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$60 Games Are Here To Stay
Next Generation explores the price jump for 'next generation' titles, looking into the success of the $60 price point for videogames. They have a copious number of graphs and charts to support their findings: "Even without Guitar Hero II, prices in 2007 are still at historically high levels. In January, fully four of the top 10 games sold for $60 or more. In February, that jumped to five $60 games, and the average rose accordingly. While there were four $60 games in March, they shared the top 10 with two Nintendo DS games which brought the average down sharply. This happened again in March -- the month of Pokemon -- and also in May."
Wii games are $50 US, $60 games are not here to stay.
Inflation and rising development costs result in both a higher price tag and acceptance of a higher price tag. News at 11.
Doesn't this just make you wonder why people pirate games?
Prices don't go up because people are "greedy," prices go up because your government decides every day to ruin the value of your money.
Games now have many international ties (design, programming, etc). Because the U.S. dollar is being inflated as fast as it is (and has been since 1913), more dollars means that the dollars out there are worth less, especially versus foreign currencies. This means that prices seem to cost most.
The flipside of inflation is that some people, especially the banking elite, get the new money earlier than others -- so it is usually the middle and lower classes who are harmed with prices inflating faster than their wages do. Eventually wages DO increase because of the easy money out there, but usually it is too little, too late.
Prices go up in any inflationary market. Prices also go up because of a limited supply for a highly-demanded item. Generally, though, in a market with a currency backed by something other than fiat/force, prices go down slowly -- soft deflation. The benefit of this is that you actually can SAVE your money and earn value on it, unlike today where even the stock market gains don't keep up with the TRUE cost of inflation.
Sidenote: Government inflation figures are lies, plain and simple. Find some old credit card statements and see what inflation really is in your life. You may be surprised that it is 10-12% annually for the past 3-4 years.
$20 games that were $60 games last year here to stay too.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
....modchip sales are brisk.
$50 in 1988 is equivalent to $88 now. Prices are dropping in real terms. (http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl)
Keep jacking the price for video games and pretty soon the red-light district seems like a great use of allowance money.
We never had so many free online games to play.
So how many Greatest Hits titles exist for the new consoles? None, because the stuff is too new to discount. It takes a while for the competition among developers to really heat up, once they are competing with releases that are several years old. I see no reason to expect high prices to stay, when we all know the bargain bin is waiting to be filled once these next-gen games grow older.
... games cost $90 and we had to play them on the Sega Saturn.
$60 games are here to stay New. If you need your fix RFN, go for it. Me, I'll wait until I can pick 'em up at my local used game store on the cheap, though that's assuming I ever get a next-gen console in the first place - the best part about the PS3 coming out was the way the prices of PS2 games sunk through the floor. I'm gettin' a lot of milage out of that.
--Triv
I modded the firmware in my 360. True, I don't have Live access anymore...then again, considering I have burned roughly 20 games, I have saved about $1200...I think I will go buy a core system and spend a hundred bucks on Ebay to buy used version of the games I want on live...I've saved enough to make the purchase warrented.
Still. I refuse to pay 60 dollars for a game (unless it is something like Bioshock or Mass Effect or Fable 2...I intend to purchase those.)
Am I a criminal? Perhaps. Is what I'm doing morally wrong and illegal? Perhaps. Do I give a fuck? no.
Living With a Nerd
Inflation Happens
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
Deflation is just as bad for an economy, possibly even worse, than inflation, because when you have deflation there's much less incentive to invest money instead of hoarding it.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
can someone tell me what US$60 today is in 1990 dollars?
That is what happens when there are more dollars out there to chase products - inflation.
Average cost for a commercial Linux game in 2006 was $27.61.
The selection may be more limited, but the games are cheaper and there are lots of no-cost games, too.
You're right, partially, Mostly that the real inflationary catastrophe didn't start until 1971. Richard Nixon's unilateral destruction of Bretton Woods cut loose the dollar into free fall. Arguably he had no choice, had Keynes prevailed at Bretton Woods, such a move would have been unnecessary, but Harry Dexter White won, and as a result, the conference yielded heavy concessions for export/lender nations, a position which White apparently believed the USA would hold forever, when in fact, it didn't last 20 years. Keynes solution was far more egalitarian, and would, I believe, have proved more sustainable. The post WWII period up until the United States bankrupted itself in Vietnam was one of the most unprecedented periods of prosperity in the history of the world.
Then I'll just wait till they come out as budget titles. No big deal, I'm too old to have the time to play the latest and greatest anyway.
$60 is too much. I have only purchased a couple at that price. The handful of others were all purchased used at a greatly reduced price.
And now we see the real reason the music industry is losing money. People have only so much disposable income, and I bet CD sales are losing to game sales, and game price just get higher, bet this year will be another loss for the riaa.
Or we could go further back (SNES/Genesis) era and look at all of the $60+ games then.
Hell, look at the prices for N64 games. They generally retailed for $60 new. CD based games brought the price down to $50 (new) for two generations. The better margin on distribution medium made its way into production value for games. Now development costs have finally eaten all of the margin we've gained from switching mediums and prices for games have gone up.
As for why video games (and attendant hardware) haven't really been affected by inflation throughout the years (consoles generally debut at $300-$400) is all thanks to Moore's Law. Prices were coming down as fast as the value of the dollar.
This is also why the PS3 is more expensive. Nintendo, and to some extent Microsoft, are leveraging Moore's Law to keep hardware prices at some level. Sony decided to go balls to the wall.
My twitter
I don't mind $60 games, as long as I still have the right to:
1. Make a backup copy
2. Sell the game if I don't like it, ie: don't tie the game down to an email address/account
I absolutly REFUSE to pay $60.00+ for a game, and then spend more money on a subscription to play the game online.
I'm a little ticked off at valve and all, for essentially enforcing point #2 on Half-Life 2, etc.
There is some point to the console market, since those games can generally always be resold.
Man, enough already. You've been posting this gold-standard bullshit for years, and it's never made any sense. You have no credible sources for any of this. Give it up.
You've also posted a lot of mystical pseudoscience babble about gold. It's just a metal. Inasmuch as it has little to no innate utility to anyone, it's a substitute for actual goods of value in the same way that paper money is, or any other currency standard.
more dollars means that the dollars out there are worth less, especially versus foreign currencies.
Except for the obvious logical fallacy that foreign currencies have also abandoned the gold standard?
prices go up because your government decides every day to ruin the value of your money.
That was the only interesting thing you mentioned. Yes, money you hoard devalues at a long term average of about 4% per year. And that's a good thing - it's better for the economy to have money actively invested rather than sitting in a mattress. You'll note that time periods with low or negative inflation were times of currency crisis - because the wealthy hoarded their money and little was left in circulation to sustain the economy.
I realize that the $60 price point seems like a lot, but expressed in real value, I think we were paying more for NES games back in the day. According to this calculator, 60 dollars in 2005 is worth 33 dollars in 1985 as measured by CPI. I think NES games were $35-45 at the time, so it's really no different. Publishers have been making up for spiraling game asset development costs by volume more than price increases, though the end result (market consolidation & reduced diversity of product) is still the same.
That said, my frugality circuit kicks in every time I'm looking at the wall at Gamestop, and I balk at paying even $40 most of the time (the Wii is the only modern console I have currently, so I deal with those price points mostly). I think I need to let go a little bit.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
Not if Nintendo has anything to say about it. They went down this $60/game road once before with the Nintendo 64, and it cost them dearly. In the Gamecube generation, Nintendo set out to reverse the trend. They looked into methods of reducing costs (anyone notice how much Nintendo reused models, scenery, textures, and sound effects between games?) and bringing the average game purchase down to something closer to $20-$30. Blockbuster games still started at $50, but came down quickly.
Now with the Wii, Nintendo is continuing that trend. They intentionally kept the console away from HD to realize the cost benefits of SD development. Their console is still the cheapest on the market, and their games have been keeping their prices in line with what consumers have come to expect. Many of the older titles are already dropping in price. If and when the supply problem is resolved, I fully expect that Nintendo and Co. will look into dropping the price on games to make a lion's share of profits by moving larger quantities.
IMHO, the article merely demonstrates that it is possible to sell $60 games. The question that has gone unanswered yet is, "Is it possible to profit from $60 games?" Will the profits of these high-ticket games exceed the profits of the more homely Nintendo and Ps2 titles? Or is it being driven by the hype surrounding new consoles?
Which raises the question: What happened during the last generation of console launches? The Ps2 and Gamecube both sold very well out of the gate before their sales diverged. If we went back in time and looked at the launch, would we find a similar, but temporary, trend? According to the article, the average is being pulled upward by the introduction of a large number of $50 games by Nintendo and Co. Thus I have a feeling that the same trend would be present if the numbers were crunched back during the last generational launch.
All together, I fear that the Next Generation data simply adds up to another case of "How to lie with numbers". Since there are no real baselines established, the numbers make it appear that we consumers are going to be in for the most expensive games ever. Unfortunately, they have not given any historical context upon which to base that conclusion, so their numbers are nothing more than interesting data points about the current market. They don't tell the whole story.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Comment removed based on user account deletion
To summarize, a big problem with game prices is the "leeches" on the side.
