Battlefield 6 won’t cost $80, but EA aren’t ruling out future price hikes “to capture the full spectrum of pricing”

The game of chicken between publishers and players over whether $80/£70 is an acceptable price for the shiniest of video games continues. EA have announced that, as regards their forthcoming shooter Battlefield 6, they don’t think it is, but that may change, because they are never going to say no to more money.

Some brief background: executives at various companies have been bandying around the idea of a general price hike for a while. The broad justification often given is that standard price points for blockbuster shootybangers such as Battlefield have not risen in proportion to development costs, and that games theoretically offer many more hours of funtimes than, say, those stupid no-good films, with their shocking absence of levelling systems and sidequests.

Capcom’s president Harushiro Tsujimoto, for example, recently opined that “raising unit prices is a healthy option for business”. Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has suggested that videogame prices are “very, very low” for what they give you. Michael Douse, publishing director of Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian, reckons “almost all games should cost more at a base level”. He thinks next year’s GTA 6 could breach the current, widely embraced $70/£60 ceiling for the standard boxed edition of a premium game.

Nintendo may have beaten Rockstar to it. They’ve been selling first-party Switch 2 games for $80, and appear to be getting away with it, though a lot of game sales at launch form part of hardware bundles. As ever, it’s worth noting that Nintendo enjoy a stature among game publishers equivalent to the High Elves in Tolkien. That’s to say, they’ve been around forever and do not have to live by the same crude laws as the mortal races.

The same isn’t true of Microsoft, who recently tried to raise the price of Obsidian’s corpo satire The Outer Worlds 2 to $80. Mass internet screeching resulted, and Microsoft decided they were going to sell The Outer Worlds 2 for $70 after all, spoofishly framing this on social media as the intervention of a government regulator. At what point in capitalism’s co-option of criticism of capitalism do skulls start to actually implode, I wonder.

Now, here comes TD Cowen analyst Douglas Lippl Creutz with a question for EA chief executive officer Andrew Wilson during the publisher’s latest quarterly earnings report. He would like to know whether EA are considering selling Battlefield 6 and other major games for $80, in the wake of Microsoft and Nintendo’s movements.

“We’re not looking to make any changes on pricing at this stage,” Wilson responded, continuing that “we already offer a fairly broad pricing scheme across our various products. When you think about everything from free to play through to our premium products and our deluxe editions, our orientation is always to capture the full spectrum of pricing so that we can serve players in the best way possible and offer them the greatest value. We’ll continue to look at opportunities to deliver great value to our players through various pricing schemes over the course of time, but no dramatic changes planned yet.”

Here are some simple, non-exhaustive objections to the “games should cost more” reasoning above: some game development budgets are exorbitant because the projects are badly managed, and there is a difference between a game making enough money and a game making enough money for its investors. Publishers often have frankly insane expectations. There was no mention in the quarterly earnings call of a recent report that EA want Battlefield 6 to attract 100 million players, a feat no other Battlefield game has come close to achieving.

The game’s first single player trailer surfaced last week, in a terrible show of helicopter abuse. Look out for a full reveal of the multiplayer tomorrow.