Nintendo made some big news this past month. We knew April would hold the big Nintendo Direct presentation focusing on the upcoming Switch 2 console. However, the presentation also revealed that $80 video games are upon us. With this new premium price tag becoming a hot topic, the CEO of EA doesn’t seem keen on adjusting their current plans.
Thanks to VGC, we’re discovering that Andrew Wilson, the CEO of EA, spoke about game pricing. The topic arose during a Q&A portion of EA’s latest earnings conference call. It was asked how the company was approaching the pricing of their line of upcoming games and if they would be taking a similar approach to other companies as of late.
According to Andrew Wilson’s comments, they are in a far different world than just ten years ago. For instance, the push a decade ago was selling physical copies of games. However, currently, there are new parts of their business, such as providing anything from free-to-play experiences to premium editions of video games.
Our business is very different today than it was even just 10 years ago. In a world where everything we did 10 years was about selling shiny discs in plastic boxes in retail shelves, while that’s still a part of our business it’s a significantly smaller part of our business, and we now have pricing representing everything from free-to-play all the way to Deluxe Editions and beyond.
At the end of the day, whether we’re doing something that costs a dollar, or we’re doing something that costs $10, or we’re doing something that costs $100, our objective is always delivering incredible quality and exponential value to our player base. – Andrew Wilson
So, ultimately, the focus is on providing quality and exponential value to their players. Andrew would later confirm that there are no changes to their current strategy. It might be reassuring that we won’t see an influx of new $80 games from EA, but we’ll have to wait and see if that actually ends up being the case.
Again, $80 games have been a hot topic. The former SIE Worldwide Studios president, Shuhei Yoshida, recently spoke about this move Nintendo made. While Nintendo was the first, Yoshida stated that this would happen eventually. That’s ultimately because of how much money and resources are poured into video games.
Of course, some developers are hopeful AI will soon help relieve some of the time to make these games, which might even help keep costs down. For instance, the director behind Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was eager to see how AI could help aid in development.