The Raven
Fixed ;)
Deflation is just as bad for an economy, possibly even worse, than inflation, because when you have deflation there's much less incentive to invest money instead of hoarding it.
So untrue. Deflation is fine -- if you sit on your money, it doesn't become worthless. But this also gives you reason to invest properly and wisely, to get a better return than just what the deflation offers. Right now, easy credit and easy money have created all the bubbles we've experienced since 1913, including the Great Depression. All these bubbles followed by recession/depression happen because new money is printed, people spend it/invest it, causing prices to rise, giving people the idea that the investment was a good idea because "prices always go up." Eventually, people start buying MORE than they need to speculate (see, dotcom, housing bubble, etc). When there are no new speculators to sell to, the bubble pops, leaving the late buyers holding the bag. Inflation is the worst thing about economic stability ever. It has destroyed empires for thousands of years.
Soft deflation hurts no one because you don't HAVE to invest to get a return on your money. You CAN, but you'll be safer know your investment is safe from the bubble-markets we're familiar with today. Inflation also steals from the poor, who don't have enough money to save to invest. In a slow deflation market, the poor are helped the most -- they can actually save, in hopes of investing in themselves in the future. The poor can't do that today.
Prices should fall over time, unless there is a supply shortage of something. This is good for everyone.
By that logic games should now be dirt cheap in the UK. In reality they are $80-100.
If what you're saying is true:
1) Why don't bond purchasers demand a higher premium (interest rate) for loaning money that's going to depreciate that fast -- and they *have* noticed that the government inflates the money supply by now.
2) Name the basket of commoditiy futures I can buy that predictably appreciates at the "true" 10-12% inflation rate you claim.
Look, it's very tempting to believe what you've claimed. And I'm the last one to defend government intervention. But your claims have real-world investment implications that are profitable to all of us here, if true, and you need to show how your ideas meet these simple tests. As far as I can tell, they don't.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
The oft quoted reason for the increase in prices between last generation console games and this generation of console games is "rising development costs". While I am sure that development costs have risen and $10 isn't all that much more to pay considering the improvements that the next generation of consoles can offer in terms of graphics, on-line experience, etc, I have to wonder just how much of that $10 difference is related to "development costs" when PC versions of console games remain at the $50 mark, if not cheaper. Shadowrun immediately comes to mind and the $10 premium to simply be able to play the game on my television (something you can do with any suitably equipped HDTV) just doesn't wash, especially given the fact that several heavy hitting PC games have been released at the $50 price tag.
Really, the $10 increase in game prices isn't going to effect me anyway because I've only ever bought a handful of games at full price. It just seems to make a lot more sense for me to dig through the $20 game bin at my local video store when eventually the games I want will reach that price level.
Freeware games are here to stay.
. . . prices go up because your government decides every day to ruin the value of your money.
The government doesn't control inflation directly. It has some indirect means (interest rates, national debt, amount of money in circulation, etc.), but ultimately its all invisible hand stuff.
Because the U.S. dollar is being inflated as fast as it is (and has been since 1913)
The current problems with the dollar have to do with foreign currencies, many of which didn't exist in 1913. The Euro, in particular, has been giving the USD its first major competition in a long time.
In any case, consumer electronics tends not to follow inflation with the rest of the economy. We tend to expect the cost/byte of memory to drop every year. Same thing with cost/performance of CPUs. New DVDs have been between $20-25 for years, and music CDs between $15-20. Electronics companies still end up making more money against general inflation figures because:
So if general electronics holds at a steady or even deflationary price, why are games going up? The stated reason given by the developers--that more complex games require higher development costs--seems the most reasonable answer.
Not a typewriter
Man, enough already. You've been posting this gold-standard bullshit for years, and it's never made any sense. You have no credible sources for any of this. Give it up.
The Great Depression happened because of inflation. The dotcom bubble happened becaues of inflation. The housing bubble? Inflation. None of these things happen in a solid-currency economy. Read this reply I just made to another person who doesn't believe that soft deflation is good, and all inflation is bad.
The Austrians have shown time and again that soft deflation is a good thing. Keynesians have never proven inflation is good -- they keep changing their opinion whenever another bubble pops.
QFG2: Trial by Fire ftw!
Wrong.
The dotcom bubble happened becaues of inflation.
Wrong.
The housing bubble? Inflation.
Wrong.
Stop embarrassing yourself.. the garbage you spew out might look good to moderators, but your bullshit is ridiculously stupid to any person who knows economics.
If what you're saying is true:
Fantastic questions, by the way.
1) Why don't bond purchasers demand a higher premium (interest rate) for loaning money that's going to depreciate that fast -- and they *have* noticed that the government inflates the money supply by now.
Mostly because past history has shown that major losses have been covered by the government through future taxes. Also, we have an entity in the U.S. called the Plunge Protection Team which uses U.S. owned assets to buy stocks ands bonds to prevent market crashes. This intervention can't last forever -- they don't have unlimited access to real assets (gold, land, etc). The PPT has been trying to keep housing funds afloat, along with U.S. manufacturers. They're slowly losing that battle, and the market will be terribly harmed.
Look at Bear Stearns' recent bond report. One bond is now worth $0 on the dollar (yes, $0 on the dollar, their official statement). Another bond is now worth 9 cents on the dollar. These are billion dollar bonds, now worthless. Yet many of these bond issues are diversified through CDOs, which are increasingly becoming dangerous. We're talking possibly $1 trillion in CDOs that are in danger of collapse - yet the average person has no clue about it. Things could go from bad to horrific in very short order, affecting markets unrelated to the bond issues quickly.
Over time, if the government DOESN'T intervene and bail-out the investments, then bond investors WILL demand a higher return or some sort of reserve to back up the bond. We'll see if that happens. I just checked the city and state bond issues, and some states have unfunded liabilities of over $100 billion coming up (see Florida). It's bad, really bad. They'll issue bonds based on future tax income, but they'll have to raise taxes to meet those liabilities.
2) Name the basket of commoditiy futures I can buy that predictably appreciates at the "true" 10-12% inflation rate you claim.
Impossible because inflationary income causes people to invest unwisely, so inflation moves from market to market. When a bubble pops, those who pulled profits out before the crash will still have all that money -- but they will take time to reinvest it to create another bubble they can profit from. How many people lost their rears in the housing crash in the 90s? All those profits taken out before the crash created the dotcom bubble -- plus new money from Greenspan's inflationary printing cycle. That crashed, hurting hundreds of thousands of late comers, but the profits that were taken out (including all that newly printed money) still existed in someone's pocket -- someone who invested in home builders and land. As that money flooded housing, and the new money that Bernanke created came in too, housing went crazy. Housing is crashing now massively, but the early profit takers got out with billions, if not trillions. That money still exists, and it is now flooding into the stock market -- causing new bubbles waiting to burst.
I know a lot of friends, family and customers who are rallying on the stock market, not realizing that many companies that are growing in dollar price are NOT profitable -- it is just old and new money flooding into the market to create a new bubble. Those who exit early will make a ton of profit, but they'll leave the bag held by all the suckers who saw all that money and figured they could get rich, too.
The rich get richers, the poor and middle class get poorer -- thanks to inflation.
Prices don't go up because people are "greedy," prices go up because your government decides every day to ruin the value of your money.
I see, so this is why Nintendo games sold in US are times cheaper, and PS3/360 games are even more expensive abroad now (I'm in Europe, I know).
I agree the government in US hurts the value of the dollar, but it's bad for your cause to just slap your pet cause randomly on things unrelated, such as the price of the 3G highend console games.
Stop embarrassing yourself.. the garbage you spew out might look good to moderators, but your bullshit is ridiculously stupid to any person who knows economics.
you embarassed yourself by posting anonymously. all those recessions were definitely caused by inflationary monetary creation, causing people to put that new money somewhere, followed by others who put their new money into the same slowly growing markets. when those markets had no one new to sell to, they crashed. thats simple economics. why not post yourself what you think caused those implosions? most economists agree that bubbles are only created by inflationary money creation.
Well, this is true for console gaming, but my beloved PC Gaming seems to be keeping steady, regardless of price increases. Just take a look at the most visually impressive game to date, possibly the best FPS to come out in years, Crysis, which can be pre-ordered for only $39.95. That to me is amazing, especially when other games on console platforms want $59.99 for a subpar experience in my opinion.
PC/IT enthusiast
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
My older brother bought Jutland in 1993 for a whopping $70 based on the unassailable logic that "if it costs that much, it must really be good." Adjusted to 2006 numbers, that's $97.06.
Also, the game was... not good.
"Name the basket of commoditiy futures I can buy that predictably appreciates at the "true" 10-12% inflation rate you claim."I/i>
Energy.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Here in the UK most new next gen games are $90-100!
$60 games would be like £30. I might actually buy games regularly if they were that cheap rather than one game every 6-9 months like I do now.
How is there a 'limited supply' of video games? It costs virtually nothing to press a game disk, and literally nothing to download it through content delivery systems like steam (or bittorrent for that matter).
