Between massive budgets and gigantic marketing campaigns, video games of a certain claibre aren’t exactly cheap to produce these days. With hundreds of hands on deck, the licensing of the latest technology and plenty of talent to pay, it’s a miracle that video games have remained at a steady price for so many years. Just like cocaine. No seriously, go watch The Business of Drugs.
With a newer and shinier generation of consoles on the way, those prices may soon be increasing to match costs. 2K Games has already got the ball rolling with the next NBA 2K title charging a $70 premium for PS5 and Xbox Series X versions, a new benchmark that other publishers are likely to follow in the next-gen days to come. Ubisoft on the other hand, won’t be increasing their prices. For now at least.
In an earnings call earlier today via Kotaku, Ubiboss Yves Guillemot (Totally different to Yves Guillotine who snipped a few company heads out of a job after they were rumbled for some gross behaviour), detailed how Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Watch Dogs Legion and one other game (Probably Beyond Good & Evil 2) won’t be charging extra for a next-gen upgrade:
We plan to come with the same price as the previous generation of consoles. As we said earlier, for the $60 price we are really concentrating on the Christmas releases and we have decided that those games will be launched at $60.
Which is really clever marketing talk for saying that those games will still stick to a traditional price tag, without confirming if everything else that follows in their wake will slap an extra $10 charge on the price of admission. In other Ubi-news, expect another episode of Ubisoft Forward Ubi-soon! Ubisoft says that their next livestream will kick off in September, with more deep dives into their upcoming slate of releases.
“Please note that we will have another exciting Ubisoft Forward event in September, and we can’t wait to show you more,” Ubisoft CFO Frédérick Duguet said during the financial results briefing, via Games Radar. Just get IO Interactive to make the next Splinter Cell game and I’ll be happy. Easy.
Last Updated: July 23, 2020
