would crash, hard. So there really isn't much of a solution, other than to stop making as many AAA games, and go the indie rout of low-cost, high-creativity games.
I agree, but unfortunately for AAA studios, they've pushed themselves into a corner. So much money is being put into these games that they have to sell gangbusters, so they can't really afford to have too much creative risk taking. It's the norm to see game development costs being upwards of at least $200 million just to make a single AAA game. Not even taking into account marketing costs. A single flop like Immortals of Aveum and half the studio gets laid off. I can't imagine what would happen if major releases God of War: Ragnarok, FF16, Star Wars Jedi Survivor and the like get their development budgets cut in half.
I don't see how the market doesn't eventually crash in some form. Manpower will only continue to rise as game tech only becomes more and more complex thus leading to game development being even more costly as time goes on.
Makes me wonder if that's why tech companies are pushing so hard into AI. To help push costs down, which is also a double-edged sword.
You're dreaming if you think most games cost anywhere near that.
Hard to claim that when there’s literally been articles on VGC about AAA games costing even more than that lol. How do you not know that's how much a vast majority of AAA games cost to make these days? You think games are increasing in price just because? lol
People hear the estimated cost of a top AAA game , like GTA and suddenly its a blanket AAA games cost $100 million or more to make without taking into account that just like the rest of the gaming industry the costs per game varies across AAA games.
Sony used the uncharted series to explain the cost of AAA games saying that uncharted 1 and 2 cost $20 million each to make and 3 and 4 $40 million each but the doubling in costs for UC3 and UC4 had way more to do with the success of the franchise allowing for greater budgets than any general cost increases pressures.
It's the hefty ROI made off the back of continued success and the less risk that brings that allows for these AAA game budgets , so while rrp may have remained stable until Sony increased theirs opening the door for others to follow, the record profits show that those increased budgets are well and truly paid for by way of increased sales and a gaming industry that uses ecosystems and no longer just relies on rrp for profit .
That's bull. Why is it higher when game dev tools and engines have improved massively.
Capcom should be the last to talk. Most of their games only take 5 to 6 hrs to complete.
