Shuhei Yoshida, a former PlayStation executive and a well-known figure in the gaming community, joined the discussion about the rising prices of video games. He argued that $80 is not too much for a title like Mario Kart World, as it offers many hours of gameplay.
As you may know, after Nintendo announced the $80 price for Mario Kart World on the Nintendo Switch 2, other publishers followed suit by raising their own prices. It seemed they were just waiting for someone to make the first move.
Speaking on the Kit and Krysta channel (thanks GamesRadar), Yoshida said that “every game has a different value,” and that it is up to publishers to decide what price is reasonable for their products. He emphasized that not every game needs to cost 70 or 80 dollars, because every game is different.
Yoshida believes we’ve reached this point because of the rising “production costs” of AAA games. In his view, a better path forward might be relying on smaller teams, like Sandfall Interactive, the studio behind Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
He also said that publishers shouldn’t be locked into fixed prices. Instead, pricing should vary depending on the product. Yoshida mentioned live service games, which are sometimes very expensive to develop and might charge “$100 for you to buy this one digital trading card or something.” While that seems excessive, he pointed out, “some people see the benefit, so they spend that $100… So it’s up to you if you see the value or not.”
While Yoshida acknowledges the global economic struggles people are facing, he also asks players to consider that video games haven’t increased in price as much as other forms of entertainment, like movies. He believes they are still “amazingly affordable.”
He concluded by saying: “When you look at the value that the amount of entertainment a good video game provides, like Mario Kart 8, so many people played hours and hours and hours right with just one purchase, or maybe you know some people paid for additional tracks… So it’s really up to the game and people have to [judge] which game provides the entertainment that you want and see if it makes sense to pay the price on day one, or some games, you know, many games [the] price comes down when you wait as well.”
