There's been a lot of talk about the potential price of next-gen games of late. After 2K Games announced that the upcoming NBA 2K21 would have a price tag of $69.99/£64.99 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, vs $59.99/£59.99 on current-gen consoles, folk got to speculating on what that might mean for the standard price of a next-gen video game.
Is the cost of the next-gen NBA 2K1 indicative of the industry standard going forward? Is it better for publishers to keep raising prices or simply start making smaller games at a lower cost again? We still don't have definitive answers to these questions, but Ubisoft has at least confirmed its own intentions for next-gen pricing... at least for now.
During a recent earnings call, Ubisoft CFO Frédérick Duguet confirmed that for the remainder of 2020, any Ubisoft game that releases on the next-gen consoles will cost the same as their current-gen counterparts. That means titles like Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Watch Dogs Legion won't cost any more if you plan on waiting to pick it up for PS5.
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"For the Christmas games, we plan to come with the same price than previous generation of consoles, and that's what we're focused on at the moment," Duguet said.
It's not clear what this means for Ubisoft's 2021 cross-gen titles like Far Cry 6. It could very well be that we're expected to pay a little more for the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions of the upcoming open-world FPS. For now, Ubisoft refuses to comment. We'll simply have to wait and see.
This news comes weeks after former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden's warning that current AAA development is "just not sustainable".
Referencing the fact that most AAA games currently cost anywhere between $80m and $150m to develop, Layden shared his thoughts on the future of development costs during a panel at Gamelab Live last month.
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"The problem with that model is it's just not sustainable," he said, according to GamesIndustry.biz. "I don't think that, in the next generation, you can take those numbers and multiply them by two and think that you can grow.
"It's been $59.99 since I started in this business, but the cost of games have gone up ten times. If you don't have elasticity on the price-point, but you have huge volatility on the cost line, the model becomes more difficult. I think this generation is going to see those two imperatives collide."
Given Ubisoft's penchant for making massive open world games, it'll be interesting to see which direction the company goes in as it starts to develop exclusively for next-gen hardware. Either games like Far Cry 7 and whatever the next Assassin's Creed ends up being will be way too large for their own good, or the developers will scale back and find other ways to make the most out of the new consoles.
Featured Image Credit: UbisoftTopics: Far Cry 6, PS5, Assassin's Creed, Xbox Series X, Ubisoft