Slashdot Mirror
On Retailers And Videogame Pricing
Thanks to CNN Money for its article discussing the results of a retail survey analyzing relative videogame prices among "key game retailers." According to the survey: "Wal-Mart's prices were the highest, coming in 9 percent higher -- nearly $100 for a basket of 30 games -- than Amazon.com and 6 percent higher than Best Buy, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Tony Gikas." Other interesting trends were also observed, though: "The used game market has quietly been growing for the past several years and Gikas now estimates that more than 8 percent of all games sold in the U.S. are used games." The piece concludes by noting: "The survey indicated retail prices seem to be holding up as the current generation of consoles hits middle-age... Other analysts, though, say retailers they've talked to indicate while prices have not fallen much, the demand for games at higher price points is not as strong as it was a year ago."
Now, I'm not an economist or anything, but aren't costs supposed to come down when the demand decreases? Most games I'm looking to buy are fairly old, not noteworthy anymore, and simply take up space on store shelves. Still, the prices stay up where they are and nobody buys them. Even used games rarely go below $20 anymore, and I can remember walking into FuncoLand when I was a kid and seeing that newspaper of game prices with things priced around $5-$10.
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I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
You can save plenty that way. For example, I just picked up Wave Race: Blue Storm for Gamecube in Akihabara today for 500 yen - for a new copy. I'd never have paid $50 for it, but I'll buy just about anything for $5-10.
Holding off on the "iffy" purchases makes it a lot easier on the wallet to pick up the occasional "gotta have it" game at $50.
Whether you're shopping at Walmart, EBX, Best Buy, Amazon, etc... We should all be happy that the prices of games haven't risen proportional to inflation. In the mid-80's a single Nintendo game would often cost $40 - $50. The 16-bit SNES and Genesis offered games in the $50 - $70 range. Of course the media used to create games has plummetted in price (cd/dvd as opposed to cartridge), but the production cost and complexity of the software have both increased dramatically. There is no reason to complain about the cost of a game, regardless of where you buy it.
I'm getting a little sick of people being surprised that WalMart is no longer the cheapest place to get some things. Once upon a time if you wanted it cheap you went to WalMart. Now that is no longer the case. They are still the cheapest on a few things, but not on many of their products.
If you watch their low prices commercials you'll notice that the smiley face is lowering prices based on WalMart's original price for the item. WalMart is now in the game of convenience. You go to WalMart because you can get pretty much everything you need in one trip and it doesn't cost too terribly much.
WalMart is not the place it used to be. Notice that "The customer is always right" is no longer their policy and that "Always the lowest prices" has been replaced with "Always low prices".
Faugh, I say!
If you get ten hours of enjoyment out of a fifty hour game, you've just paid 5 bucks per hour. You'll pay a hell of a lot more than that to go to a movie, say.
Books can be cheaper, as they're the result of one or two guys banging on a keyboard, somebody editing it, and somebody printing it.
DVDs are an anomoly; it's often easy to find the full blown DVD of a given movie for less than the CD soundtrack. Also, consider that Laserdiscs tended to be $100+.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I mean, what kid (or even teenager) has the kind of money necessary to pay $200 for a console
Teens have more disposable income than their parents. Read more about it here
Even if you are an adult without kids, you have much more bills to pay than your "average" teen with a job. When I was in HS and worked, I had close to 100% disposable income. When I moved out, that dropped to around 5%, as rent, phone, utility, car insurance, and food absorbed the great bulk of my funds.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
I'm no great fan of Wal-Mart, but I wouldn't be too quick to judge them based on the limited data in this survey. According to the article, 30 games were price compared between seven shops. The highest price for this basket of goods was $1231.76 at Wal-Mart; the lowest, $1134.51, was at Amazon.com. Does that mean Wal-Mart is evil and overpriced? Not necessarily....
;-)
First, we have no idea how the games were selected, other than that they were a presumably random mix of "recent and older games from all platforms". If we picked a different set of 30 games, or sampled another set of 30 games, we'd likely get a much different result.
A second point to consider is what is called the "grocery store paradox": store A advertises lower prices than store B, and vice versa, and a check of the receipts shows that both are telling the truth. Were we to break out certain categories of games from the sample (such as all PS2 or XBox games), Wal-Mart might have the lowest prices on these categories... old N64 cartridges that management won't drop below cost might be keeping Wal-Mart's average prices high, but most game buyers wouldn't care. We don't have the data, so we can't say for sure.
My last point (because this is getting too boring, even for Slashdot) is that the differences presented by the survey likely won't matter to most consumers. The difference between best and worst was $97.25, or just over three dollars per game. If I only want 5 out of the 30, and I want them now, then a $16 convenience fee might be worth paying... and, who knows, Wal-Mart might have better prices on those five.
To sum up: Amazon rocks, and Wal-Mart does in fact suck, but not for the reasons stated in the article.
Vanya's Law: "In any culture without irony, fart jokes will be the highest form of humor."