Anyone who lived through the cartridge era remembers that game prices always sparked debate at the rental store door. In 2020, with the arrival of the new generation, the conversation came back strongly: after many years in which US$ 60 was the standard for launches, Sony began charging US$ 70 for its own PS5 games, such as Demon’s Souls and Sackboy: A Big Adventure. In the United Kingdom, the price was £ 70, which, at the exchange rate of the time, was over US$ 90.
The company’s justification was that development costs had risen a lot over recent generations, while the shelf price had stayed flat for years. In an interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph, published in November 2020, Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan was asked whether he thought it was fair to pay £ 70 for Demon’s Souls. The answer:
“Yes, yes, I do. If you measure the hours of entertainment that a video game like Demon’s Souls offers compared with any other form of entertainment, I think it is a very simple comparison to make.”
In the same conversation, he denied a report that was circulating at the time, according to which Sony had considered even higher prices before settling on US$ 70:
“I can say that this report that we were considering higher prices for first-party games is categorically false.”
Demon’s Souls, the game used as an example, is the remake of FromSoftware’s 2009 classic for the PS3, redone by Bluepoint Games with Japan Studio. It came out as a PS5 launch title on November 12, 2020.
What came next
The remake was very well received by critics and passed 1.8 million copies sold. The pricing topic kept generating talk: in Horizon Forbidden West, from 2022, the PS5 version cost more than the PS4 one, and Sony was criticized for how it handled the upgrade between the two.
Where to buy
Source: The Telegraph, via GamingBolt.
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