During EA’s recent earnings call, CEO Andrew Wilson, during the Q&A part of the call, spoke about how the company currently doesn’t have plans to raise the prices of its games. When asked about “taking a similar approach” to other companies like Nintendo raising the prices for their upcoming major releases, according to VGC, Wilson spoke about how the nature of the business has changed in the modern digital age, and EA’s current strategy of being represented in a wide segment of prices helps the business stay strong.
“Our business is very different today than it was even just 10 years ago,” Wilson said. “In a world where everything we did 10 years was about selling shiny discs in plastic boxes in retail shelves, while that’s still a part of our business it’s a significantly smaller part of our business, and we now have pricing representing everything from free-to-play all the way to Deluxe Editions and beyond.”
“At the end of the day, whether we’re doing something that costs a dollar, or we’re doing something that costs $10, or we’re doing something that costs $100, our objective is always delivering incredible quality and exponential value to our player base.”
He went on to speak about how the company is able to marry the idea of the quality of their games with the value they offer by being priced appropriately is helping the business stay strong and grow. “And what we’ve discovered over the course of time is whether we can marry quality and value together, our business is strong, resilient and continues to grow,” he said.
EA CFO Stuart Canfield elaborated on the idea by saying that, with the planned releases for now, the company will not be making changes to its pricing strategies. “From a games perspective we put out, we have reflected no changes in our current strategy at this point,” said Canfield.
This essentially means that, at least for now, games like the upcoming Madden NFL 26 and EA Sports FC 26 will not be getting bumped up to $80. Rather, both titles will remain available at the company’s current standard AAA price tag of $70. This is in contrast to Nintendo, who revealed back in April that the first major first-party launch title for the Switch 2, out on June 5, will be the $80 Mario Kart World.
Circana analyst Mat Piscatella has pointed out how Nintendo’s new higher price tag shouldn’t come as a big surprise to the market, since things like Deluxe and Collector’s Editions for games had already gotten players used to spending well over the $70 price tag of base editions of games. Earlier this month, he also pointed out that the success of game typically has to do less with its price and more to do with its overall quality.
“Ultimately, if someone thinks a game is really cool, they want to play it, they’re going to buy it at whatever price they need to buy it at,” he said. “That’s just kind of the nature of the price-insensitive video game fan that wants to play the game they want to play.”