The boom-bust cycle is nothing new, and not a product of inflation. Inflation is part of the boom-bust cycle.
As for the printing of new money being the cause of today's inflation, that's false. The increasing money supply today is dominated by credit offerings, not by currency.
As for deflation being bad for the economy, I'll agree with you. There were a couple studies recently released indicating that recessions rarely follow deflationary cycles. Then again, it's not surprising -- what follows a deflationary cycle is a recovery, typically.
However, all else said, I'll go out on a limb and say that over time, the boom-bust cycle is healthy. It promotes advancement during boom cycles, then weeds out the weak during bust cycles. In the long run, the boom-bust cycle promotes technological advances that result in increased standard-of-living across the board. The key is to mitigate the bust cycles so that the economy doesn't collapse.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
My Wii has games for $50 and I can buy tons of PS2 games for $15 to $40.
And then there are the free and almost free games from the shopping channel for my Wii.
We're next gen, we just don't have HDTV.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I remember paying $60 for games just 10 years ago when I bought SNES and N64 games. Many of those games were $50, $60, even $70. With inflation over 10 years, I feel we're getting a pretty good deal now. Not that I buy many games, or even own a next-gen system, but considering how much games cost to produce now, I'm surprised. Though games during the SNES/N64 era were undoubtedly more expensive to manufacture being plastic cartridges with EEPROM inside instead of just a CD/DVD.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Are You F**KING NUTS?
The dot com bubble happened because of INFLATION? The dot com bubble made Many Many Many people wealthy, and kept the economy going for quite a few years. Then the charlatans became too common and the economy corrected. Inflation had ZERO to do with it. Over eager investment in stupid ideas is why the bubble burst.
House is the exact same thing. Stupid investors bought bad investments because they thought they could. Good for the sellers. Good for for me who fixed up and flipped two houses and then got the hell out of the market. For a while the cheap money helped a lot of people. Then people got stupid and it had to stop. That has absolutely nothing to do with inflation. That has to do with human nature and emotional purchasing.
A boom/bust cycle is NORMAL and HEALTHY. Every thing in the world is cyclical. If you have no cycle, you have no growth period and no correction period. If there is no cycle, the economy becomes stagnant and unless you already have money there is no way to earn good money. Sitting on my cash in the hopes that deflation will cause its value to grow slowly is a great plan to avoid risk and an even better plan to avoid reward.
In a cyclic economy the bulls make money, the bears can make money and the pigs get slaughtered.
In a flat non-boom/bust economy only the pigs who already have money can make money and anyone who wants to make money either through working hard or through buying smart has no opportunity to do either.
Don't be a dogma-quoter. Use your brain about what caused something to happen.
I do. Cuz not so long ago I was cleaning out my closet and came across a handful of those paper claim tickets that they used to have you use at Toys R Us. I was so stoked that they actually had Batman in stock I greedily grabbed a handful to make sure they had a copy up at the front of the store. 3rd grade logic. Anyways, $44.95 was the price of NES Batman. Considering inflation alone, $60 is very acceptable. If I knew then that I could have one of today's games for $60 I would have freaked
Inflation also steals from the poor, who don't have enough money to save to invest.
You are absolutely incorrect.
Inflation helps the poor because it pays off debt. The bottom quintile of wealth in the US has on average $30K of unsecured debt per capita. Just as inflation will make $1 able to purchase less in the future, it also makes $1 worth of debt able to be paid off in the future with a smaller sacrifice of purchasing power.
In a slow deflation market, the poor are helped the most -- they can actually save
No, they can't. Deflation will increase their existing debts in real terms.
The rest of your post is also way out in left field. Get a refund on your mail-order economics degree.
Although this is the standard answer as to why "shoplifting costs us all money", prices are always set by the market, at least in the long term.
If you are selling a product for $100, and everybody else is selling it for $80, you just won't sell any. People will buy it at the lower price unless there is a reason to buy if from you (laws, geographic, customer service, etc.). So I can sell it at $80. That's regardless of my cost. If I have a theft problem, it costs me money. I can't raise my price above $80, and selling for less than that would not be rational. So the producer/merchant doesn't have a lot of elasticity in that price. You either sell it for $80 or you don't sell it.
What this means is that if theft becomes an industry wide problem, it means the game producers make less money. And if they can't make enough money to cover costs, then they stop making games. The game industry could get together and act to raise game prices together, but that's illegal in the United States.
So in a nutshell, we "all" don't pay for copyright infringement; the game producer does.
PC games have been cheaper than console games for years. Wasn't it the N64 that had games in the $60 and $70 range? PC games have undercut their console counterparts by $10 to $15. Then there was the Neo Geo with games costing a few hundred dollars, although that was a bit of a fluke. Wii games aren't as expensive as the competition, but I still feel that at $50 some of those games are a bit overpriced. An equivalent game for the PC would be $40 at most.
What makes console games more expensive is licensing costs, something that PC developers don't have to contend with. Although, perhaps that may change with Microsoft's push of Games for Windows. However, it hasn't yet. I can easily find newly released games for $45. I haven't seen console games have any such discount.
It could be that PC gamers are more discriminating, but I suppose it's more likely that there are fewer of them. So they need to provide more incentives to get people to buy in significant numbers. Inevitably, however, I go back to licensing costs unique to consoles because if PC developers weren't turning a profit at current prices they wouldn't still be developing games. Or PC games would cost as much as console games do.
The dot com bubble happened because of INFLATION? The dot com bubble made Many Many Many people wealthy, and kept the economy going for quite a few years. Then the charlatans became too common and the economy corrected. Inflation had ZERO to do with it. Over eager investment in stupid ideas is why the bubble burst.
Over-eager investment is encouraged because of inflation -- people have easy access to easy money/easy credit. Both bubbles happened because of this, instigated by a combination of our government's inflationary creation of credit, combined with the government's low standards for that credit. Banks loan out all the credit they can get/create, because they feel relatively protected by government's backing of those investments. FNMA created a mess of housing, the SEC created a mess out of the dotcom bubble. It is always inflation that creates bubbles, which are never healthy.
A boom/bust cycle is NORMAL and HEALTHY. Every thing in the world is cyclical. If you have no cycle, you have no growth period and no correction period. If there is no cycle, the economy becomes stagnant and unless you already have money there is no way to earn good money. Sitting on my cash in the hopes that deflation will cause its value to grow slowly is a great plan to avoid risk and an even better plan to avoid reward.
The desire for profit is what creates a vibrant economy -- profit for both parties in a given transaction. One party profits with a gain in money, the other party profits with a gain in items or services to make their lives better or easier or more entertaining. Bubbles don't create any more, or less, than the efficiency of a market with a stable money supply. If anything, bubbles shift funds from those who don't have enough to those who have more than enough. Bubbles are government-created, always.
In a slow deflation economy, you have two choices: sit on your money until you want/need to spend it, or invest it in something that has a higher risk but may have a higher reward. In a high inflation economy as we've lived in since 1913, you have two choices: sit on your money and let it inflate to worthlessless, or invest it in a risky venture that may only be "profiting" because other suckers with easy credit are also investing there. You never know if a growing market is truly growing because of profitability and market share gains, or because other suckers are buying in (housing, dotcom, etc).
With charts and graphs? It must be true!
Someone was just trying to tell me the other day that the value of the US Dollar is worth half as much every 3 years. So by their logic, games are just slightly over half the price they were 3 years ago, and only a quarter what they were in 2001! They're practically giving them away now!
lol I think I need to go save that post to refer to now and then. Especially 3 years from now when nothing has changed substantially.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I also like the fact that the whole article is about explaining away the points in the graphs where their pet theories don't hold up.
My twitter
The standard economist line is not that inflation is good, nor that is bad, it is just inflation.
If I give you 1 dollar and want my value back at the end of the year with 4% inflation, then I need 1.04(I'd probably want some sort of a return for depriving myself of the use of the dollar, but for simplicity we can leave that out).
If actual inflation is 5%, I lost value, because to get my value back I should get 1.05, so if inflation goes up, the receiver of a loan wins.
If actual inflation is 3%, I gained value, because I really only needed to get 1.03, so if inflation goes down, the lender of a loan wins.
Inflation is bad because it makes it hard for 2 parties to agree on a mutually beneficial exchange when uncertainty is introduced like this. They can plan on an equal exchange, and then inflation risk can fuck it up.
Deflation is the same, it's just smaller numbers but the same effect. If the value is dropping at unpredictable rates, it stunts business because the 2 parties can't depend on a fair exchange. The information of knowing it will be stable is important to efficient resource distribution and investment in an economy.
So what is important is not inflation or deflation, what is important is how much variance is in the inflation or deflation.
Inflation makes the number bigger, deflation makes it smaller. But as long as the percentage of change is steady and predictable, it has no effect on the exchange in value. However, large inflation numbers tend to carry more variance, while low numbers are more stable. So that's the job of the Fed. To fight inflation so that business people can do their thing without worrying about instability fucking up the exchange they're negotiating.
