Capcom President Says ‘Game Prices Are Too Low’

It’s because these companies keep driving up production costs on their own. Their next game has to top their last. At what point do we say that graphics are good enough? Who needs these insane amount of details? Why does a game absolutely need to be 100+GB in size? Is Bloodborne not visually appealing enough? What about God of War (2018)?

Can we not find a “good enough” acceptable baseline and just work with that? This infinite growth is annoying as both a developer and a player. Like okay, ooooh, you can render each individual hair on someone’s head and they each have their own physics. Congratulations. How’s the story for the game? Ah, broken to the point of unplayable, but you pinky swear a patch is coming.

i want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i'm not kidding
- Welcome to the world of indie games, where the passion leads to experiences that stick in minds more than plenty of AAA games these days
- Fuck yeah. Give me passion projects made by people having a great time any day of the week.
- was this quote originally by Jim Sterling or someone else?
This infinite growth is annoying as both a developer and a player.
wait until you find out what the world economy is built on...
I still play Dishonored every year. Those are not realistic graphics in the slightest, but it still holds up pretty well. Why? Style. I would 100% take a "lower" graphics game with style than a 100GB game with exquisitely modeled sandwiches.
Stylistic games also age better than realistic games in my opinion. Look at other 2012 games like Mass Effect, Far Cry 3, and Borderlands. Mass Effect and Far Cry went more realistic, and I think they suffered a bit for it in the long run.
Not saying Dishonored didn't age tho. It does have that 2012 feel, lol.
No offense but 100gb really isn't that big in the year 2023... I keep seeing people complain about this and I just don't get it. 5-7 years ago? Sure. That was unusual. Now? Nah.
I mean 4k HDR Remux files are often upwards of 80gb, and that's just a 2-3 hour movie. Games can have hundreds of hours of content and also have high quality textures/HDR/HQ Audio/etc. Is it really that surprising that a bunch of games are 100+ gigs?
- Let’s say you buy an Xbox Series S. At the current going rate of games, you can fit four, maybe five games on the thing, assuming you don’t play older or indie titles. You can buy an external USB hard drive, sure, but you can’t play games off it. You’d have to awkwardly shuffle games around any time you wanted to play something else. Wanna expand it with storage that can actually be played off of? You need to pay the same cost as the console for proprietary storage.
  It’s different on PC and PS5 since you can upgrade storage relatively easily but even then, a 1TB NVMe disk can hold a maximum of 10 games at today’s storage requirements. Want something bigger? Get ready to shell out some serious cash.
  Storage has not kept up with file size. And to be fair, 4k HDR Remux files are just as bad. You can’t tell me the average person can even tell the difference from a 1080p WebRip (a fraction of the size) and one of them. Not unless you’ve got the high end hardware to make use of it, and I highly doubt the average person is shelling out the $5000+ required for that to be a thing.

I hereby announce that I don’t have enough money, and I want more.

I'm sorry, we don't acknowledge that query. It sounded like you said: "what's wrong with the world". Would you like lifelong, wistful depression or the psychopathy required for C-suite?

Well, if you think your game prices are too low, just raise them. The market will regulate this all on it's own.

He knows that. Which is why he's talking about it and not actually doing it.
He's basically just whining about it to us.
- I'm worried that he's actually speaking to other CEOs. "If you raise prices, so will we."
They largely are. $70 is becoming the new price point for a new game.
- First of all, consider how many hours of use you usually get out of such a AAA title, and you will see that it's actually quite cheap entertainment. And second, there are good games (to waste countless hours on) that are way cheaper.
- Yeah, and aside from less expensive indies I’ve bought fewer new games than ever this year.

I'm already 50% of the time on my ship to the seven seas. Do they want me permanently at sea? Same goes with the media companies like Disney+, Netflix and Amazon. They push it any further, I'm pushing off to seas for good.

They *literally, figured out how to beat piracy. The unbeatable problem. And then they had to go and blow it with their greed.

Meh. Capcom games just became $0 for me, because I'll swear an oath before you to pirate every one of their games, from here on out.

