Slashdot Mirror
$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."
$50 in 1988 is equivalent to $88 now. Prices are dropping in real terms. (http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl)
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.
OK, it's fairly expected on /. for people to misrepresent Moore's Law, but this is about the furthest from a bulls eye one can get!
Trust me, Moore's law has absolutely ZERO to do with video game pricing. Nothing. Nada. Completely and utterly wrong.
If you're looking at a simply reason for this complex situation, it's simply supply and demand. More consoles, more gamers, more games being sold. That is a much more likely scenario. Of course, there's also more competition right now which certainly helps immensely.
No Comment.
Actually I just bought a Greatest Hits title for the 360 yesterday. $30. So yes, they do exist.
The expression is "I could NOT care less." Think about it.
Xbox 360 Platinum Hits
There was a significant hop in price with the XBox games. The way they structured it, the basic game was $40-50, and then the ultimate/gold/platinum/collector's edition was another $10 or $20 on top of that and included an extra level or other goody. Ads typically showed the cheaper version to get people into the store, and then offered the gold version for just a bit more.
People at the store already spending around $50 easily justified the special-edition for only another 20%, and viola, the $60 price-point was born. Game makers saw that the public eagerly snapped up (as eagerly as at $50 at least) and reset their target to $60. The only reason I could see the extra 20% justification is that buying it at that premium includes all of the downloadable content that the basic version may buy.
Personally, unless the title is spectacular, I wait until it hits the bargain bin ($20) and get it. Fortunately for me, I can typically get the collector's edition for the same $20 price as the basic version.
Actually, game prices are falling. In the late 80's and early 90's, I was paying US$45 per game, according to the inflation calculators that I found (http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl) the price is roughly US$20 cheaper today (at US$60) than then (adjusted for inflation of course).