Some say some small inflation is good, because it keeps pace with the growth of actual value in the country. GDP(just one of several measurements of a nation's value) for example, for the U.S it's been growing around 2-4%, so to keep the right amount of money flowing to represent this increase of gross domestic product, the idea is to keep the amount of money growing at 2-4%. Not everyone agrees with this, I don't see maintaining the speed of money circulation(How fast 1 dollar circulates) is worth intentionally keeping a level of inflation(Wouldn't the value of money change appropriately to adjust for changes in the speed of money circulation?)
However, a gold standard is just a different form of currency. Now a nation's currency growth rate is tied to...mining rocks? The currency itself is worthless, it's the value behind the currency that matters. A gold standard wouldn't help combat this fluctuation, it just ties it to a different fluctuation, mining. The real goal here is to keep the value stable, which is what the fed should do. They're trying to keep it steady at the current value, which is fine if they can pull it off. I'd be happier if they kept it steady at 0% inflation.
The more pressing issue is trade deficit. Inflation should be moderated by the Fed as it is currently. I don't like the idea of upsetting this tender balance. As much as I agree with many of Ron Paul's stances, abolishing the Fed for a gold standard is a dealbreaker since I believe it would bring little good to the country, while potentially wreaking catastrophic results. Another global Great Depression sort of catastrophe.
My explanation is rough, I know, but hopefully someone else can clarify this better than I.
Thank you.
Out of all the economist rhetoric I've ever read, this is the only thing that has made any f---ing sense. You're not burying your head in the sand, nor are you demanding revolution. You're just appealing to the notion that everything is exactly where it's supposed to be; moreover, that this a system that is in some kind of harmony within itself, however turbulent.
It's pretty much like* thermodynamics: no entropy, no gain. Flatten out the market and you get, well, nothing.
(* or is by extension, as money represents goods and services, both of which cost energy)
You conveniently leave out the causes of the depressions and bubbles that occurred prior to the great depression (hint: speculation does not require fiat currency to occur).
No, I didn't. The Federal Reserve went on a massive inflationary credit/money creation spree from 1924 to 1929. This easy money gave everyone, even the shoe shiners, a huge increase in the value of the stock markets. But it was that easy money that made the stock markets rise, not actual increased profitability of companies invested. In 1924, a few early investors had early access to the new easy credit. The stock markets ticked up, and as that new money trickled down into the economy, more and more people invested -- causing the market to swell artificially even more so. The Fed did nothing but create more and more credit, which flew into the stock market pushing it higher and higher. Government inflation caused the market to bubble. The Fed tried to control the market boom by restricting that easy money, so those who were holding the stocks (namely, a decent portion of the population) had no one to sell to -- no more easy credit meaning no one else to buy those stocks. Quickly people sold off stocks, but the banks were restricted in paying out deposits because the Fed was trying to deflate the currency base.
The Fed caused the Great Depression.
The boom-bust cycle is nothing new, and not a product of inflation. Inflation is part of the boom-bust cycle.
I'm amazed people give you any trust or value, honestly. Inflation causes the boom-bust cycle as I easily explained in this post and in previous ones in the same threads. Inflation, the creation of money, gives people false indicators of a growing market. In a free market, stocks go up in value because they either pay more dividends, or because the company is truly worth more money now or in the near future. In an inflationary economy, stocks go up usually because another sucker used easy credit/money to buy stocks from a previous sucker, at a higher price. That's boom-bust. It is NOT part of a healthy economy.
I'll go out on a limb and say that over time, the boom-bust cycle is healthy. It promotes advancement during boom cycles, then weeds out the weak during bust cycles. In the long run, the boom-bust cycle promotes technological advances that result in increased standard-of-living across the board. The key is to mitigate the bust cycles so that the economy doesn't collapse.
Society blossomed during a stable currency base during the Industrial Revolution. Why? Companies and individuals found ways to become more efficient, introduce more products and services to the market, and reduce prices for everyone (deflation). This happened pre-fed, during a strong dollar that didn't fall more than a few percent in value over 150 years. The dollar has lost 98% of value since 1913, because of inflation/the Fed. In a strong dollar economy, people still create, but do so wisely because they find profitability in efficiency or new inventions. In an inflationary economy, companies sell nothing or junk (dotcom, housing) because they have easy access to easy credit, used to fool foolish investors.
Thank you for mentioning Austria. It's a prime example how stranglehold deflation can actually ruin an economy. The time you'd want to look for is about 1930-1938.
The government back then tried to strengthen the currency by limiting the amoung of money in circulation. It did actually strengthen the currency, no doubt. The Austrian national bank had more gold in reserve than the German one did (that was one of the reasons why Austria was quite interesting for Germany to swallow). But it certainly didn't help the economy a bit, quite the opposite. It was near impossible to get a loan, companies went bankrupt because of it, unemployment reached 30%, peaking near 50% in some areas. The resource industry was getting the shaft because, due to the strong Schilling (Austria's currency back then) it was cheaper to import from abroad, at the same time with inflation and hyperinflation all around, it was near impossible to export anything because what you charged could not match the foreign prices. And to reap the benefit of having a strong, deflated currency, i.e. becoming the standard currency for international trade, Austria was WAY too small and had a way to brittle economy after losing WW1.
In case you're refering to current events rather than historic ones, care to show me when Austria had a "soft deflation" recently? Until the adoption of the Euro, Austria had an annual inflation of about 1-3 percent.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Standardized pricing will be applied regardless of inclusion of in-game advertising. So don't get fooled by marketing promising cheaper and better games due to inclusion of ads
Call me crazy, but the grandparent poster doesn't mention the gold standard once in his post.
He does mention that our economy is inflating somewhat rapidly, which can be very easily verified by taking a look at some graphs plotting the exchange rates for US dollars.
Whether or not this is an explicitly bad thing is a subject of debate. From what I understand, inflation is generally considered to be a good thing in small amounts, and that the US is on the brink of passing the cusp of these "small amounts".
Take a look at what happened in Argentina. Their currency became worthless almost overnight due to poor economic practices (nothing to do with the gold standard).
The grandparent poster then draws a bunch of conclusions from the assumption that the dollar is inflating, all of which appear pretty sound in the context of other economic inferences. If the dollar's worth less, as in any economic disaster, the people with the least money are obviously going to be the most affected. Because people have to eat, wages will then hopefully rise to try and catch up.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
But energy can neither be created or destroyed, how can it be inflated?
(That's what you get for discussing economy with geeks...)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The same way it is for any kind of content: artificially.
You just mentioned the key problem of the information industry. Information can be reproduced infinitly at near zero cost, yet the original creation of information costs a lot of money. The only way to create the shortage (and thus create some price, and not only value, for information) is to limit its supply artificially.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Am I a criminal? Perhaps. Is what I'm doing morally wrong and illegal? Perhaps. Do I give a fuck? no."
Some isn't. And for the parts that are? Your attitude is commendable...until life does a one-eighty and you're on the recieving end of someone elses "fuck you". Welcome to living in a society.
buying my games from half price and used cd places helps with that, until they're able to bind discs to a specific platform. If you don't like paying $60 for a game, don't. You're only encouraging them.
His reference to Austria has little to do with the practice of Austrian government or central banks, past or present. He is referring to Austrian School economics. HTH.
Standard UK price for new PC and console games has been £40 for a while now. Even before the dollar went above 2 to the pound that was the thick end of $80. Except DS games - they're usually £30.
So I tend to haunt the 4 for £20 Xbox rack in the local Gamestation. Just picked up Oddworld:Stranger's Wrath, The Suffering: Ties That Bind, Jade Empire and Alien Hominid, which should keep me going for months. By the time I run out of quality Xbox titles, the new hardware should have gone through a few revisions and a price drop or two, there should be a decent selection of 2nd-hand titles available at around 50% of the original price, and I can start the cycle all over again.
On the other hand - $80 or no, I'm having Metroid Prime 3 on day of release...
But the parent poster was right that the current administration has created a wildly inflationary economy which is just as dangerous as a deflationary economy. If you watch the trends in currency exchange, you'll notice that the dollar has been losing roughly 10% per year to the euro and pound. This is no doubt due to the massive amount of debt being incurred for the war in Iraq/Afganistan. As an investor, I've stopped investing in the US markets. Even what are considered to be good returns aren't as much as sitting on euros and pounds. An offshore savings account earning 1% per year will likely have out-performed most portfolios of investors in the US, and at a significantly lower (read: zero) risk.
What would be interesting is not whether $60 games are becoming the norm but whether games are getting more expensive in Britain and Europe since their currencies are inflating at a much slower rate. The numbers in the US are merely adjusting for the decline of the dollar.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
I agree. For reference, your average PS3 new release title is 100 USD (549DKK) in Denmark, GTA4 can be preordered from my local EB games at a modest 110 USD (599DKK).
I pay $5 or less for my games. No hurry to get the latest, so wait until the price drops to what I'm willing to pay. "XIII", "Max Payne", "Oni", etc. are suitably entertaining, engaging, and cost less than lunch at McDonald's.
You want the latest? You are willing to pay $60 for the latest? Then, supply-and-demand, retailers will charge you what you're willing to pay for what you want - and that, for the collective "you", is working out to about $60.
Go figure.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Freeware games are here to suck.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Anyway, what about publisher and retailer? If each get another quarter ... I don't see how the developers are left with 50%.
