I’m pretty sure that every single one of your butt cheeks clenched the day we heard about the $70 (or R1,399) AAA game becoming the norm, everyone except for Capcom’s president Haruhiro Tsujimoto.
In a talk at the Tokyo Games Show this year, Tsujimoto stated that he thought game prices were too low.
“Development costs are around 100 times higher than they were in the days of the Famicom (NES), but the price of software hasn’t risen so much.”
But Tsujimoto doesn’t seem to be coming from a point of greed. He also reportedly mentioned that “There is also a need to raise wages in order to attract talented people”. This shows that Tsujimoto is focused on developing great games, and he thinks that to achieve that, you need the best developers on the job, and those don’t come cheap.
Capcom has already started increasing the wages of their employees in Japan by 30% following a 9th profitable year.
Capcom themselves have yet to bump up the price of their games from the $60 (R1,249) price to the dreaded $70 that Sony, Microsoft and a few others already have, but with words like these coming from the Capcom President and their new wage increase, it’s likely that we will see a price increase soon.