In a recent chat at the Tokyo Game Show, Haruhiro Tsujimoto, the head honcho at Capcom, had a lot to say, and one of the hot topics was the rising cost of making video games.

Tsujimoto didn’t mince words. He basically thinks games these days are too cheap for all the hard work that goes into them. He even dropped the bomb that development costs are a whopping 100 times higher than back in the good ol’ days of the Famicom (you know, the NES for the old-school gamers). But guess what? Game prices haven’t exactly followed suit.

He said, and I quote, “Personally, I feel that game prices are too low.” Tsujimoto made a pretty valid point about how it’s not just about the games themselves but also about attracting top-notch talent. To do that, you’ve gotta pay well. And with wages on the up and up in the gaming biz, he reckons hiking up game prices makes good business sense.

Now, you might’ve noticed some other game makers already flexing their price muscles by charging $70 for their titles, but Capcom’s holding off on that for now. Take Street Fighter 6 and the Resident Evil 4 remake, for instance. Both hit the shelves at $60.

Capcom’s not just talking the talk, though. They’re walking the walk by boosting their employees’ base salaries by a cool 30% and rolling out a spiffy new bonus system tied to the company’s performance.

As for the whole “economic climate” deal, Tsujimoto isn’t buying it. He’s pretty convinced that the games industry dances to its own tune. He said, “Business confidence and high prices have little to do with the games industry.” And he’s got a point – even when the financial world was doing the limbo during the Lehman Brothers meltdown, games were still flying off the shelves.

In the finance department, Capcom’s stock price has been on fire, hitting all-time highs left and right, like a rollercoaster you just can’t get enough of. And in their latest financial report, they spilled the beans that they’d sold a jaw-dropping 41.7 million games in a single year, smashing their own record. Now, that’s what you call a winning streak!