Games are amazingly affordable”: Former PlayStation boss defends $80 prices because stuff like Mario Kart provides “hours and hours and hours with just one purchase
Former PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida has once again chimed in on the debate around $80 games, and he doesn’t actually mind the higher price tags.
When Nintendo announced that Mario Kart World would be launching alongside the Switch 2 with an $80 price, it didn’t take other publishers long to follow suit. Microsoft soon said some of its major games, including The Outer Worlds 2, would also adopt the (now) new standard.
But speaking to the Kit and Krysta channel, Shuhei Yoshida said that “every game has a different value that it delivers to players,” so it’s up to publishers to gauge what price is reasonable for their products. “It doesn’t have to be that every game has to be at, you know, $70 or $80 or whatever because every game is different.”
He then points to sometimes-ultra-expensive live service games that charge “$100 for you to buy this one digital trading card or something,” which is obviously extortionate, “but some people see the benefit, so they spend that $100… So it’s up to you if you see the value or not.”
Yoshida does also acknowledge that things are particularly tough for folks right now – hello, cost of living crisis – but reckons game prices haven’t inflated as much as movie tickets over the last 10 years, for instance, and are still “amazingly affordable” all things considered.
“When you look at the value that the amount of entertainment a good video game provides, like Mario Kart 8, so many people played hours and hours and hours right with just one purchase, or maybe you know some people paid for additional tracks… So it’s really up to the game and people have to [judge] which game provides the entertainment that you want and see if it makes sense to pay the price on day one, or some games, you know, many games [the] price comes down when you wait as well.”
Check out some of the other upcoming Switch 2 games to see what else is on the horizon.
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