GTA 6 publisher CEO thinks videogame prices are "very, very low" for what they offer

rockpapershotgun.com:

Speaking to investors in an earnings call this week, GTA 6 publisher Take-Two's CEO Strauss Zelnick had a bit to say about the eternally uncontroversial topic of videogame prices. In news worth holding the press for, he thinks they're pretty cheap for what you get in return.

Zelnick cautioned one investor against "generalising" about the state of game pricing based on the recent fortunes of TV and movie subscription services like Netflix, which have had to increase subscription fees to match their expenses after underpricing themselves initially to grow their audiences. Videogames might be all about subscription services these days, Zelnick said, but that doesn't mean they are subject to the same commercial logics as ye olde non-interactive media. In particular, it doesn't mean publishers are currently able to raise videogame prices, even if they feel like they're overdelivering.

By way of explanation, Zelnick shared a little of Take-Two's own methodology for calculating videogame prices (be warned that the following sentence may give you a headache). "In terms of our pricing for any entertainment property, basically the algorithm is the value of the expected entertainment usage, which is to say the per hour value times the number of expected hours plus the terminal value that's perceived by the customer in ownership, if the title is owned rather than rented or subscribed to," he said.

Let me try to simplify that for us non-C-suite-based lifeforms: price is about the relationship between what you get per hour, how many hours you can expect to get, and what you perceive to be the overall value of the thing you're playing, watching, etc.

"You'll see that that bears out in every kind of entertainment vehicle," Zelnick