(Image credit: Square Enix) Tone player loading. A glance at the top-selling retailers of Steam shows that games are priced at $60, $40, $30, $15, $4. Although the prices of the game are more flexible and fluid than they’ve ever been, triple-A games on consoles aim the same price at $60 versus $60 – Xbox One, or 0 – 80 – $100 for the sexy PS5 / Xbox Series X. Over the last year, publishers have stepped up their bid to bring this $70 price to PC, but it looks like Square Enix is going to crack the seal. Final Fantasy 7 Remake is coming to the Epic Games Store on December 16th, costing $69.99. Square Enix seems to be going ahead with 70-$4000, as it announced recently that in May’s Forspoken, will be the same price. These aren’t the first PC games that cost 70 dollars, and, of course, these are only the standard editions of each of these, without bundled season passes, soundtracks or cosmetic DLC. This is not a premium, it’s the new normal. Or at least what publishers like Square Enix want to become the new normal. The first major publisher to push a standard $70 base price on PCs; some recent high-profile games like Battlefield 2042 and Call of Duty Vanguard have stuck to $60, despite them costing $10 more on the new consoles. It seems as though the $60 triple-A game will be on PC for a long time, at least: there are 2022 games like Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands that already sold at that price, even if they are better rewarded by a PS5 or Xbox Series X. But it seems inevitable other publishers will follow Square Enix eventually, even if there’s no argument that big budget games actually cost less. The new standard for the majority of the other countries is even worse than the US. Square Enix sells Forspoken for $115.95 in Australia. The price is 17.9% a month, according to SteamDB. The average price in England is 64.99, or 23.2% higher. And the price of the European currency is just ridiculous: At 79.99, Forspoken is almost 30 times more expensive in Euros than in US dollars. At least international Steam sales will cut that sting.