The Raven
Uh, the market was driven up by margin buying in a market where the margin buy was not backed by any assets. This led to an inflation in stock prices that was in no way tied to the currency supply.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Except that the debt is mostly unsecured high interest debt that is growing at a rate faster than inflation. Inflation might help reduce the pain of that 25% credit card debt but it is in no way going to eliminate it.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
What are you responding to? I was talking about the boom-bust cycles prior to the GD that you still fail to address. You know, the ones that occurred while we were still on the gold standard? 1837, for example?
I see, the claims you made that I'm disputing are the counterargument? Give me a break, you're saying "it's fact because I said so". Once again your base definitions are incorrect. Inflation is not the creation of money, it's an increase in the money supply in circulation, which is different. To illustrate this, consider a constant supply of paper money. Inflation can still occur because if people take cash from savings and place it into investments, they have increased the money supply. This is exacerbated by banks extending more credit, since that in effect also increases the money supply. Yes, printing more currency contributes. However, in today's economy, the extension of credit affects the money supply far more than the increase in currency.
You seem to think that speculation cycles only happen because of increased currency in circulation. This is proven false, because no free market is an ideal free market which, as you continue to ignore, requires full knowledge of the market by participants.
No. In an ideal free market, this is true. However, the free market you espouse exists only in theory. You confuse free-from-govermnment-action with free as it is intended in "free market" by theorists. In reality, even with fixed money supplies, speculation occurs. However, with a fixed money supply, there is no way to mitigate the bust cycle that follows the boom cycle.
Does this mean that the Fed didn't screw up in the 1920s? No. But this doesn't mean that the Fed is inherently bad, it means that errors were made in policy and in implementation.
Once again, correlation != causation. Furthermore, define "society". Let's not mix social terms with economic ones, since one could easily argue that society withered during the industrial revolution, with theretofore unprecedented decreases in quality of life not due to natural disaster.
That's a useless statistic, since wages are not the same as they were in 1913. It looks good, makes it seem like there's this huge drastic problem, but in reality, currencies all over the world have experienced similar inflations, and wages have basically kept pace, so unless you think it's important for some arbitrary value to be pegged to the dollar, then it's meaningless. In which case, it's a self-referential maxim anyway -- the dollar must stay at X because if it doesn't, it's no longer at X! The horror of it all!
It's funny that you think the dollar was stable in value prior to the 1910s. It actually fluctuated a very large amount. For example -- inflation from 1900 to 1910 was about 13%. Furthermore, the variance in the wage-to-purchasing power was higher than today, which was a huge problem. The difference is that the delfationary cycles have been much smaller, so the net is an inflated currency -- and the collapse of the economy is forestalled due to proper attention to the money supply.
I don't know why anyone respects your economic misinformation. You consistently use terms improper
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I second this.
Much like Americans complaining about gas prices, Europeans would love to have games that cost $60.
Where I live in Ireland, next generation console games regularly cost up to 79 ($108 US Dollars)
And to preach to the anti PS3 choir, the price for the PS3 in Europe is 599 ($824 US Dollars) but in Ireland, for some reason Sony set a different price point, of 630 ($867 USD)
So while they continue to gouge Europe for all it's willign to spend, guess who's gonna opt out of the 'Next Generation' and stick with his PS2?
Yup...
Worse yet, wages are often slow to adjust to high inflation. So credit card debt will become harder to pay off over time. This is not necessarily the case in a deflationary economy since wages are often sticky downward (meaning they go up over time, but don't go down). However deflation is really bad for businesses for this very reason...many costs cannot be adjusted for deflation. So deflation helps poor people up until their company is forced to lay them off.
The best situation for the lower class is an inflationary economy, but one where the rate of inflation is pretty small (1-2%). That rate will track pretty closely with wage increases.
The extension is that fiat currency is to blame, and that the gold standard would solve the problem. However, since he's been lambasted so much for his crackpot theories in re: the gold standard, he no longer refers to it by name in his posts.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I paid about $50 for games on my old Atari VCS. Then I paid about $50-60 each on games for the Atari 400. After a long ride on that platform, I jumped into the PC world, and started buying games for...$60. Some were less (DOOM was a great deal), and some were more (Under a Killing Moon was $85. Ouch!).
The reason I don't pay that kind of money for games now is that I don't (generally) buy games when they're first released, but if I did, I'd have no problem paying $60 for 'em, as long as they're good.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I can agree with you to a point on that. The only problem is that most of the really good titles never go under 20 unless you're ebaying them. Hopefully services like Steam will start to offer older titles for less and undercut the inflated price of the Best Buy bargain bin.
But don't forget games that never drop that far for better reasons: they're simply that good. Half Life 1 never went below 25 (that I had seen) in the big box stores. At 60 it would have been worth buying twice!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
If inflation is 0% (stable pricing), then I am indifferent between buying something now or in a year, as my money is worth the same. If there is a small amount of deflation, I have an incentive to sit on my money, because it will be worth more in a year... If I get 2% by putting it in my coffee can, why not wait when things are cheaper. With small inflation (2%-4%), there is a reason to spend now (money becomes worth less in a year).
Basically, small inflation forces people to either spend their money, or save it in interest returning investments, or invest it... you can't sit on it. Small deflation causes people to sit on their money. If you look at the cyclical nature of the computer industry, the fact that the computer industry is deflationary has caused all those hiccups. For consumer goods, the built up supply chains of distribution work fine... doesn't matter if it takes 3-4 weeks to get the shampoo from the factory to the store to your home, nobody loses money... recently companies have gotten so good at just-in-time manufacturing, that they decided to worry about this, NOT because of deflation and collecting less money at the end, but because the finance department realized that the "inventory" that they are shipping around uses working capital (if I carry $20m in inventory, that is $20m that I am either borrowing or not investing, so there is a "cost" of the inventory). However, in the computer industry, Dell was the first to move to just-in-time, and decimated everyone... not because of carrying costs which are small, but computers deflate at 2% a month or so, so if it took two months to get the product there, they lost 4% of the value in the channel.
Basically, small inflation is devastating, because it means that the "real" risk free rate is negative. If expected inflation is 3%, and people expect a 2% rate of return for 0-risk, then the nominal interest rate for treasury bills is 5%. If inflation rises to 4%, then the interest rate foes to 6%, with no major change. If instead we get 3% deflation, then the "interest rate" SHOULD become -1% (-3% deflation + 2% required rate of return = -1%)... Now, who would buy a bond for -1%? Instead the money sits in the mattress. As a result, you might see an interest rate of 1% or 2%, but that means that the real interest rate is 4%.
A higher real interest rate means that people require a higher return for "risk," which means that bond yields go up (making it more expensive for companies to borrow money, which means that they don't invest as much in growth. It means that stock prices go down, because stock price today = NPV(future returns), and the higher the interest rate, the lower the NPV.
Basically, deflation => higher REAL interest rates => slower economic growth, plus deflation => lower expenditures while people hoard cash => slower economic growth. Deflation is VERY bad. Look at Japan's long recession, they couldn't get out of the cycle, because once you lower the interest rates to 0%, there is nowhere to go. When the US economy went into recession, the Fed was able to lower rates from 5.25% to 1%, which sped up the economy. The reason they moved it up so fast, they were scared that if another attack happened or something else slowed the economy, they had nowhere to move, they COULDN'T lower interest rates more, which meant severe recession or depression to fix things.
The Fed's ability to affect rates lets them tweak the economy. The tweaking works fine in normal conditions (moving between 3% and 5% GDP growth is manageable, once you get outside that range, the interest rate can't control it). The American people like to know that each year they will generally be a little better off. In the late 90s, you had red hot growth, which everyone enjoyed, but when the economy slowed to absorb those gains, people decided that a mild recession was a severe depression.
Look at the housing market, people expected 4%-5% growth, inflation + 1%, and while they enjoyed the 10%-20% growth while it lasted, it forced people into doing stupid moves to get ahead of the game... Now prices drop 2%-4% in a year, a minor fluctuation, and people are talking about a market collapse.
This, always, in currency/economic discussions means the gold standard. Also check the g'g'parent's site - the second link on the page is about the gold standard.
It's quite clear he is a gold bug.
360 games are released at £50 in the uk, which equals, for those not aware of the current exchange rate, just over $100.
$50 is CHEAP! At least I think so. Look, before any of that cheat code / mod stuff they were charging in upwards of $50 a game. In fact, I remember visiting my local Magnavox dealer back in 1978 as a kid (I owned an Magnavox Odyssey 2 console and often, the Mag dealers were the only place you could obtain the games). No game ever came out under $49.99 (in specific I remember 'Thunderball' - a 3K game - cost $49.99) and when the Challenging Series was released, some of those games were $79.99!
Now last year, I GLADLY paid $70 for Half Life 2 and did not regret it. It was certainly worth that to me. But the price will always come down over time - it was true in the 70's, it's true now - and HL2 can be obtained for about half that now. A year after 'Thunderball' was released, it was down to $29.99 too.
