You might have recently noticed the announcement from Microsoft. Xbox made the jump in pricing their AAA video game titles. This is not a sudden change, so you don’t have to worry about these games costing more for the holiday season. Instead, Xbox had announced that in 2023 the upcoming first-party AAA video games that Microsoft’s game developers put out would cost more. Today, we’re learning a reason why Microsoft is making the jump to the price increase for their video games.
Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, was recently interviewed on the Second Request podcast. During this conversation, Phil Spencer was asked about the recent price increase announcement. According to Phil Spencer, there were a few areas in that Microsoft could have adjusted the pricing, and something had to give. There’s an increase in what developers have to pay to deliver software into the marketplace. The choice that Microsoft opted to run with was increasing the cost of big AAA video games to $70. That’s a $10 increase, and Phil notes that they were not the first to make the jump to this newly established price.
Instead, we’ve seen other publishers come out with a new $70 price tag. But the cost had to be adjusted to ensure that the business could thrive for game developers. In fact, Microsoft reportedly held off on the price increase for as long as they could. That seems to be the case across the board whenever the new $70 standard price tag is brought up. Developing games for modern platforms cost more, and as a result, the games themselves will have to be adjusted. Although, Phil Spencer also wanted to make note that they are happy with where the cost resides for subscriptions and game consoles.
After all, with Game Pass, you can obtain all of these first-party AAA games at launch. But again, this is not a price increase that is happening today. The announcement was for the upcoming AAA video games from Microsoft in 2023. Likewise, Phil Spencer stated that this would be for their largest AAA games, so we could potentially see some AAA titles costing less than the $70 standard. Right now, there is nothing we can do but wait and see what some of these upcoming games will end up running. Hopefully, for those that want to save some money and enjoy the games at launch we’ll see Game Pass continue to stay at its current price. Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see if we see a dip in how many units get sold at launch for new AAA games that now sport the $70 price tag.