Inflation is a fact of life. Is a price that raises ever all it takes for you to decide to pirate? Did you do so when games increased from $50 to $60?
- Poverty is also a fact of life. Not everyone can afford every price increase.
- Nope. I only pirate when media companies can't stop gorging themselves on billions of dollars in profit and shovelling shares and dollar bills down their greedy little throats.
  It's not that I don't have the money, I've just had enough. When you had one of two streaming services and a Spotify and good prices on steam and whatnot, that worked.
  Today we have preorders that eclipse 100 dollars, my streaming service bills are more than the cable bills they were supposed to be replacing, and now it's just more more more. We want more more more
  🖕
- I didn't decide to pirate when games went from $70 to $80 (CAD). I didn't decide to when they went from $80 to $90. I decided to when, on top of that price, I also am encouraged via predatory tactics (such as matchmaking intentionally matching you up with players who have all of this nonsense so you can "see what you're missing") to buy a deluxe edition, season pass, monthly battlepass, "cosmetic only" microtransactions, second season pass, additional DLC not part of any season pass, and whatever other crap they want to nickel and dime their playerbase into buying. All just to actually get the full content of the game. Remember when games had the full game when you bought it? Maybe an expansion pack that had a substantial amount of content that was developed and released after the game was released?

Interestingly enough, if the games industry had kept the $60 price point that they fixed back ~2005 up with inflation, games would be costing around $95 today.

Unfortunately people's wages haven't kept up with inflation either, so that would just be a double whammy of making people who already struggling to pay for essentials pay more for entertainment as well, and at that point I'd think some people would just decide they can keep playing their old games.
Now do 1985.
Never mind, I'll do it myself: NES games were $50, which today is about $185.
- That's only because people in the US and Asia overpaid for their games. We weren't paying that for microcomputer games in Europe.
- That puts collecting into context.
  Buying almost any game new and holding onto them for decades would be a huge loss, net inflation. Even most "valuable" games would sell at a loss.

I say big budget games are too large in scope. Too much going on, too ambitious, too much emphasis on certain aspects that I feel developers value more than consumers. Not every game needs to be the biggest baddest game of the year blah blah blah.

Yeah. Every time someone comes up with "games are too cheap" I always point to the fact that the vast majority of AAA games have insane amount of bloat. If AAA devs were struggling to make a profit then a clear way to cut costs would be to streamline the product. If leveling is not vital, cut it. If randomized loot is not necessary, cut it. If horse balls shrinking/expanding with the weather is not necessary, cut it.
There are always ways to cut corners in a AAA games and if the cost was an issue they'd do it. But the fact that they don't shows how little the actually struggle. So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.
- So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.
  Starfield is the sloppiest Bethasda game ever, cutting corners to save cost is not how I would describe its development at all.
  I agree with what you are saying though. Spending 40% of the budget on voice acting and cinematographic dialog is extremely wasteful. As long as the gameplay is good and graphics are pretty gamers will like the product.
For real, I think it's rather telling that there are people who exclusively play some triple a games for the mini games.
It's also interesting seeing indie take larger and larger chunks from the triple a market. Remember when harvest moon and simcity were big corporate endeavors, now it's indie titles like city skylines and stardew Valley.
I would like to see some smaller projects from triple a studios targeting genres other than open world action-rpg.
- studios targeting genres other than open world action-rpg.
  With the corporate culture that's developed in the industry I don't think anyone should want that. Indie has the small project space covered & they make far better games than EA or Activision ever could in those genres. Corporate sellouts cannot beat passion, but they can make games so large in scope that small studios just cannot compete with that.

Capcom's CEO salary is too high

I just double checked and I think I will continue my trend of but buying Capcom games. The few IPs I may have been interested in I can definitely live without.

Game budgets are too big.

Honestly this is it.
AAA gaming does not equal good gaming, just bolted, expensive gaming.

It's true, game prices today are the same as they have been for the past 40 years for AAA titles.

I can't think of an industry which hasn't had a price raise in decades.

Gaming had managed to get by on this thanks to increasing market volume as gaming became more mainstream in addition to extra revenue streams like micro transactions. But it's hitting saturation now and won't keep counteracting inflation forever

