There are two ways you can screw up when pricing things.
The first is pricing things so cheaply that you undermine the work that others in your field are doing, to the point where they can no longer make a sustainable income.
The other way is by pricing things so high that they become out of reach for the common person.
The value of video games feels all over the place at the moment. On one side of the spectrum you have Nintendo Switch 2 games coming out over this past summer that cost $80 out of the box and an additional $20 for DLC. That’s a hundred bucks for a game!
On the complete opposite side of the spectrum you have Hollow Knight: Silksong, a highly anticipated game that has been in development for the better part of a decade, and has a list price of $20. It’s hard to get a good meal for that these days!
Most other games tend to fall somewhere in the middle, with $60-70 being the most common range for brand-new games produced by larger studios, and $30-50 being the typical range I’m noticing for smaller or independently developed games.
Let’s focus specifically on the two games that I’m thinking of most right now: Silksong and Donkey Kong Bananza. Both are high-quality, polished, beautiful games. The less expensive game has been ported to PC (including a native Linux build), Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation, and every platform in between. The most expensive works only on a single platform: Nintendo Switch 2. According to https://howlongtobeat.com, Silksong has an average main story play time of 27.5 hours (with over 60 hours to be a completionist). Bananza, on the other hand, clocks in at 18.5 hours (or 48 for completionists). Although Bananza is more the style of game that I prefer, and I generally find that I would rather play shorter games than longer, that’s still more value for the less expensive game any way you slice it.
With broader hardware support (which means more development time and more testing), and much longer playtime, you would think Silksong would cost more than Bananza.
So what gives?
The biggest difference in price comes down to what it takes to build a game. For the indie game, you have just a few developers, plus some contracted workers to fill in the gaps in areas like music, marketing, and QA testing. For the larger (I refuse to say “AAA”) games you have major studies with hundreds of developers, game designers, play testers, composers, marketers, and managers. According to what little data I could find online, Nintendo EPD (who made Bananza) have somewhere around 900 employees. They all need to be paid fairly, and to do so, you have to sell a bunch of copies at a higher rate.
There’s also the “free market” argument, I suppose: the market will sustain the price, so why not charge the amount that gives you maximum profits? Perfectly ordinary thinking if you’re running one of the wealthiest companies on the entire planet.
On the flip-side, $20 may be too low. It sets the expectation for similar games from other indie studios to be released around that $20 mark, but doing that requires games to sell enough copies to cover the development costs. Team Cherry, the Hollow Knight and Silksong devs, have sold tens of millions of units of both games. The developers no longer have to worry about money. They are set for life, and can afford to continue to release games at that price point. Other, less well-known or perhaps generally less popular studios, probably can’t sell anywhere near that many copies, so charging a higher price for fewer copies may be the only way to make ends meet.
Ultimately, I think the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. $30 for a game feels reasonable to me. Maybe even $40. Even with hundreds of employees, I feel like Nintendo could probably sell their games for half as much and still cover all the salaries of their employees, plus development and marketing costs. And by doing so, they would make their games more accessible to a wider audience. If I have to pay a hundred bucks for a game, I’m going to pick one or two I know I will love, and that’s all I’ll get. If they were half as much I would be much more tempted to try many different games, and be willing to go out on a limb for a title I might be unsure if I’ll enjoy.
But Nintendo loves money, and they have no trouble selling games at full price, so I imagine that’s going to be the way things continue. No skin off my bones, I’m more than happy to send twenty bucks to a smaller dev team putting out great work.