Maybe it's the cost of the media against the cost of the actual creation of the game. Back in the day it was ONE GUY who did it all, but the media costs were very high. Now there are programming teams - sometimes numbering in the 100's of people. Games will go for whatever the market can bear. Apparently, it can bear around $60 for a game on average.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
False, wherever did you get that idea? How about a link? The Austrian School maintains that deflation is of no benefit to society, but that price drops due to increased productivity are a good thing. Did you get confused about the definition of deflation again?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
...and in three years they will always be $9.99.
kulakovich
I guess I don't understand the definition of 'poor'. I thought being poor meant that you didn't have a high level of income. By what you are saying, being poor means that you have a great deal of debt. Just because someone is poor, why does that have to mean they are in debt? If they aren't, the parent argument doesn't make as much sense.
A couple of weeks ago after Transformers came out, I was walking through Target and saw the PC version for $20. Since I have a 360 I checked the price there, a whopping $60. So I ended up buying the $20 PC version. I would have been willing to pay $60 IF I could return it for sucking so bad. It's by far one of the worst games I've ever played. It has no story, choppy graphics (on a 7800GTX), boring gameplay, etc. Anyway, explain to me the price difference between the PC and 360? I just don't get. $40??? That's nuts.
I remember paying fifty bucks a pop for games over 25 years ago--and I don't mean inflation adjusted. In 1980, Intellivision consoles cost $300--about $800 in 2007 money. Cartridges were $30-60, which is equivalent to $75 to well over $100 today.
If you watch the trends in currency exchange, you'll notice that the dollar has been losing roughly 10% per year to the euro and pound.
This is all well and good, but it doesn't measure inflation. Inflation is measured by how much the dollar buys in goods and services, not by how much it buys in other people's currency. The euro, etc. is also subject to inflation/deflation, and the currency market is also influenced by other pressures (i.e. our national debt, price of oil, the wars we are engaged in, etc). You're basically introducing a set of entirely new variables when you try to measure one currency against another.
The parent poster is correct. The only people who gain from deflation are people with lots of money piled up. Anyone with debt actually does well with modest inflation - you pay down the debt with money that is worth less than the money you originally got from the lender. Of course, you don't want runaway inflation, like Argentina, but there's no evidence of that such a thing is anywhere in our near future.
The Fed actually does a surprisingly good job at regulating our economy, and I'm shocked that a government agency can actually be that effective. Consider, we've had no economic depression since the 1930's, and aside from the Carter stagflation debacle of the 70's, no real sustained economic downturns.
"You'll note that time periods with low or negative inflation were times of currency crisis - because the wealthy hoarded their money and little was left in circulation to sustain the economy."
wait.. are you saying it was hoarding which caused the crisis? or hoarding was caused by the crisis?
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
I'd like Forza 2. But I don't want to pay $60 for it. I'll wait until price drops to $50 or less or a used copy for $40 or so. I did pay for Dirt, but don't enjoy it enough to be happy having paid $60 for it. I paid $30 or so for a used copy of Need for Speed Carbon and enjoy that, and think it was worth the price I paid. I'm not sure I'd have been happy paying $60 for it though.
I "can afford" to buy games at $60. I just don't think they're worth that much. Not even the ones I like. So I'm choosing not to.
See my sig. Not much has changed in eight years.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
"The Fed" is not part of the Federal Government. To use a quote I like (but isn't mine), "The Federal Reserve is as much a part of the government as Federal Express."
The price for a new game, as far as I can remember, has always been around NZD$100 (~USD$80). I remember some top title games for the Master System II like Sonic the Hedgehog were around $120. It surprises me with inflation, and the production cost of games going through the roof, that the price of games hasn't gone up a lot.
I remember when Pac-Man came out for the Atari 2600 for $50.00 waaaaay back in 1982.
uhhhhh, so what's the problem?
Books can be had for as little as $1. Or free, at your local library.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Household income in the United States typically rises faster than inflation. This isn't true every single year, but over any 10-year period since World War II, the median household was earning more, even after adjusting for inflation, than they were at the beginning of that 10-year period. Here is a graph showing the upward trend of inflation-adjusted incomes.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Your shit is modded so high now I have to post a second, expanded, reply.
>>it's a substitute for actual goods of value in the same way that paper money is, or any other currency standard.
Wrong, there is an absolute limit to the supply of gold.
>more dollars means that the dollars out there are worth less, especially versus foreign currencies.
>>Except for the obvious logical fallacy that foreign currencies have also abandoned the gold standard?"
Even in a world of fiat currencies, when one currency is produced at a faster rate than the others, the relative value declines. Take a look at the last ten years of exchange rates for US/Canadian, US/Pound and US/Euro sometime.
There is a reason that gold is, and has been, a standard of exchange for millennia. Those reasons are readily available for anyone to learn of on the net. The proof is in the pudding though. They are the same reasons the BIS uses it still. Good enough for countries and banks, but not for the people it would seem. Not as easy to manipulate and play games with, games that benefit only the players and not the played. Namely, us.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
When Chrono Trigger came out for the SNES, it cost $90. Did I get it? Hell yes, that game was awesome. There's nothing wrong with $60 for a game, so long as the game you're buying is worth $60 to you.
...of money for the software industry.
2 /index.htm
Ok, I'll give you that, but can you explain why this is the opposite trend in the PC hardware industry?
Case in point, in 1992 I ordered what was then a top of the line PC:
* 486 - 66 MHz / 8 Meg memory
* 240 Meg hard drive.
* No CDROM
* No sound card.
* No networking or modem.
* Diamond Stealth 64 video card (Vesa local bus)
* Cheap case with floppy.
* 14 inch VGA muti-sync monitor.
* Mouse/keyboard.
* $2,500.00
This past Sunday 7/26 I just purchased my new baby:
* Intel D975XBX2 (Bad AXE) mobo with a load of stuff on board.
http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/D975XBX
* Intel QX6700 (Core 2 quad core 2.66GHz)
* 850 Watt SLI power supply.
* EVGA GeForce 8800GTX 768Meg video card.
* 4 Gig DDR2 800 MHz RAM (PC2 6400).
* 320 Gig SATA 7200 RPM drive.
* Lian-Li PC1200B II case.
* 20X CD/DVD burner SATA.
* Windows Vista Ultimate.
* $2,800.00
Please tell me why inflation and rising development costs didn't have an effect on these prices?
As an engineer I can tell you that moving from the hardware technology of 1992 to 2007 was also "a lot of work" and required "a lot of resources" and "a lot of money". Yet based on inflation, I got a system that just crushed the older one into the ground.
Hmmm...
truth be told, games, like most other media, are vastly overpriced
if PHBs lived in the working person's economy, prices would fall
Today's Headline: $60 Games Are Here To Stay
Tomorrow's Headline: Game publishers blame internet piracy for decrease in video game sales
When UT2004 came out, it was $40 and it disappeared from the shelves like free candy. After selling out, it came back as $50. Perhaps distributors can learn a lesson from this, as PC game sales of non-overhyped games continue to dwindle.
The 60$ games cost 70€ in Europe whereas the 50$ games cost "only" 60€ so the US dollar isn't a sufficient explaination.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
False dichotomy. Prudent investing is always possible. However, in a deflationary economy, there is an inequality that rewards those who hoard cash rather than investing.
The truth is that in an inflationary economy, there is a tax on saving. However, speculation is not the only investment strategy (and according to most wise investors, a very poor stretegy). Wise investment strategy includes investing in certain ventures based on real product. Consider IBM, for exmaple -- people invest in blue-chips like IBM because stick price is relatively stable but dividends are high. If what you say about an inflationary economy was true, no one would invest in IBM since it's not high-risk, high-reward. Yet funnily, it consistently returns above inflation. Did you forget that inflation affects returns on investments as well as the value of saved funds?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What would be interesting is not whether $60 games are becoming the norm but whether games are getting more expensive in Britain and Europe since their currencies are inflating at a much slower rate.
Yep, 10€ price hike for "next-gen" console games (60€->70€). I believe console game prices were set to match US prices back when the Euro was at 0.8$ and never adjusted for the changing value. Now they're adding a price hike just because they think they can. For a comparison, the Wii is getting several new games at prices below 60€, e.g. Mario Strikers Charged Football can be had for 45€ in some places. I don't know about Britain, though.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Wrong, there is an absolute limit to the supply of gold.
Yeah and I'd rather see that used for processes that need the chemical properties of gold rather than just be something shiny to trade with.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
One of the main reasons I bought a Wii was to avoid spending a ridiculous $60 on games. I think a lot of other people factored this in to their console decision too. In fact, I would so go far to say that only the people who were willing to spend $500 - $750 on a console are the same people who don't mind spending $60 for games ... and due to Wii's runaway success and dismal console sales of the other systems, I'd have to disagree with this article.
Just to add icing to the software developers cake, I just remembered that all the software industry actually sells you are little bits arranged correctly on a piece of plastic. And you know, sometimes you don't even get the plastic! It's the same with the movie and music business.
Sheesh, must be nice.
I'm going to take a rather pedestrian assumption here (cuz I hate economics). But isn't inflation good because as the population grows it keeps the rich from getting AS richer? More actual dollars to go around to more people. Is inflation inline with population growth? So wouldn't it go up exponentially as population does? I do feel like I'm seeing the price of things rise faster than I remember. I don't know I just write software.
