


This year, 2K Sports came under fire because NBA 2K21 has unskippable ads prior to 2KTV episodes. The company also added sponsored ads on top of all this. NBA 2K has added the expensive, $99.99 Legend Edition, Virtual Currency, M圜areer mode's real-money, pay-to-win hooks, and MyTeam mode's card packs and loot boxes. Recent entries in this sports game series were slammed by fans for abusing monetization. NBA 2K has long been a mess of microtransactions, with Take-Two and 2K Sports doing whatever they can to drain your wallet dry. In the case of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, I’m paying to extend an experience I’ve enjoyed with new content separate from a satisfying $60 game.īut there are games that go too far. Games like Fortnite and Genshin Impact are free-to-play, so there’s no price for the initial entry. There’s a line, though, and it’s a matter of tuning and tweaking. I occasionally play Fortnite, and I have purchased skins in the past. I’m looking forward to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s upcoming DLC, which expands the game to Ireland and Paris. On a basic level, I don’t have a problem with microtransactions. What used to be a single game purchase has become an ongoing one, as games move to being services. Season passes, controversial loot boxes, and microtransactions in the form of skins and progress boosters have become the norm. Over the past two generations, in response to the rising costs, we’ve seen an increase in alternative monetization tactics. (Queue someone posting an ad showing some of the prices of classic games at launch.) Developers work many, many hours to create The Last of Us Part 2's post-apocalyptic Seattle or Ghost of Tsushima's danger-filled island. Making games that take advantage of 4K televisions and monitors is a costly process, and game prices haven’t really risen in line with inflation. I’ll acknowledge that game development is expensive, especially in the AAA space. But for the purpose of this article, we’re just going to talk about games costing more. In reality, £70 translates to somewhere around $90, and that doesn’t include regional taxes. For us, that’s a $10 bump, but in the UK, it’s closer to £20 Ghost of Tsushima costs $59.99 and £49.99, as an example. Sony is carrying over the pricing of the US version of Demon’s Souls to the UK-$70 in one region to £70 in another-but they aren’t entirely comparable.

There’s some nitty gritty that we’re putting aside for this discussion.

If you measure the hours of entertainment provided by a video game, such as Demon’s Souls compared to any other form of entertainment, I think that’s a very straightforward comparison to draw.” When asked if the UK £70 price point was fair, Ryan replied, “Yes, yes, I do. In an interview with The Telegraph The Telegraph, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan addressed the worries around Demon’s Souls price point.
