EA still unsure if it’ll increase prices for next-gen games

“I don’t really want to weigh in on that yet,” says EA’s COO

EA has not yet decided if it will raise prices for its next-gen games, according to the company’s COO and CFO Blake Jorgensen.

During an earnings call on November 5, Jorgensen said that it was too early to discuss the possibility of raising prices for EA’s future games. “I don’t really want to weigh in on that yet,” he said when asked if games that utilise the full power of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X or S would mean higher costs for consumers, per VGC.

“We’ve always said games are getting more expensive [to develop]. The experience is getting deeper. The time that people are playing games is getting longer,” Jorgensen added. “One might argue that that might require a higher price point over time, but we’ll address that as we get closer to more games coming into the next-gen console transition.”

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Jorgensen said that the focus should be on “the excitement of what we can do with new games”, and that the prices will come thereafter. “We’ll figure that out. I don’t want people to read into that – ‘we’re going to raise prices or not’. We don’t know that yet. What we do know is we’re going to be able to do a lot more things with the new consoles,” he continued.

Star Wars Squadrons
Star Wars Squadrons. Credit: EA Motive

Jorgensen’s comments echo a similar statement by EA CEO Andrew Wilson in August, who said that the company will “start with the player motivations, the expectations the players have around depth and breadth of live service, and we go from there”.

“We’ve already announced plans to transition free of charge from current-gen to next-gen. We’ll also have innovations of Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. What players asked for was the smoothest possible transition. We’ll continue looking at the prices as time goes on,” Wilson had said.

Jorgensen is the latest gaming executive to speak about the increasing costs of game development. Earlier this year, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick cited development costs as part of the reason for raising the prices of the company’s next-gen games. “The bottom line is that we haven’t seen a front-line price increase for nearly 15 years, and production costs have gone up 200 to 300 per cent,” he said at the time.

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Earlier this week, Zelnick also said that he believed consumers currently pay less than what the company’s games are actually worth. “We deliver the highest quality experiences in the business, and we charge much less for them than we believe they are worth to consumers,” he commented during a financial update with investors.

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