$70 PS5 game pricing is fair, argues PlayStation boss
Jim Ryan says hours of entertainment justifies the increased price of some games
Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan has defended the company’s decision to increase software prices for selected first-party PlayStation 5 games.
Launch titles Demon’s Souls and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales Ultimate Edition (which includes Spider-Man Remastered) both have RRPs of $70/£70.
A Sony spokesperson recently pointed out that the $70 price tag was currently reserved for the company’s “biggest” first-party PS5 titles in a strategy “reflective of the growing development resources needed for these ambitious games.” Family titles such as Sackboy: A Big Adventure retail for $60.
And asked by The Telegraph if he considers $70/£70 to be a fair price for a video game, PlayStation boss Ryan said: “Yes, yes, I do. If you measure the hours of entertainment provided by a video game, such as Demon’s Souls compared to any other form of entertainment, I think that’s a very straightforward comparison to draw.”
A Bloomberg article recently claimed Sony considered pricing PS5 games even higher than $70, a report Ryan labelled “categorically false”.
He also refused to confirm if future games from top PlayStation studios like Naughty Dog would carry the $70/£70 price. “I’m not making any predictions about anything that might or might not happen in the future,” Ryan said.
Other publishers have also decided to increase software prices for some of their next-gen games, including Take-Two with NBA 2K21 and Activision with Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.
Rival platform holder Microsoft has chosen to play its cards close to its chest when it comes to next-gen software pricing, with Xbox CFO Tim Stuart recently saying it would announce first-party Xbox Series X/S software pricing “in due time”.
In the same Telegraph interview, Ryan predicted PS5 owners won’t have to wait until the tail end of the console’s lifecycle for some generation-defining games.
“I think the performance of our studios on the PS4 generation was great,” he said. “But it’s a little acknowledged phenomenon that virtually all of the great generation defining games that we published on PS4 came in the second half of the cycle – and that won’t be the case this time round.”
Ryan also refused to comment on whether God of War Ragnorak will be released for PS4 as well as PS5 next year and claimed the company hasn’t received feedback suggesting consumers are concerned about the amount of storage space offered by PS5.
