XBLA price rises haven’t dented sales

Nothing is too expensive if enough people are willing to pay the price, and Microsoft says that it may not yet have found the price ceiling for titles released over Xbox Live Arcade.

XBLA portfolio director Chris Charla has admitted that the average price of a title on the service has risen, but that sales have not been negatively affected.

"If you look at Live Arcade, and do the math, 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 Games Industry.

“That has been an interesting trend because on some app markets there's been a race to zero as fast as possible.

"We've seen a little bit of the opposite happening. I don't really know where prices are going to go – ultimately, that's set by the market – but it has been really gratifying to see that people are willing to a premium price for digital content."

In 2009 just 21 games out of the 86-strong XBLA release schedule were priced at 1200 Microsoft Points, Last year that rose to 27 out of 85 titles, and already in 2010 we’ve had 20 games charging that top tier price, the site reports.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/xbla-...d-sales/082439