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Life After the Videogame Crash
Clark Hall writes "Is it 1983 all over again? E3 is over and millions of gamers are realizing they can't afford a PS3, or an HDTV. Is it time for a steep and painful correction in the gaming market? Pointlesswasteoftime has been tracking what is looking like a Hindenburg voyage for console gaming, with HDTV playing the role of Hydrogen." From the article: "There's going to be a lot of money lost the next few years, a lot of articles written, a lot of panic, a lot of changes. And when gaming comes back, it will hopefully be different and innovative and based on something other than eye candy and the shock value of blood and guts and hookers. Hopefully it will allow for creativity from the players, and room for small, independent game makers to create content. Hopefully it will be something every working person can afford. "
Most people live paycheck to paycheck in the US...
Two things:
a) This is not true, as any basic check of median income would have told you ("median" being the key word, because it's not as skewed by rich folks as "average" income would be).
b) Even if it were true, the conditions for the industry now are still better than they were from 1977-1980, when video gaming first exploded in this country.
The Atari VCS cost $249 when it was first launched. That's more than $800 in today's dollars. You were lucky to find a 19" TV set for $500 - about $1,500 in today's dollars. And that at a time when unemployment was more than 10%. Yet still, the industry flourished.
There is no economic reason whatsoever why the average American couldn't afford a $400 console and a $500 TV today if they could afford the equivalent of an $800 console and a $1,500 TV in 1977. All this bitching about price is just a lot of whining, nothing more.
I'm not saying everyone can afford it, but if you can't, then you've got bigger problems to solve anyway. There's no use crying about game consoles - work on getting some food on your table and a roof over your head first if you're poor enough that $1,000 for five years or more worth of entertainment is unaffordable. (Remember, TV's can entertain just fine even without a game console hooked up...)
The only difference between now and 1977 is that there is more competition for our disposable income. But why is this something to bitch and moan about? So because you just bought a $300 cell phone or a $1,000 laptop PC or a stack of DVD movies, the electronics and video game industries have to lower their prices for you? To a large extent, they have - adjusted for inflation, everything game-related is cheaper than it used to be (including games). But there's only so far they can go.
I'm not being elitist - I'm saying that most people do have the money, they just don't know how to prioritize their purchases. They act like it's the manufacturers' responsibility to just make everything so cheap that they can afford to buy everything they'd ever want. And those that really don't have the money really need to be concentrating on things other than game consoles anyway.
I don't see any cost parallel between now and 1983. Cost wasn't the reason for the crash anyway - in 1983, there were systems at every price point from about $75 up to $275. And in fact, one of the main reasons for the crash was the exodus from game consoles to more expensive computers that played more advanced games. People would have rather paid $400 for a C64 or $800 for an Apple II than $100 for an Intellivision or $150 for a Coleco Vision. So I don't see that affordability really has anything to do with either era, or anything to do with any possible crash, past or present.
A reader at my forum posted a question regarding the PS3 and if it is really more expensive than the PS2. In 2000, the PS2 sold for US$299. In 2006, the PS3 will sell for $599. Over the past 6 years, the dollar has fallen in value by about 50% in many areas of the market (not just gasoline or housing). Things haven't really gotten more expensive, the dollar has just become more worthless. You can thank Greenspan and Bernanke for their inflationary monetary policy.
For many households, their incomes have nearly doubled in the past 10 years, if not 6 years. I know my income is up nearly 300% in 7 years. For me, the PS3 is cheaper versus the true cost of living than the PS2 was, and I'm 32, not 25. Considering I was 26 when the PS2 came out, I am already past the "I can't afford XYZ" phase of my life.
Maybe things are coming to a head in the economy entirely, where people are earning more and more dollars, but those dollars are constantly worth less and less to a global market. For a guy like me living on a personal gold standard, most prices have been falling over the last 5 years, not rising. For those of us who see our paychecks going up every year, the PS3's reported initial price shouldn't see that outrageous, especially considering many of us aren't doing much more than we were doing 6 years ago, so getting a raise seems pointless.
At least the PS3 has many new features to show for the dollar price increase. What is the Euro price of the PS3? The dollar fell against the Euro almost 50% in that same time.
For me, I won't buy it anyway, since it's a Sony product and I'm through with them. I was a Sony fanboy for a decade, but not now with their junk and their consumer manipulations. They can go suck it. Even still, the PS3 seems comparble to the PS2 in actual value rather than dollar price.
Even 1930s movies (or earlier) have enough resolution to be scanned in HD, I would imagine (and if you could find a good enough print). Films today use the same 35mm film format that has been is use since the 1890s (though the chemistry HAS been improved to make a better image, and there have been innovations such as sound-on-film, color and so forth). Actually, 70mm used to be more prevalant, which has even more detail.
All the marketing hype behind HDTV has duped the general public into believing that a higher definition actually makes a difference. Unless you sit eighteen inch's away from your sixty inch screen, there is no difference between a traditional television and an HDTV.
I'm being completely serious: if you can't tell the difference between HDTV and standard def, you need to see an optometrist.
I sit about 12' away from my 50" plasma, and I can easily see a dramatic difference between HD content and standard-definition content. At one point I accidently set my cable box for 480p output, and for the next day or two happened to be watching only standard-definition programming so of course I didn't notice anything wrong. Then I tried to watch a high-definition show, and within five seconds I was hunting through the settings trying to figure out why the picture looked so blurry. It really is that dramatic. I also have a smaller plasma which is farther away from the viewing position (42" at 18') and I can easily tell on that one as well.
Have you actually seen HDTV and standard-definition on the same TV set? I doubt it, or you wouldn't be making claims like this. Or perhaps the set you were comparing on was marked "HDTV compatible" or something equivalent, which just means that it can accept a high-definition signal, but can't actually display it at its full resolution -- typical "EDTV" sets have 480 lines of vertical resolution just like standard-definition TVs do.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
"The Atari VCS cost $249 when it was first launched. That's more than $800 in today's dollars."
I hate these statements, look at things like wage increases and compare them to "adjusted" dollars, there is simply no way my parents were making 4x the amount of money in 1980 then they were today, their wages have remained relatively flat since that time, so I guess they are making 4x less money? Notice how the price of games has remained betwen 35-60us, 40-70CDN. And they've been that way since 1987!! Games still cost $50-60 and that was almost 20 years ago.
Think about it this way: They have to price games at a level where people will afford them, and inflation does not apply everywhere equally.