Xbox digital games prices ‘have crept up’

The average price of games sold on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade platform has risen in the past five years, a Microsoft executive has said.

Chris Charla, Xbox Live Arcade’s portfolio director, said the digital platform’s rising game prices is a trend in contradiction with the rest of the digital market.

"If you look at Xbox Live Arcade, and do the maths, and look at the publicly available sales numbers, you can see that average prices on XBLA have crept up over the last few years,” he told GamesIndustry.biz

Charla said it was an “interesting trend because on some app markets there’s been a race to zero as fast as possible".

Apple and Google’s mobile operating systems are both swamped with free apps, with developers hoping to recoup costs via in-game advertising and microtransactions.

“It has been really gratifying to see that people are willing to a premium price for digital content," Charla added.

In 2009, around 24 per cent of Xbox Live Arcade’s games were priced at the platform’s premium price-point (about £10).

One year later, that figure rose to 31 per cent. It is expected to climb again by the end of 2011.