Sony Confirms Disappointing News About Next-Gen PS5 Games

Japanese gaming giant Sony confirmed that first-party PS5 games would retail up to $70 / £70. The company joins the current industry-wide trend of more expensive titles on next-generation gaming consoles. While fans are not thrilled about this recent confirmation, the announcement is already anticipated following other gaming studios' confirmation of higher next-gen titles' prices.

Sony shared the list of PS5 launch lineups and other aspects of the upcoming gaming system via the official PlayStation blog. One major noticeable thing about the recent announcement is the increase of $10 on the prices of first-party PS5 titles. This excludes "Spider-man: Mike Morales" and "Sackboy: A big Adventure."

Additionally, PS5 exclusives retail at the same price. Sony is the most recent game publisher to join the ranks of others who earlier confirmed that their games' prices would considerably increase. Activision's "Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War" and 2K's "NBA 2K21" were earlier announced to have more expensive pricing.

Other game publishers like Electronic Arts and Capcom previously said they would monitor the industry trends in connection with next-generation games' pricing. Meanwhile, Ubisoft said that the first wave of its next-gen games would not cost more than the current-gen versions at least until the holiday season of 2020.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick talked about this very topic in a recent conference call. The executive said that "we haven't talked about broad based pricing changes; I wouldn't be surprised to see other publishers raise prices when they have something great to sell. That's already happened in a couple of instances, but it'll be on a case by case basis from our point of view."

At this point, it still remains to be seen if the new price would be the standard in next-gen games' prices. However, with Sony and other market leaders already setting their prices, gamers could expect everyone else would likely follow suit. Recently, IDG consulting, an industry research firm, believes that more major game publishers would "explore increasing the prices on next-gen gaming consoles' Xbox Series X and PS5 because development cost is anticipated to rise.