I'd gladly agree to pay more in exchange for a legally binding agreement that higher prices mean video games free of predatory monetization and reasonable pay and job security for the people making the games. But we both know that they have no intention of doing the right thing, no matter how high the box price. They're already raking in record profits while laying off huge chunks of their workforce and giving the c-suite ever-increasing annual bonuses.
They've perpetuated the lie that microtransactions were a necessity and the $60 price was unsustainable for such a long time that people actually believe it. Now they want to increase the box price while keeping the predatory monetization, having their cake and eating it too.
Games have actually gotten cheaper over time adjusted for inflation even as production costs have risen, it's crazy. A NES game in today's money would be around $160.
- Game industry is bigger than movies and music combined which was not the case back in the NES era. Game industry has become a juggernaut with a huge consumer target base, and lower barrier to entry that allows for even random people being able to publish games instead of a few larger companies. Rise in production costs has been one that has been self imposed the way some studios go for big special effects blockbusters because they are targeting billions. Meanwhile like with movies you get these indie 2D and last gen 3D looking games being hits right alongside these billion dollar company attempts.
  I guess one area you can look at is how niche products get priced lower like mechanical keyboards, and then once productions starts ramping up and things go mainstream suddenly these niche expensive ventures with a few fans becomes more affordable as larger quantities are now being distributed.
  You same thing with tech like SSDs and hard drives actually falling price over time while capacities offered grows. Lot of PC parts actually with the exception of GPUs.
- Wages haven't keep up with inflation, you need to account for the loss of disposable income since then.
- Now compare the inflation adjusted cost of a Model T to a Corolla.
  Then compare the inflation adjusted cost of a ~~Model T~~ IBM series 1 PC to a ~~Corolla~~ modern PC.
  etc.
  etc
  etc.
Yes, but the market has grown significantly and the cost of production and distribution is very low, lower than the age of cartridges. The development is the only cost.
Lots of industries have had relative price drops over that time. Mainly electronics. An mp3 player used to be $200 minimum.
Prices definitely increased, over the last 20 years new AAA games price increased from 45-50 EUR to 70 EUR.
With inflation taken into account that would probably mean flat prices.
With the increase in the numbers of players, the spread of DLCs and micro transactions, I suspect revenue increased even with inflation taken into account.
Could it be the cost of creating game is rising faster than inflation? Or game studio just got more greedy?
In America they have been. In the UK I've watched games raise from £10 on my Amstrad in the 80s to £70 on my Series X now.
What you said, but in video form https://youtu.be/VhWGQCzAtl8?si=Gj9AaniT3U46KlGF. And that came out 5 years ago. Even if we only kept up with inflation from when that video came out until now, videogames should cost $73

I see what he’s saying, but the market says no.

Honestly, more product categories should do the same, imagine if Apple released a new phone for an extra $100, but everyone just said no.

They would focus on keeping the costs down and whinge about it like game manufacturers do right now, and it would be glorious

Yeah, it is interesting that with the exception of GPUs, PC parts like SSDs, hard drives, CPUs, and so on actually have felt like they haven't increased in price in comparison to phones. If anything prices have dropped and capacities increased and speeds gotten faster for SSDs for example. Same with televisions and monitors where stuff like resolution and hz has seen improvements while being cheaper than in the past.
- exception of GPUs
  To an extent, motherboards, too, and even before the GPU prices went ballistic. I bought a Z87 mobo back in the day for 80 or 90€ and the most expensive mobos were around 300€ or so. The X570 mobos in 2019 started at 250€ and 550 mobos didn't even get released until at the end of 3000 series Ryzen. Who in their right mind would pair a 200€ R5 3600 CPU with a 250€ mobo?
  I bet most of the budget-minded people who bought a R5 3600 CPU never got to use PCIe 4.0. And to add insult to injury, budget GPU-s started using PCIe 4.0 x8 (or even x4) instead of x16, effectively gimping them on budget mobos.

I literally sold the consoles I had and all my games with it because games became shittier each year.

Imagine having to pay 80+ dollars/euros for a game that isnt even the "finished" product.

I'd rather just save my money and spend it on things where I don't get absolutely railed as a consumer.

Capcom has absolute authority to price its games however they see fit.

If they make choices that put them out of business, that's on them.

At this point every game company would have to produce super solid, super polished games for like 4 years before they'd get my trust back.
- Wanna know which game I last broke my "no pre-orders" rule for?
  No Man's Sky. The game that was a tech demo for the first year or so after release. It's become a hell of a game since then, but it taught me a valuable lesson and I haven't bought a game since then.
  It's kinda the natural progression of late stage hypercapitalism though. Used to be that you spent all your money up front, then your sales recouped your investment and hopefully generated you a profit. Once game companies figured out OTA patches they realized that they can push a lot of QA back until after release and use pre-orders and day 1 sales to fund it. Then with DLC they realized that they can sell the untested skeleton of a game up front and use presales and early sales to fund development. The natural progression seems to be the Star Citizen model, where you get huge chunks of your sales up front and use that to determine what you'll develop and when (if ever) you'll release it

He's right. Free is a pretty low price for a game.

I didn't know Capcom CEO was trying out to be a comedian

You want to bet this kind of iluminated wisdom is what is going to push small independent studios and indie authors to the front line?

noone told them to make exoprimal, we just wanted more mega man & dino crisis