Capcom wants you to buy Dragon's Dogma 2 for $70 and yeah, I probably wouldn't

rockpapershotgun.com:

Capcom's fantasy action-RPG Dragon's Dogma 2 will sell for $69.99 - $70, if you disregard the usual "deduct one cent to fool silly left-to-right readers into thinking it's significantly cheaper" gambit - when it releases in March 2024. If you're in the UK, the figure is currently £53.98 on Steam. It's the first time Capcom have sold the base edition of a game for $70 in the US of A, and follows comments this September from a Capcom executive that videogames are priced "too low" these days, based on how much games cost to make.

That's $70 for the base game, again - there's also a deluxe edition of Dragon's Dogma 2 with cosmetics and a gallery of music and sound assets that will sell for $80 or £65.98 on Steam. See all that for yourself on the store page.

It's far from the first game to break the $70 barrier - Sony's God of War Ragnarok and Warner's Gotham Knights went for similar sums - and it sounds like Capcom have been weighing the benefits of making the jump for a while.

"Development costs are about 100 times higher than during the Famicom era, but software prices have not gone up that much," Capcom president Haruhiro Tsujimoto asserted during this year's Tokyo Game Show, as reported by Nikkei and passed on by Kotaku. "There is also a need to raise wages. Considering the fact that wages are rising in the industry as a whole, I think raising unit prices is a healthy option for business."

Elsewhere in the TGS presentation, Tsujimoto suggested that publishers can get away with raising prices even during rough economic times, because people need their creature comforts. "Just because there's a recession doesn't mean you won't go to the movie theater or go to your favorite artist's concert," he noted.