I know I'm gonna get flamed for this, but I kinda agree.
I paid $60 for games back when a bottle of coke in a vending machine was 25 cents. Now I regularly see sodas in vending machines at $1.50 but games are still $60? Don't get me wrong I'm grateful, but when you have a 0% price increase over a period of time where inflation increases by 150%+ everywhere else, it's hardly surprising the companies are looking for new ways to monetize.
Devil's devil's advocate; gaming has grown many times over. GTA 3 sold 15M copies in 7 years, GTA 4 sold 6M copies in a week, GTA 5 sold 11M copies in 24 hours.
What you're missing is that you don't simply buy a $60 game anymore. You used to buy a $60 and that was that. Now you buy the game and have to $5 or $20 here and there for half of the content.
He said " The company's major releases this year - Exoprimal, Resident Evil 4 Remake, and Street Fighter 6 - were priced at $60 at launch. " Meanwhile just the TMNT content of Street Fighter 6 costs $100 to get all of it.
Zero reason to increase game prices unless they want to get rid of MTX. Even single player games have MTX. They're making more money than ever.
Maybe not the best comparison considering in the past couple years inflation on food has been artificially inflated due to corporate greed.
I wouldn't mind paying slightly more for games if the money was actually going into developers pockets.
All that being said though, unless it's a very specific title, I've been waiting for sales for the past decade. I only buy a game or two for full price a year (usually Nintendo because they rarely do sales)
I agree with you. The development cost is constantly increasing. Games are taking hundreds of millions to make, so his quote makes sense. Wasn't Phil talking about something similar in the leaked email, that people were talking about a day or so ago.
Though, as consumers, I understand people's reaction to this too, no one wants to pay more when they can pay less. But I would rather they increase the cost, instead of going the micro-transactions route (for single player games).