Xbox’s chief financial officer Tim Stuart has revealed Microsoft might be thinking about raising next-gen games prices going forward. Sony was the first platform owner to raise prices up to $70 for its PlayStation 5 launch titles, with 2K Games being the first third-party publisher.
Tim Stuart isn’t making any announcement right now, but he shared that Microsoft will look into it when the right time comes. “I think we’re not making specific announcements on first-party pricing yet,” he said. “So we’ll do that sort of in due time.”
“Prices have not gone up in — what, for a couple of generations now, so it’s not unheard of to see things like this going on,” the Xbox CFO remarked, kind of quoting what 2K Games’ Strauss Zelnick had to say on the matter when he defended NBA 2K21’s pricing policy.
“And to the point earlier, content creation costs go up. And these publishers and content creators, including ourselves, want to make sure you’re driving the right gross margin profiles, the right earnings profiles of what it takes to build these new, awesome, amazing games. And you want to make sure you have a good top line to support that.”
Xbox’s general manager at games marketing Aaron Greenberg, previously shared that pricing is a very complicated matter to figure out. He also added that Microsoft’s consumers didn’t have to worry about that, since Xbox Game Pass is so convenient they wouldn’t need to buy games at all.
Analysts believe changes in next-gen games prices won’t really harm sales in the end, though.
