We love to hear from game industry analyst Michael Pachter. You can disagree with him, hate him, curse him, but you can’t ignore the man. And he does make a lot of sense. Some times. In the latest episode of his show PachAttack, where he answers questions from gamers, he was asked whether next gen games would stay at $60 or cost more. Pachter believes that games will stay at $60 for the next generation consoles because development costs won’t be much higher, about 10 to 15 percent, reckons Pachter.
But he also had a few words for Nintendo’s upcoming Wii U console. He believes Nintendo should price Wii U games at $60, because otherwise, the Wii U will appear weaker than the competition. Pachter said,
“If they stay at $50 for a game, I think they [Nintendo] are making a mistake. It would signal to the public that the Wii U is of lower quality than the other consoles. It’ll be interesting to see what they do.”
We know it’s easy to dismiss whatever Pachter says, but he has a point. Consumers tend to related cheaper price with lower quality when it comes to newly released gaming software. Which is why shovelware titles usually cost much less than AAA games. Another reason why Wii U games will likely cost $60 is that it costs just as much to make a Wii U game as a PS3 and Xbox 360 counterpart. If not more, since the Wii U GamePad requires more work for all the extra features. Porting a game to the Wii U doesn’t appear to be expensive though — Ubisoft stated that it costs less than $1 million to port a title to the Wii U. Which means a ported game only has to sell about 20,000 copies in order to recoup the investment.
Pachter has previously been less kind to Nintendo. He proclaimed that the Wii U could be the next Dreamcast, and said that the console “won’t work“.
