Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan has stated that $70 USD for PlayStation 5 games is fair, while reports that higher prices were discussed were“categorically false.”
The first next-gen game to reveal its price was NBA 2K21, with an RRP of the standard edition being $69.99 USD. As debates continued over the price of AAA games in the next-generation, at least one industry analyst proposed gamers would be “happily pay“ the $10 higher price.
Other games with the new $70 USD price tag on digital stores include Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War, Demon’s Souls (2020), and Godfall. All of these titles are coming to next-generation consoles.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg released a report of an “industry-wide effort” by publishers to raise the standard price of a AAA game to $70. “Inside publishing houses,” their sources claim, “a price hike has been plotted and dissected by executives for years.” The report also features the damning quote “At one point, Sony discussed going even higher before settling on $70.”
Now, Ryan has discussed the price of next gen games in an interview with British newspaper The Telegraph. When asked if the £70 GBP price point for first party PlayStation 5 titles such as Demon’s Souls (2020) was fair, Ryan defended the decision based on the hours of entertainment players would get.
“Yes, yes, I do [consider that a fair price for a video game]. 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.”
When asked about Bloomberg’s report, Ryan said it was “categorically false.” SIE had previously denounced Bloomberg’s reports on the PlayStation 5’s production woes as false [1, 2, 3].
Ryan was then asked if a first party development studio such as Naughty Dog would price their next game at £70 GBP. Ryan once again stated the claims being higher than £70 GBP were false, though did hint that the future was not set in stone.
“I’m not making any predictions about anything that might or might not happen in the future. I’m saying that the reports about discussions that we considered higher pricing for first party games in this launch window were categorically false.”
Earlier in the interview, Ryan also state the PlayStation 5’s launch and 2021 line up were “by far the strongest that we’ve ever had, so I’m really happy with it.”
Ryan also defended developing games for both PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, and that the former were built with the console’s features in mind. However, Ryan did not confirm or deny if God of War: Ragnarok would be coming to PlayStation 4.
When discussing the PlayStation 5’s 646.7GB of usable storage out of the box (reported as 665GB by The Telegraph), Ryan stated SIE were not hearing those criticisms.
“We’re not hearing that. We’ll obviously watch what happens as people unbox their PlayStations and start to use them. We think we’ll be okay. We obviously are able to monitor hard drive usage on the PS4 microscopically and everything that we saw there indicates that we should be fine.”
Image: PlayStation
