How much should games cost? We asked that question back in 2017, when the standard big-budget release came in at $60, and even made the case for prices being lowered to $50, or even $40. Some studios got the memo: Helldivers 2 launched at $40, for instance, and Dune 2 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 arrived at $50. But in spite of our very convincing math and graphs, prices on major big-budget games have instead gone up over the years.
It's been a slow ascent—Call of Duty brought the $70 game to Steam in 2022—but it looked set to accelerate earlier this year when Nintendo dropped an $80 tag on Mario Kart World for the Switch 2. Microsoft quickly followed with an $80 price on The Outer Worlds 2, although that was quickly walked back in the face of gamer outrage to the less-loathed $70 price point. Take-Two studio Gearbox also made a big point of listing Borderlands 4 at $70, not $80.
You can now add Electronic Arts to the list of game companies that have seemingly recognized they've pushed as far as they dare—at least for now. "We're not looking to make any changes on pricing at this stage," EA CEO Andrew Wilson said during a recent investors calls when asked about a possible shift from the $70 to $80 price point, particularly for Battlefield 6.
"But that's in the construct of, we already offer a fairly broad pricing scheme across our various products. When you think about everything from free to play to our premium products and deluxe editions, our orientation is always to capture the full spectrum of pricing, so that we can serve players in the best way possible and offer them the greatest value.
"We'll continue to look at opportunities to deliver great value to our players through various pricing schemes over the course of time, but no dramatic changes planned yet."
Game pricing on PC is a bit more of a fluid thing than it is on consoles: We noted as far back as that 2017 report that there will always be people willing to pay a premium in order to play a game first, but the advent of Steam sales and even Epic giveaways have conditioned us to simply wait for games we want to play but don't need to play. Battlefield 2042, the previous game in EA's military shooter series, is a good example of that: It launched in November 2021 at $60, and a month later it was on sale.
There's no doubt that price increases are coming. Nintendo can get away with leading the charge because, well, it's Nintendo, but other big publishers will follow suit soon enough. Battlefield 6 doesn't have the horsepower to pull that wagon, but Grand Theft Auto 6, or maybe next year's Call of Duty (especially if this year's doesn't suck)? Absolutely they do, and sooner or later someone will.
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