Former PlayStation boss blames AAA "production costs" for $80 games, says titles with "tighter teams" like Clair Obscur could be the way forward

Former Sony Interactive and PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida thinks the move toward $80 games was always inevitable.

In the last few months, Nintendo shocked the internet by announcing that Mario Kart World would be its first modern game with a $80 price tag. Xbox wasted no time in jumping aboard and soon revealed that at least some of its new first-party games would also be $80 by the end of the year - hello, Call of Duty?

So when Rockstar Games again showed off GTA 6 this week, and everyone saw its expensive-smelling, almost jaw-dropping graphics up close, questions were raised about how much it would cost, too. Surely, if there's any game that can get away with $80, it's the game with individually rendered arm hairs and realistically bubbling beer bottles?

In an interview with PlayStationInside, Yoshida said he doesn't know "if Rockstar will jump at the chance" to charge $80, though those price hikes were "going to happen sooner or later."

Yoshida's reasoning is one we've all heard politicians echo forever: "Inflation is real and significant, but people expect games that are ever more ambitious and therefore expensive to develop... it's an impossible equation." Of course, inflation is a real thing, but the problem is that wages haven't kept up, so we now have entire online campaigns begging Nintendo to "drop the price."

Alongside inflation, Yoshida also points to the ever-ballooning budgets in AAA games these days, where projects such as Horizon Forbidden West and The Last of Us Part 2 can cost upwards of $200 million to make. "Everything in video games today is more advanced and more technologically demanding than ever before, and therefore requires more resources," he added. "In the end, the heart of the matter lies in production costs. And that’s why industry actors are so keen to diversify their revenues, in order to continue producing the AAA games that the public buys before anything else."

He says evermore frequent remasters and remakes are part of this move, as are games-as-a-service and subscription platforms.

But, ultimately, what might help the industry is more games made with moderate budgets and teams, like the recently released Je'RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a turn-based $50 throwback that's sold over two million copies in two weeks. "The game is just as phenomenal visually, despite the fact that the team only has around thirty people," Yoshida said. "This is one of the ways forward, I think, because you can make excellent games with tighter teams and budgets without compromising quality."

$80 Switch 2 and now Xbox games aren't a big shock, analyst says, and games haven't really been $70 for a while: "The average price people are paying ... is much higher"