The high price of the country is high for a long time.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake has been exclusive to the PS5 platform for more than a year, and at last week's TGA, SE announced that the Final Fantasy 7 Remake Transition Edition, which was packaged with DLC, will land on the Epic platform on December 16, giving PC players the opportunity to taste this legend that began twenty years ago.
However, this time the national pricing is obviously overestimating everyone's spending power - Sheng Hui 446 yuan.
For comparison, in the PS Store Hong Kong service, which is most used by domestic console players, the price of this game is 568 Hong Kong dollars, which is about 464 yuan.
In the long-term enjoyment of low-priced concessions on the national standard and the host platform the same high price, it is indeed somewhat inappropriate, not to mention a game that has been on sale for a year and a half, without any new content, just a simple platform port, without giving a little discount is also difficult for players to accept.
This price unsurprisingly caused controversy, and then the game hid the price on Epic, and now click into the store page, the four big words "coming soon" are placed in the place where the original price was marked, the game is about to be released, and players can't even pre-order normally.
This sudden price increase is not aimed at Chinese players. With the help of data monitoring on the third-party website epicgamesdb, the pricing of this game has changed from the traditional $60 to $70, most countries and regions have different price increases, and the highest price in Israel has even reached a sky-high price of $100, which is enough to buy a deluxe version if it is replaced by other games.
The game price increase is obviously not news anymore. When the PS5 was released last year, Sony had already marked the price of its own game to $70, and when it recently ported PS4 games to the PS5, it would charge an additional $10 fee to unify the price of first-party games to $70.
For manufacturers, the self-destructive word-of-mouth thing of price increases naturally has to find ways to restrain a little. Manufacturers who choose to increase prices only dare to mark the price of $70 on the next-generation console platform, while the previous-generation console and PC platform still maintain the popular $60, so that players can exploit the loophole through the downward compatible function of the next-generation console and waive the $10 "next-generation hosting tax".
The pricing strategy of se is undoubtedly the first time to bring $70 to the PC platform, and the extra $10 "next-generation hosting tax" out of thin air fell on their heads, and most PC players were resentful and bitter. In the Steam comments section of Forspoken, another $70 game released by SE at the same time, everyone's biggest concern is no longer the quality of the game, but the price of the game.
In today's high cost of game production, increasing the price of the game as the simplest and roughest cost-sharing strategy, it is obviously unrealistic to let all players pay. How to balance profits with player reputation may be a problem that all big manufacturers should consider.