A dozen eggs is $4 in 2022. Trolling price increases when Phil said they were going to do it is really some low brow Neo GAF stuff.
Unfortunately a lot of Xbox fanboys/fangirls and well just anti-PS people in general kept beating Sony over the head for $70 games for two years, under the idea Microsoft would never follow that model.
Looks like they're wrong. And now, they'll go ghost.
All streaming services save for maybe Netflix are priced low to build subscriber base. They are heavily subsidized and make hardly any money at all. The long game is to be the next Netflix where you have so many built-in shows that are only on your service that people have to stay subbed, because it's basically a utility. So the model is that you keep people on and then raise your price slowly over time.
Realistically how many subs do you think a service like GamePass can garner & sustain long-term? Because I personally peg them at around 65 million - 75 million before they completely tap out their market, and that's with taking massive PC & mobile growth into account.
I just don't see how the model of subscription services for games, particularly accessing new Day 1 games, works well the same way it theoretically does for TV shows. And if we're comparing games to other media, most games are either more analogous to films (non live-service/GaaS games, almost always single-player) or shows (live-service/GaaS titles, especially MP ones), or a mix of both. But consuming gaming content is MUCH different than consuming movies or shows, on average you ALWAYS invest more time for similar levels of interest/investment of attention.
Therefore sub services for gaming, IMO, work best for large content backlogging, but then ask yourself how many people with 300+ Steam games have actually played them all? How much of them that they've played, have they sunk real time into? I bet you the answers are frighteningly small. So it still asks the question if the value-to-money investment is worth it for the average person outside of a pseudo-feeling they have a large (digital) collection at a barebones price they can access at anytime.
Yup.
And this hold true for everything that has gone up in price the past 2 years.
When prices go up and the economy is supposedly in a big pinch, the theory is expensive non-essential stuff like travel, vacations, furniture etc... take a big hit. While essentials like food (everyone has to eat), utilities, driving to work dont get hit as people still got get through live at the most basic survival purchases.
Where do games fit in? On paper it seems like a luxury good that would get hit. But going by sales and profits it seems it doesn't get affected much at all. Covid helped with people stuck at home with nothing to do but spend more on games and movie sub plans, but will sales and profits keep zooming up? Or will it crash and burn due to inflation and everyone back outside? The companies seem to be doing fine as we head into 2023.
Maybe there's more money left on the table and $80 US games are around the corner. You never know. All comes down to who wants to try it first, it shows success, and then everyone else joins in. At some point it will hit $80, but a matter of which year.
Honestly, I don't think inflation will impact games too much in terms of increased prices leading to some crash. If we look back at the one big industry crash with America in the late '70s/early '80s, it was lack of quality control and oversaturation of the market which led to that event.
Any game pricing itself a premium MSRP better have the quality and value perception WRT quality by customers to justify it, or it simply gets ignored (bad sales). Publishers will also want to be more sensible in how they spread out their releases over the fiscal year so that they can maximize sales for any singular game and not risk that game getting drowned in a sea of their own content (other game releases cramming the schedule).
Personally I don't think an increase to $80 is happening anytime soon, because almost all of the publishers increasing to $70 are doing so in addition to balancing that out with more GaaS/live-service gaming initiatives. Which if those work out, will mitigate any need for an additional price increase, even for games that otherwise offer no GaaS/live-service type of content outside of their single-player design.
I wonder how long until the Gamepass fee goes up. I still have GP through 2024.
Probably before then.
That’s true, but imo not every game is worth $70 or a price increase even with inflation. I remember literally everyone was ripping Sony apart for charging $70 for first party games so I’m just wondering if that same energy will be applied to Microsoft.
It won't. It never really is.
It was "journalists" mainly pushing that narrative WRT Sony two years ago and even into this year, simultaneously pushing it to boost GamePass reception (and Microsoft/Xbox reception in general). Now many of them are going to have egg on their face, but they'll just pretend they never said those things or move the goalposts.
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