"Industrial and dental uses account for around 11% of gold demand, or an annual average of just under 400 tonnes from 2001 to 2005 inclusive."
Source: World Gold Council
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
As I recall the source of the 1837 depression can be traced to foreign inflation -- in Britain, I think. In any event, the contention is not that only inflation can cause depressions, but rather that boom/bust cycles are a consequence of systemic inflation. Standalone depressions have occurred many times as a result of unforeseen phenomenon such as natural disasters, but only in periods of inflation have there been noticable tendencies for boom periods and recessions/depressions to run in predictable cycles.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
. . . there is an absolute limit to the supply of gold.
There's an absolute limit on the supply of gold in the earth's crust that we can get at with modern mining equipment. In theory, you can get more either artificially (through nuclear reactions) or from some place other than the earth's crust (core or asteroid mining). Admittedly, it remains to be seen if any of these technologies can be done economically.
You'll see a sharp drop in the general metals market if any one of those technologies pans out. If currency is based on any of those metals, you'll see a corresponding drop in those currencies. Consider that all asteroid mining needs is to get launch costs down and a bit of robotics engineering, and it seems very likely that we'll see just such a technology pan out within our lifetime. I wouldn't want to have my currency based on gold when that happens.
Not a typewriter
After buying about 12 games for 360, I realized that I wouldn't play most of them again. At $60 a pop, it's just wasn't worth buying most of them. So I got a GameFly account and am pretty happy with it (so far). It's nice not caring about the value/money ratio for games anymore. Especially since most action games only take 10-12 hours to beat and I rarely replay them.
The only games I'll be buying now are ones with good multiplayer (Halo 3) or that I want to add to my permanent collection (Bioshock). Games like Prey, Lost Planet, The Darkness, etc are perfect as rentals.
Yes, a somewhat inflationary economy is a good thing. And if it were only 4% per year, that would be manageable, though ideally it should be a bit lower.
But the parent poster was right that the current administration has created a wildly inflationary economy which is just as dangerous as a deflationary economy. If you watch the trends in currency exchange, you'll notice that the dollar has been losing roughly 10% per year to the euro and pound. This is no doubt due to the massive amount of debt being incurred for the war in Iraq/Afganistan. As an investor, I've stopped investing in the US markets. Even what are considered to be good returns aren't as much as sitting on euros and pounds. An offshore savings account earning 1% per year will likely have out-performed most portfolios of investors in the US, and at a significantly lower (read: zero) risk.
Of course this isn't due to havign an unbacked currency but instead due to massive debt incurred due to some poor foreign policy decisions and some poor economic decisions.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I know a few other people have already said it, but a little while back video game prices actually dropped. I remember paying $70 for Phantasy Star (the original on Sega Master System) back in 1988. Many games were $60, and if you were lucky, the game you wanted was $50. Years later, it seemed like $50 became the standard cost for video games, and that seems to have held until this year. $60 isn't new, it's just not what we're used to anymore.
A low rate of inflation is a natural symptom of prosperity, more people have more money and thus prices rise.
The poor are most hurt by deflation. They are the class that is forced to spend a greater percentage of their earnings on day-to-day living. There will also be increased unemployment as there is less for the rich to invest/purchase.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
With the exchange rate as it is I'm almost tempted to buy an ntsc console and buy my games at $60 dollars a time instead of the £50 (thats $102!!!!) that games cost over here in the UK.
The really good titles may not go under $20 for the 360. But now is a great time to pick up a PS2! There are plenty of great games to be be had for under $10 used.
I'll probably pick up a 360 around 2011 or so, when the cost of system & games is more in line with what they're worth to me. Of course, I'm more of a casual gamer.
I've reached a time in my life where I'm no longer the hardcore gamer I was when growing up. I still play games, but they're more along the lines of online poker, sudoku, or casual game downloads. These can be had for as little as $7 each, and can provide multiple hours of enjoyment. (Disclaimer, I work for a casual game company).
I have 2 kids and work full time, so the available time for gaming is pretty small. When I play, it needs to be something I can drop at a moments notice, as well as pick up at a moments notice. I don't have the time/patience to spend 4 hours learning/playing an RTS, so this works well for me. Likewise, the Wii works very well. I find myself more inclined to buy "social" games that are played with friends/family than buying the $60 game that would have me locked in a room on my own for days at a time.
If you're getting fed up with paying $60 every year for an improved graphics version of the same games you've been playing for years, look into the casual game market. It's something I'd never considered until I started working in the industry, so it may surprise more people than me.
Some of the best non-mainstream titles never get anywhere near that, though... Suikoden 3 (which I loved, but others hated) went out of print around $30.
And you're correct that it's supply and demand. There's a massive assortment of 2 yr old games for dirt cheap, and the consoles to play them on are cheap as well, because the demand for them is so low. Old titles that have huge demand (Persona 1 USA, for PSX) have huges prices again. (Or 'still', maybe.) Persona is $70+ on EBay for used copies. What's really sick is that I'm considering paying that to replace my lost disk. I haven't because there's a rumor of a remake for PSP soon.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
unlike today where even the stock market gains don't keep up with the TRUE cost of inflation.
By true cost of inflation do you mean the cost of living? Average rental prices in NYC are up 20% in the last four years, I'm guessing most everyone didn't get %5 annual raises every year. Even if the stock price did keep up.
We are all just people.
In Australia, new games usually launch for AU$99 (which Google tells me is US$87.50). It seems that games cost a lot more here. It doesn't bother me though - I refuse to pay that much for games, so I wait until they're a year old and get them for AU$50.
I remember in the 90s paying $60 or $70 dollars for brand new Super Nintendo games, like the final fantasies or donkey kong country. Since thats what I grew up with, the last 8 or 9 years of $40 dollar games have seemed cheap to me... Now that its back to $50 it feels 'normal'
Here in the UK I've been paying £30-£40 ($60-$80) for games since '95 :-/
Actually, from '95 to '96 -- at which point I found a cheaper hobby to pass the time until last week, when I bought a PS2 and top 12 games for $200 :P (All second hand, of course)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
The dollar may have done down, but gaming shops are gradually outsourcing more and more jobs to Russia and India for $7/hr.
Now the real question (for us in Australia) is - if $60US is a high price point, and that's what the games are selling for. Why the hell do we pay $115 for the high price point (at least at my local chain)? Let's do a conversion: Currently, $60US = $68AU. OK, we live far away. Right then, let's add very generous $20AU for postage. That's a total of $88AU to get a single game shipped here. Therefore, I could order many many games, individually, from the shelf of a US retailer - sell them from my shelf, and make $27 per game. So when we factor in bulk discounts, wholesale prices, and bulk freight, it's seeming like there's a whole lot of profit in Australian game retailers pockets. Where do I sign up?
Come to Australia so we can strip search you and rob you of your internets, pr0n, rights and freedoms.
I still haven't gotten through all the games in the "Lost Treasures of Infocom" that I bought about 12 years ago.
"The Fed" is not part of the Federal Government. To use a quote I like (but isn't mine), "The Federal Reserve is as much a part of the government as Federal Express."
:-P
Except the government isn't allowed to pick the board, CEO and President of Federal Express.
Don't forget to factor in VAT. It's included in virtually all European prices whereas local US sales taxes are not. Assuming 17% VAT (not too far off from most European countries) 60/1.17 is about 50 and 70/1.17 is about 60.
To give a more helpful answer, energy *alone* couldn't do the trick -- remember, it fell significantly from 1980-1999 and only recently posted huge gains for a few years. ($11 barrel of oil in the late 90s, anyone?) So energy hasn't historically posted that kind of nominal return, and worse, has very high volatility :-/
Even if you're staking your bets on energy becoming more expensive due to some Peak Oil scenario (I'd consider that extremely ill-advised, but just for the sake of argument), that only guarantees exponential growth. It doesn't guarantee it will grow e.g 12% as opposed to 1% per year.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I know we're talking $USD! But would love it if games in Australia were selling at $60. Next gen games are around $100-120.. With the Aussie dollar doing so well we should not have to pay more $70..
I read a definition of 'wealth' (in Rich Dad, Poor Dad, actually *) that was along the lines of 'the number of days you could live at your current comfort level without going broke, if you quit your job'. For most of us, that's a negative number, since so many people are in debt. He made the distinction between being rich (having lots of money), and being wealthy (having assets which, passively or actively, increase your net worth over time).
* This book was great up to the point where the author reveals how he actually got rich in the first place, going to mortgage foreclosure auctions and ripping off unfortunate families, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. The guys a vulture. If that's what it takes to turn a quick buck, I'm all for staying poor.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
No, but on the whole the strategy will save you a good deal of money over time, if you buy a reasonable number of games.
Because those are classic, out of print games. They're almost what you'd call vintage. If you wait too long the games essentially become antiques and you end up having to pay what a hobbyist collector would pay for them, if you want to own them legitimately and the game hasn't been re-released for a more modern platform. In the vast majority of cases, however, if you don't wait one or two console generations worth of time to elapse before purchasing the game you had your eye on, a little patience will save you a good chunk of money on any given title.
