Summary
Embracer Grouphas been considering the idea of making some of its games more expensive, a senior company official has revealed. But the gaming giant isn’t framing the potential move as a price hike.
The standard price of new video games started shifting from $60 to $70 with the advent of the current console generation. Publishers andanalysts alike believed consumers would “happily” pay $70 for next-gen gamesand were largely proven correct, as underlined by the fact that the industry has continued to grow since that shift.
Embracer Pondering What Kind of Games Consumers Would Pay More Than $70 For
And while it’s only been four years since $70 releases started becoming the norm, Embracer Group CEO Lars Wingefors believes another price hike isn’t impossible. In a recentinterviewwith GamesIndustry.biz, the executive said that while no one has yet tried raising the price of standard releases beyond $70, that is something that the company has been pondering as of late. However, Wingefors is quick to note that these internal discussions aren’t being framed as a typical price hike, but are instead aimed toward figuring out what kind of games consumers may want to pay more than $70 for.
Elaborating on that point, the executive pondered whether gamers would consider paying more than $70 for something like an “enormous RPG,” which may have “100 or 150 hours of gameplay,” on top of offering an experience that’s equal parts polished and unique. If the audiences were to respond positively to such a release, that could pave the way for more games to hit the market, Wingefors explained. But that is ultimately a big “if;” e.g., something like thecritically acclaimedBaldur’s Gate 3checks almost all of the aforementioned boxes, but has still launched at $70 on consoles and $60 on PC.
Embracer Not Planning Any Game Price Hikes in the Immediate Future
Ultimately, Embracer won’t rock the boat just yet, with Wingefors confirming that the company isn’t planning any new pricing experiments in the immediate future, even if it is mulling over them. But his comments serve as a signal thatthe $70 standardmay not be as long-lived as its $60 predecessor, which was in effect for approximately 15 years, from the start of the seventh console generation to the end of the eighth one.
However, the majority of that period was characterized by a relatively healthy inflation rate, whereas the 2020s have so far been heavily affected by the post-pandemic inflation surge, which hit the gaming industry as hard as any other sector. That trend and the rising interest rates that made money more expensive to borrow and consequently caused investments to dry up are believed to have heavily contributed to the mass layoffs that have been affecting the entire tech sector, gaming very much included.Embracer alone has laid off thousands of employeesover the course of its recently concluded fiscal year.
