Capcom says players gave its first $70 game ‘a moderate reception’

Capcom has addressed the consumer response to its first $70 game as well as its strategy for future software pricing.

Dragon’s Dogma 2, which was released on March 22, is the Japanese company’s first game to carry the increased price point that has been adopted by many publishers this console generation.

The game sold over 2.5 million copies during its launch month and surpassed three million sales by late May, according to Capcom.

In a newly published translation of its latest earnings Q&A session, the company was asked about the performance of the game and to discuss its strategy for pricing software going forward.

“This title was given a moderate reception from players and achieved 2.6 million units in sales as of the end of March 2024,” it said. “Regarding pricing for future game releases, we will determine prices after carefully assessing user response and considering the rising cost of development.”

It wouldn’t be too much of a surprise if Capcom started releasing more $70 titles, given its president reportedly said last September that he believed games should cost more to buy.

“Personally, I feel that game prices are too low,” Haruhiro Tsujimoto said during the Tokyo Game Show, according to Nikkei. “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.

“There is also a need to raise wages in order to attract talented people. Given that wages are rising across the industry as a whole, I think the option of raising unit prices is a healthy form of business.”

Like Ubisoft, which released its first $70 game in December in the form of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Capcom is relatively late to the trend of raising software prices during the current console cycle.

In August 2020, Take-Two’s NBA 2K21 became the first current-gen game to be priced at $70. The likes of Activision, Sony, EA, Square Enix, Nintendo and Microsoft have since followed suit.

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