NBA 2K21‘s upcoming PS5 and Xbox Series X edition will cost $70 USD, which is $10 above the normal price of current-generation games. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has now defended the price increase to Protocol, pointing to the ballooning costs of game development. He remarked that he doesn’t expect consumers to care about rising development costs, but outside of that, Zelnick argued that the NBA 2K series has expanded its own value proposition by virtue of making the game more robust and deep.
“The bottom line is that we haven’t seen a front-line price increase for nearly 15 years, and production costs have gone up 200 to 300%,” Zelnick said. “But more to the point since no one really cares what your production costs are, what consumers are able to do with the product has completely changed.”
The newer NBA 2K games are “much, much bigger” in terms of what they offer, Zelnick said. As such, this warrants a price increase, he added. NBA 2K also offers the ability to pay for various microtransactions, but Zelnick said the base game is compelling enough to warrant a more expensive sticker price.
