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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.
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.
....modchip sales are brisk.
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.
Might I recommend moving beyond Economics 101 into the more daring regions of inflation vs. economics of scale? Thanks to the economics of scale, the price per unit falls dramatically even as inflation drives the price upward. The result is that there exists a "sweet-spot" where the price may remain stable. It's only through the introduction of radical new developments that prices go upward.
Basic Market Fact: The market for video games is larger than at any previous point in history. Every generation has seen a distinct rise in the number of overall units sold. (i.e. There's more pie for the competitors to divide.)
The Wii prices have remained stable because Nintendo is riding the economics of scale to combat inflationary costs. The XBox 360 and PS3 are so costly because they bucked these economics and embraced the cost of the disruptive HDTV technology. HDTV is at the edge of technology. It's what the CD-ROM was in the days of the 3DO. It's a high-technology item that still has limited scale to back it. Prices of the sets and microchips to support them are dropping, but not fast enough for the consoles to exist in a competitive region of scale vs. inflation.
Thus it's a gamble: Will the consumer pay more for cutting edge video-game technology?
The traditional market response has always been a negative. The 3DO priced itself out of a market, the Jaguar priced itself out of a market, the Saturn priced itself out of a market, the Turbo-Grafx priced itself out of a market, etc. The closest example of this trend being disrupted was the original Playstation. It was introduced to the market at $299, a full $100 more than the market was used to for new consoles. However, its price fell quickly and newer models dropped the unit cost by that much more. The majority of consoles were sold at a much lower price. The trend repeated with the PS2.
In fact, history shows that the inferior technology often wins out. Atari 2600 v. Intellivision, NES v. Master System, SNES/Genesis v. 3DO/Jaguar, Playstation v. N64, PS2 v. GameCube/XBox, etc.
All this adds up to bad news for overly expensive consoles. They are gambling on superior technology, but the market tends to not put much value there.
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