You may get bit by the few exceptions to the rule, from time to time. There will sometimes be some ups and downs, and some games may not experience much of a price dip. Katamari Damancy was originally priced at $19.99 and when it became a runaway success, all the copies were sold out, and they released a more expensive sequel without producing more copies of the original. If you wanted Katamari, for a while there, you'd have to pay in the neighborhood of $50 or so on eBay. However, it recently went back into print and you can once again buy it brand new for $20. Something similar happened with a few DS games, I know, and the price on the Guitar Hero games has been pretty stable since release as well.
By and large though, it makes a lot of sense to wait. Of course, if everybody waited, it would lose some of its efficacy as a smart shopping tactic, so I'm glad for all of the impatient gamers and early adopters. It allows a cheapskate like me to thrive off the bargain bin and cheap, used and perfectly playable games.
Look at Bear Stearns' recent bond report. One bond is now worth $0 on the dollar (yes, $0 on the dollar, their official statement). Another bond is now worth 9 cents on the dollar. These are billion dollar bonds, now worthless. Yet many of these bond issues are diversified through CDOs, which are increasingly becoming dangerous. We're talking possibly $1 trillion in CDOs that are in danger of collapse - yet the average person has no clue about it. Things could go from bad to horrific in very short order, affecting markets unrelated to the bond issues quickly.
A few CDO Bonds being worth near nothing isn't something to be alarmed about, but rather something to be expected. The purpose of CDO and CMBS deals is to pile together a large number of mortgage loans or other risky investments into a pool and then redistribute the risk. A CDO/CMBS will have a 10-20 or so bonds as a part of it. The higher tier bonds receive priority on principal payments, and the lower tier bonds take the losses first. Accordingly, the higher tier bonds have low interest rates whereas the lower tier bonds can get rather high interest rates.
Now, for the technicalities. The average interest rate for the entire deal cannot be higher than the average interest rate of the sub investments that make up the deal. So to give the lower tier bonds a high return on investment, they will have an interest rate in the same ballpark as the higher tier bonds, but will be initially sold for something like 80 cents on the dollar.
Now, follow this logic out. The bottom tiers start at $.80 per $1. You've got a hundred mortgages or other investments making up the overall deal. As payments are missed on those investments, the bottom tier bonds don't get their principal payments. They're going to sell for even less than they started out at. You do not buy these bonds expecting to see your principal back. You buy them hoping to make a profit from the interest before the bond bottoms out. They're called junk bonds for a reason.
The price of the games did not increase--most of these games are imports and the value of the dollar has been decreasing against foreign currencies. So--we pay more.
Maybe I'm a cheap bastard, but I find it near impossible to bring myself to pay $50 for a game. $30 is acceptable, even $40 if the game is good enough with a lengthy amount of play value. I did pay $50 for WiiPlay, but only because it included a Wiimote.
On the scale of entertainment hours per dollar ratio, anything less than an hour or so per dollar is way WAY at the bottom of the stack. Hardly 'a pretty good deal'. For example, $60 spent on cable movie channels will net you 12 hours of entertainment per dollar (each month). Actually, it nets you much more than that, but you can only watch one thing at a time. Add additional people to your household or split the bill with someone and the ratio gets much larger.
A $60 video game that offers only 50 hours of entertainment isn't even worth buying. Renting it, even for a month, is cheaper (even if you sell games after you play them) and will net you the exact same entertainment.
Yes but 50€ is still significantly more than 50$. Also the VAT didn't rise that much so why are games getting more expensive?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
And people who buy gold for its shinyness or value are driving the price up.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Ah. Got it.
The gold standard just never made that much sense to me once you started thinking about it. I remember reading back in my HS history class about an African king that took a trip to Europe, and brought a large amount of gold with him to pay for his expenses while abroad... the amount of gold he took was so great that it completely devastated the economies of the regions he visited.
Or you could just have a gold rush, which would be equally bad.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Yes, in Europe we pay 100$ for a game. Nowadays one dollar is 1.4 to one EUR, but prices are of the same numbers.
I just picked up GRAW 2 for 49.99 cdn and see that STALKER shadow of chernobyl is selling for 39.99. Both are brand new titles.
I hate subscription pricing. I hate to sit down to an "entertainment activity" with this little nag in the back of my mind going:
"tick tock tick tock money is flying out of your wallet tick tock tick tock"
It's much more relaxing and enjoyable to just buy it and then play it any time I want without the nag of knowing it's costing me money.
And to me, $50 games are a bargain. I've only played two games now for the last couple of years - Call of Duty and Silent Hunter III.
I'm really not motivated to buy more games yet because both of these games have provided hundreds of hours of entertainment and I'm still not bored of them yet.
When my wife and I can spend $50 for 2 hours of entertainment at the movies, $50 for hundreds of hours of entertainment is a BARGAIN.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The Austrian School typically believes that boom/bust cycles are natural, and occur under both speci-backed currency systems and in inflationary systems. However, their take on it is that they can be avoided sometimes when there is a species standard, but are unavoidable with an inflationary system.
As for the depression of 1837, that was caused by overextended credit and the failure of specie remits to eastern banks. Once the fed stopped accepting bank notes as payment, it precipitated a run a specie which the banks couldn't support due to the previous demand for coin in the west. The inflation in this case was caused by overextension of credit, and little else. Sure, you can ascribe a lot of reasons to the overextension of credit, but I think you put the cart before the horse when you say that inflation causes boom/bust -- it's like saying rain causes thunderstorms.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Buying used games does nothing for the actual game industry at all. The money just goes straight into the pockets of your local gamestop/eb etc
Don't say that until you can read these two books and refute them:
You are correct, though, that gold is just a metal. No pseudoscience about it. Just real economics.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Come to the UK and you'll find the same $60 titles you're whinging about for sale for £40. That's $80-ish to those of you that don't speak sterling. Every time I go to the US I think wouldn't it be nice to pick up some of your cheaper games (or DVD's for that matter). Then I remember that the manufacturers have explicitly region locked them so we can't and we're forced to buy our own localised (over-priced) ones.
I bring back loads of Audio-CD's though. Funny that - the standard was developed by Philips (a european firm) who didn't add that kind of draconian region-specific feature to audio CD's originally...
~Pev
Ah, downtown real estate prices!
After a lot of soul-searching, I've come to this opinion:
If you're complaining about high rental prices, you have to think about *why* they're high. They're high because people are willing to bid that much to live there. And they're willing to bid that much because they can make a salary there high enough to justify the move, even after such high rents. If rents seem high to you (I'm not singling you out here), that probably means you're taking up a unit that someone can make much more productive use than you.
Move already!
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
The only 2 recent games I paid full price for were GTA San Andreas and Oblivion. And even those were like $40 or $45, not $60. Years ago my parents bought me Ultima 7 for something like $60, and even though it wasn't my money, I felt bad they paid that much. At least it was a good game.
For most titles I'm perfectly happy behind the curve, paying $20 or less for PS2 titles. I see you can get XBox360 games for $20 now too, that'll be good when I get a 360 to play GTA4.
"that only guarantees exponential growth"
I thing every investor would be happier with exponential returns on their investments, rather than a steady % growth.
Energy and clean water are the 2 current choke points, the things countries will go to war over this century. Everything else is secondary.
Kevin Smith on Prince
I thing every investor would be happier with exponential returns on their investments, rather than a steady % growth.
Er, exponential growth *is* a steady percentage growth.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Ah, downtown real estate prices!
Yeah I would agree with you, except I'm not downtown. I'm a 45 minute commute from work in Times Square. I'm not in some trendy neighborhood or fancy loft. I'm in what was for years, a working class neighborhood. But there are rapidly becoming no working class neighborhoods any more. While the average rent went up 20% in the last four years for the city, my rent in my building went up 48% in the last two years. Now this all relates to the discussion of inflation and wealth distribution, because the working class that is getting pushed out of my neighborhood still has the same jobs and doesn't have alot of income earning assets. They are (as I see it) haveing to relocate as a result of the centralization of wealth, which I believe is an effect of an inflation economy.
Yes, I understand that. All I'm saying is that it looks many of the prices were set assuming parity between the Euro and USD though, which was true for a while.
If it were mean income your hypothesis might work, but this is the median income, i.e. the income that 50% of people make more than and 50% of people make less than. That means that the graph is basically showing real increases for the middle class (i.e. those in the middle range of incomes).
The reason US people are in debt way over their heads more than any time before is the same reason that there are more SUVs and HDTVs in the United States than at any time before.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I was under the impression that the Wii is region free, so (if you can find one at all) you can just import games. Is this correct?
Also, do newer UK TVs support NTSC? I am aware that there were dual-mode units sold back in the day, but do all new Hi-def TVs support NTSC since they can do the much higher HDTV resolutions?*
I've always felt sad for UK gamers getting raked over the coals price-wise.
*UK HDTVs do the same 720 or 1080 that US HDTVs do right? Or did USA screw the pooch on that like we did with GSM frequencies?
"Cheeze it!" - Bender