Take-Two boss: $70 Game Price Not The Baseline

No matter who you are, you have an opinion on what is ruining the games industry. Whether it be misogyny, microtransaction, humans being themselves according to some on Reddit and Twitter, poor business practices, and so on, everyone has an opinion. However, I think we can all agree that, at least in some small part, being bled for every penny so we can have the pleasure of being advertised to or have loot boxes pushed in our faces is one of the biggest issues affecting us. Possibly not in every game, but in at least one game you’ve played.

Now, following a conference call on quarterly reports and the usual press inquiry following said reports, Take-Two CEO Stauss Zelnick spoke with Rebekah Valentine of Gamesindustry.biz. Of course, Zelnick was asked about the recently announced $70 price tag added to the Take-Two subsidiary’s NBA game. Set for release this September, the game will also be another $10 when you buy the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 releases. Zelnick has come to the defense of this, saying it is not the baseline price for all future releases.

“There hasn’t been a price increase for frontline titles for a really long time,” Zelnick told Gamesindusry.biz, “despite the fact that it costs a great deal more to make those titles.” He goes on to say, “And we think with the value we offer consumers…and the kind of experience you can really only have on these next-generation consoles, that the price is justified.” Finishing with “But it’s easy to say that when you’re delivering extraordinary quality, and that’s what our company prides itself on doing.”

Is it Strauss? Is it quality you are bringing to the table, or is it another game that your studio works themselves to death over hardly given enough resources to make the game playable? We could parrot on about how the price increase is going to become normal over time as people can hardly afford to put meals on their families’ tables right now. That’s just one of many reasons this is hardly justifiable.

Those of you that have been around the site for long enough will remember last year, when Visual Concepts, the team behind both 2K WWE and NBA titles, released WWE 2K20. The backlash was immediate, Soon after Sony was issuing refunds. A month later a major update came and didn’t fix much, and in the year it crashed. That was just one game that has resulted in 2K calling in a third-party, Saber Interactive, to make WWE 2K Battlegrounds. This choice is something that is admonished in comments any time it is brought up. Let’s not forget, while Taylor enjoyed NBA 2K20, about this time last year 2K shoved unskippable ads in the previous year’s game, and again with NBA 2K20 soon after release.

So that’s a broken and near unplayable game in WWE’s run and two games that will play adverts in your face along with loot boxes and microtransactions. Remember that time someone (reportedly) said that those that can’t stop buying microtransactions were “whales?” That was Strauss Zelnick, a man who saw people with addiction and with a desire to not be beaten to death every few seconds by cheaters in Take-Two’s money pit known as Grand Theft Auto Online. He sought to attack them with an aggressive plan of more microtransactions. Now he is defending what seems like a small hike in prices that would resort to in just more profit.

The simple math of it all is easy enough to calculate. $70 per purchase at one-million sales results in $70 million, meanwhile, the games have in recent years sold between eight to ten million units (2016-2018). Of course, not all of those sales are going to be full price. Some will be calculated overtime during sales and reductions in price months on. Though at $60 for full price for the 2017 release, that would rack up $600 million. If this year’s game was to stick to $70 across the board with relative numbers, it would make $700 million. I’m not looking to devalue the work of those working on the games, but I highly doubt a yearly sports game release costs close to that much.

The license for NBA games was reported as $1.1 billion back in 2019, this was for several years. Simply splitting that up, that is about $150 million per year. That puts away the cost of having players team’s faces, numbers, and such in the game. At a rough guess, development and any further costs might rack up to $400 million, maybe. With the highest number of sales in recent years and Zelnick’s push towards predatory microtransactions and loot boxes, the development costs are in all likely hood being covered.

Returning to Zelnick’s comments to Valentine, “The pricing has to reflect the quality of the experience, and we aim to provide the best experiences in the business. And from our point of view, it’s an extremely modest price change given that prices haven’t changed for a very long time.” I’ll agree with him on one thing there, the price of games has not changed since the 80s. Though the US median household income from the 80s (to 2014) for the lower and middle-income classes have not increased with the cost of living or to keep up with the price of any entertainment. So many households are unable to keep up with an increase in pricing.

Not to mention, COVID-19 is devouring some businesses, causing what will only be referred to as a recession as millions are set to lose their homes in the US. Many are outright unable to buy your games already. Though, Zelnick did later say in the conversation with Valentine that this price increase will be a “title-by-title basis.” This is possibly suggesting that how 2K owner Take-Two views a game will affect the next-generation prices.