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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."
Inflation and rising development costs result in both a higher price tag and acceptance of a higher price tag. News at 11.
$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.
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.
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
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.
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Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
$50 is a sweet spot for me for regular video games (PC games and Console games). $20-30 is my sweet spot for mobile games (DS, PSP). Will I pay $60+ for a game? Sure, if I really wanted to play it. But if prices start going for $60, I won't be buying as much as I use too or I'll be waiting for games to get old or become used before purchasing.
One of the benefits of this 'new' user created mods for games, like Warcraft/Starcraft Maps, Counter-Strike, Flash Games (like ones from AddictingGames.com), I have lots of other options for games. Also, while I know lots of people who are 100% against subscription games (like MMO's), I'm pretty happy with games like LOTRO's whom I've gotten a special "pre-order" subscription price of $10/month (or $200 lifetime, which I didn't take as I generally have never played an MMO for almost 2 years straight). I'm happy with that kind of pricing. Much more happy than $15/month. Such that I'm willing to keep my subscription active even if I'm going to be MIA for most of a month. The amount of entertainment hours I get for my $ are amazing... if you considering spending $10 to see a 2-hour film at the theater and another $10 for popcorn and soda.
Likewise, the DS is proving to be a super fun system and games prices are often very awesome at $20 for things like Brain Age 2, etc. I'm also a fan of loading Warcraft 3 back on my PC and playing some MOD games, for no monthly fees or download prices.
With developers and gaming companies seeing the benefit of downloaded content (Wii, PS3, 360 are now all offering DL-able games, while the DS allows you to temporarily download the game from a friend to play multi-player), I hope to see future systems continue to allow more and more user created content that will give players a much cheaper option of games to play. I know there are plenty of flash games I'd enjoy just picking up and playing for a short time.
I guess there has become a big 'casual' trend in gaming and I know I enjoy it, despite having been 'hard-core' at times (non-stop multiple day MMO gaming, Counter-Strike competitions/tourney's, etc). Probably why Nintendo's Wii strategy is really hitting the mark today.
Cheers,
Fozzy
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
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.
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.
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
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.
Meh, teleport back to the late '80's, then use your paper route money to buy a Zaxxon cartridge for Coleco for $50, or a Pole Position cartridge, with steering wheel and pedal, for $70, then get back to me.
Adjusting for inflation, it's like $200.
Adjusting for my buying power as a kid, it's like $34 million.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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
Understood, but there's a lot less value in that $60 then there were even a few years ago. You want to put in a code to enhance your game? You can't just put in a magic code anymore, or even unlock it in some cases, you have to pay $5 - $10 for a microtransaction from a place like XBox Live (this is highly prevalent in EA games). And cheat devices have more or less been locked out (and if they're not, just wait for the lawsuits). If you want to play on XBox Live, you have to pay a fee (as opposed to what the PS2, Wii and DS do). Furthermore, some games charge a monthly fee just to be able to make them useful (Final Fantasy XI, WoW)
I'm not against a $10 if it's JUST for the game. But when you take all that into consideration, and remember that a lot of these $60 aren't "new" games so much as "updates" (EA also comes to mind here, too), then the price increase gets worse and worse and worse.
So yes, even though a $50 game in 1985 costs the same as $96.82 in 2007, once you take all of that into account, the price difference dissipates to the point of being nearly irrelevant.
Let's stop dilly-dallying and just change "-1: Overrated" to "-1: Disagree" or "-1: Doesn't Subscribe to Groupthink".
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?
$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..."
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.
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