$60 Game Comeback?

[Jonbo298]

Ever since the PlayStation came around, gamers have been used to paying $49.99 for a brand new videogame (save for us hardcore $59.99 N64 guys). Publishers felt that this was the right price point to cover all the costs to develop a game, make some money off it, and still make the consumer happy.

That was then, and this is now. Back in the 32/64-bit era, a game cost in the 1-2 millions of dollars range to develop. That's not so true with the current breed of consoles, where most games cost five times as much to make or more, and while more people are playing videogames than ever, that still doesn't justify the cost of a game being the same price, $49.99. At least, according to one analyst. Here's a snip from the article, with comments from Shiny's Dave Perry:

Several things are driving development costs up:

First, compared to the last generation of consoles, the current 128-bit generation requires at least 40 times as many lines of code to fully exploit its capabilities. And that costs money.

Shiny president Dave Perry says that the more advanced the console, the larger the development team. He should know: Shiny’s “Enter the Matrix” cost more than $20 million to develop.

“To keep pushing the limits, that not only takes more people, but better people,” Perry said. “Great development staff are therefore becoming more and more valuable, and as our industry moves to Playstation 3, Xbox 2, etc., then they will be at a new premium,” he said.

Gamers concerned about a possible games price hike would do well to read the entire artlice over at MSNBC. Be aware, though, that the entire article is speculative, and in no way indicative that publishers will increase game prices any time soon. We hope.

http://www.planetgamecube.com/news.c...n=item&id=4477

If next gen games are going back to the $60 price point, they better be damn good. Maybe then companies will actually make sure a game is good. But like they said, this is all speculation. Also, will the 3 main console makers try to easen up the process to making a game on their system next gen? Imagine if the "toughness" to make a game made a difference to the price on all 3 consoles. Hell, original PS2 games might've sold for alot more then now. Maybe 'Cube games would be the cheapest or XBox depending on what companies know about the system. But who knows......