Resident Evil publisher breaks the $70 barrier for the first time

That’s $70 for the base game, again - there’s also a deluxe edition of Dragon’s Dogma 2 with cosmetics and a gallery of music and sound assets that will sell for $80 or £65.98 on Steam. See all that for yourself on thestore page.

It’s far from the first game to break the $70 barrier - Sony’sGod of War Ragnarokand Warner’sGotham Knightswent for similar sums - and it sounds like Capcom have been weighing the benefits of making the jump for a while.

“Development costs are about 100 times higher than during the Famicom era, but software prices have not gone up that much,” Capcom president Haruhiro Tsujimoto asserted during this year’s Tokyo Game Show, as reported byNikkeiand passed on byKotaku. “There is also a need to raise wages. Considering the fact that wages are rising in the industry as a whole, I think raising unit prices is a healthy option for business.”

Elsewhere in the TGS presentation, Tsujimoto suggested that publishers can get away with raising prices even during rough economic times, because people need their creature comforts. “Just because there’s a recession doesn’t mean you won’t go to the movie theater or go to your favorite artist’s concert,” he noted. “High-quality games will continue to sell.”

Is Dragon’s Dogma 2 a high-quality game?I enjoyed what I played of it a month or two back, but I also found it extremely familiar, whether in terms of aesthetics, the RPG classes or the core loop of starting unwinnable fights with griffons and letting your hapless AI pawn accomplices take the fall.

The diehard fan defence of the game’s familiarity is that it’s the game Dragon’s Dogma should have been, the one that director Hideaki Itsuno wanted to create, before he had to scale back his pitch to allay scepticism from Capcom executives. Speaking as somebody who loved the original Dragon’s Dogma - its Dark Arisen expanded edition is still one of my Switch regulars - I’m less convinced by this argument. I’d rather play something that feels like a sequel to the wonderful game Itsunodidwork on than its overdue redemption arc. I certainly wouldn’t pay £50+ for Dragon’s Dogma 2, based on what I’ve seen to date.