We need to talk about the cost of next-gen video games

Next-gen video games cost £70 – this is something that has become apparent in the last month.

Sony, with the in-demand PlayStation 5 near launch, has decided Demon’s Souls, Destruction AllStars, and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales Ultimate Edition all cost £69.99 each. On ShopTo, Gran Turismo 7 costs £69.85 – 14 pence cheaper than RRP. So does PS5 game Returnal. Clearly, if you want to get into PS5 gaming, the true cost of next-gen is £70 games.

But Sony is not alone in selling £70 next-gen games. I’ve had a look around, and I can’t help but feel we’re being shafted. PS5 launch title Godfall, published by Borderlands developer Gearbox, costs £70 on Sony’s console. The PC version, exclusive to the Epic Games Store for now, costs £50. I know PC games, which are downloads not discs, tend to be cheaper than their console counterparts. But why is Godfall £20 more expensive on PS5 than it is on PC? That doesn’t seem right. I asked Gearbox for an explanation for the cost of Godfall, but it has yet to comment.

Here’s another game that seems outrageously priced: Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. On GAME’s website, the next-gen versions (PS5 and Xbox Series X) both cost £70 each. The current-gen versions cost £65, which seems ridiculous (they’re £60 elsewhere – nice one GAME). Activision is pushing the digital-only cross-gen bundle version of the game, which costs £65 on the PlayStation Store as well as the Microsoft Store. The publisher is not offering a free next-gen upgrade, like other publishers are. It is not making use of Microsoft’s Smart Delivery, like other publishers are. If you want to upgrade to next-gen from current-gen, you may have to pay an extra tenner (we’ve asked Activision how much it will cost, but it hasn’t confirmed yet). So you should probably get the £65 cross-gen bundle, just in case. They’ve got us there, haven’t they?

There’s more: Hogwarts Legacy is £70. Gotham Knights is £70. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is £70. It’s clear: £70 is the new next-gen normal.

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But why? Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick defended his company’s decision to hike the price of the 2K basketball game on next-gen. In an interview with Protocol, Zelnick said: “The bottom line is that we haven’t seen a front-line price increase for nearly 15 years, and production costs have gone up 200 to 300 per cent.

“But more to the point since no one really cares what your production costs are, what consumers are able to do with the product has completely changed.

“We deliver a much, much bigger game for $60 or $70 than we delivered for $60 10 years ago. The opportunity to spend money online is completely optional, and it’s not a free-to-play title. It’s a complete, incredibly robust experience even if you never spend another penny after your initial purchase.”