Post Script
Yes, £70 for a game feels like a lot. But before you walk away, consider the alternatives
Game magazines of yore would often speak of a title’s value for money. We were all kids back then; funds were tight, games were smaller in scope and shorter in runtime, and grey-market imports cost a fortune. Times were hard. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag, and so on.
These days, when a debate is raging around the cost of games, it is typically the older heads who are calmer. They remember paying through the nose for import SNES games; they point to inflation, which suggests that games are, if anything, underpriced. And since they skew older, they are likely to have more disposable income, and are better able to swallow a higher price.
Not this time, apparently. Returnal’s launch at £70, Sony’s new standard price for firstparty releases, just feels different. Clearly, an invisible line has been crossed. It is on one level psychological: it feels like too much at once, that if we accept £70 they’ll be £100 before long. And in a time of free-to-play games, giveaways and all-you-can-eat subscription services, the notion of paying that much for any game, regardless of quality, feels not just daft but irresponsible – particularly during a pandemic, when financial uncertainty abounds.
The experienced, well-informed player (you, in other words) understands that development budgets have increased exponentially since the advent of HD, and that curve shows no signs of flattening. You appreciate, too, that while games can be works of art, they are also entertainment products, funded by capitalists with investors and shareholders to placate. But it can equally be argued that the bean-counters have never had it so good. The rise of digital distribution has killed the secondhand market that once caused the industry so much strife, and stripped many burdens – manufacturing, distribution, retailer cuts – from balance sheets. None of that has been passed on to the consumer, who has to pay the same price as a retail copy for a download they cannot trade in.
Yet to put this price increase into proper context, we must consider the alternatives. The generation just past has shown us what happens when companies launch new releases at traditional price points and try to make up the difference in other ways. Can we responsibly decry crunch, or lament aggressive monetisation when we refuse to accept a higher upfront price? Is an extra £20 not worth considering if it means getting a game that doesn’t nickel-and-dime us with season passes, character cosmetics and randomised loot-box rewards, and was made by developers who weren’t worked to the brink of burnout? That is not to say all that goes away if we pay more at the till. But if nothing changes then, well, nothing changes.
In any case, these days no game stays at launch price for long (well, unless it’s a Nintendo game). The secondhand market may be no more but digital sales are frequent, and Returnal won’t cost £70 in 12 months’ time. When a blockbuster film comes out, we can either pay through the nose to see it in the cinema on opening weekend, or wait as it becomes progressively cheaper until it finally lands on free-to-air TV. You buy the book you really want in hardback, rather than wait for the paperback six months later. Games have long followed this model; with prices hitting the floor faster than ever, perhaps Sony is entitled to think it is time it raised the ceiling.
The point to all of this is that gaming’s financial system is a bit of a mess. Games cost too much to make, but are already expensive enough. There is a fundamental tension here that, really, is the fault of neither party: as players we want the best, biggest and most bleeding-edge experiences possible, and developers want to make them for us. This ratcheting up of the price is just one solution to a problem that affects the entire industry. As consumers and players, we have but one option available, and it’s the one we’ve always had. We will vote, as ever, with our wallets.