With Microsoft’s recent announcement that it will be raising the price of its games over the holiday season, many are looking to the very cash-hungry (Ultimate Team…) publisher.
While other major publishers in the gaming industry are raising the prices of their games, Electronic Arts currently claims that it will not change its pricing strategy. The publisher said as much in its quarterly report. Given recent trends, it’s no wonder that one of the topics of discussion was whether EA would raise prices. Andrew Wilson, CEO of Electronic Arts, and Stuart Canfield, the publisher’s CFO, have not indicated that EA plans to raise game prices for the time being.
“In terms of pricing power, our business is very different today than it was even 10 years ago. In a world where 10 years ago everything we did was about selling shiny discs in plastic boxes on retail shelves, while that’s still a part of our business, it’s a significantly smaller part of our business, and we now have pricing that represents everything from free-to-play all the way up to deluxe editions and beyond. At the end of the day, whether we’re doing something that costs a dollar or we’re doing something that costs $10 or we’re doing something that costs $100, our goal is always to deliver incredible quality and exponential value to our player base. And what we’ve found over time is that when we can marry quality and value, our business is strong and resilient and continues to grow,” Wilson said. Canfield added that from a game perspective, there will be no change to the company’s current pricing strategy.
EA has not announced any price increases, but that does not mean that game prices will not go up. It’s just cheap PR to put the publisher in a more positive light. Anyway, everyone feared that Rockstar would be the one to break the price ceiling with Grand Theft Auto VI, but it was actually Nintendo that pushed the price of Mario Kart World even higher. Microsoft followed suit, and while PlayStation’s next big release, Ghost of Yotei, won’t see a price hike, it wouldn’t be surprising to see their next first-party title go up $10. So the answer to the question in the title is no. Or to be more precise: NOT YET.
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