Game Prices — a Historical Perspective

The Opposable Thumbs blog scrutinizes the common wisdom that video games are too expensive, or that they're more expensive than they were in the past. They found that while in some cases the sticker price has increased, it generally hasn't outpaced inflation, making 2010 a cheaper time to be a gamer than the '80s and '90s. Quoting: "... we tracked down a press release putting the suggested retail price of both Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64 at $69.99. [Hal Halpin, president of the Entertainment Consumer's Association] says that the N64 launch game pricing only tells you part of the story. 'Yes, some N64 games retailed for as high as $80, but it was also the high end of a 60 to 80 dollar range,' he told Ars. 'Retailers had more flexibility with pricing back then — though they've consistently maintained that the Suggested Retail Price was/is just a guide. Adjusted for inflation, we're generally paying less now than we have historically. But to be fair, DLC isn't factored in.' He also points out all the different ways that we can now access games: you can buy a game used, rent a game, or play certain online games for free. There are multiple ways to sell your old console games, and the competition in the market causes prices to fall quickly."

Comments

I miss some of those old games

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Links386, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, Battlecruiser 3000, Day of the Tentacle, etc.

These are the games that had the biggest impact on me.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[digitalunity]

As the summary points out more nicely, the article is half-assed at best.

Downloadable content can be very expensive. For example, Call Of Duty: World At War was something like $55 new, but immediately after buying it you had to spend another $25 on DLC if you wanted to play multiplayer without having to queue over and over.

Although I just got my PS3 yesterday, I suspect many games are like this now. This leads me to believe that we are, in fact, paying much more than we did in the past for video games.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Canazza]

They missed out on the old Amigas, Spectrum and Commodore era. I remember picking games up for under £3.
We're definitely not better off, price-wise, from that era. Graphically, and gameplay wise, yes, and I wouldn't want to go back to those days (except through an emulator)

Re:I miss some of those old games

[plumby]

Absolutely. When I started buying Speccy games in about 1984, they were typicaly £4.99 (about £11.95 adjusted for inflation). Some games did start to come out at £9.99 - I remember the shock in magazines at the time, but equally we started to get the £1.99 range at around the same time.

Like you say, obviously most of them are nowhere near as good as the best games released today, but they were the cutting edge at the time, and were far cheaper than today's cutting edge games.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Anonymous Coward]

Old classics are starting to appear in on-line stores. For example, GamersGate (www.gamersgate.com) offers Master of Orion 1+2 and the original Jagged Alliance for €5.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[c0lo]

... today's cutting edge games.

Ah, an oxymoron from my today's reading of /.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[ultranova]

Links386, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, Battlecruiser 3000, Day of the Tentacle, etc.

Master of Orion and Master of Magic work perfectly in Dosbox. Day of the Tentacle (and other Lucasarts adventures) work better-than-original (due to nice graphics filters) in ScummVM. Dunno about the other two.

I wonder if one could remake MoM as a mod for the latest Civilization... Civ4 was pretty flexible, and Civ5 is supposed to be even more so.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, which has more content, World at War with no DLC or Streets of Rage? People have long since complained about the short campaign in COD games which clocks in at about 6 hours. Streets of Rage's "campaign" (which is its only mode) can be beaten in an hour.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Joce640k]

Production costs have gone way up since the 1980s. Many Speccy games were written by students or people working at home (I know, I was one of them) with maybe some help from a friend doing the graphics. You'd then go to a game company, they'd _maybe_ retouch the graphics and hire (eg.) Rob Hubbard for a couple of days to do the music. Total cost: $8,000

Even the 'pro' games were done by one programmer and a graphics guy who'd be shared shared between three projects.

These days a game needs about 20 people working full time for a couple of years, often hiring motion capture studios with gymnasts/actors, etc., along the way. Game development budgets are now in the tens of millions (low-end Hollywood range).

Re:I miss some of those old games

[plumby]

I understand why the prices are higher, but that's not what the article seems to be claiming. To argue that they aren't higher because some types of game were high back in the day as well is pretty misleading, especially given that (from my experience at least) pretty much all gamers I knew at the time had either a Speccy or a C64, and that was where the majority of games purchasing went.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[macraig]

If you miss some of them, maybe do something about it so you're not missing them?

Master of Orion I and II for just USD$6

The complete Total Annihilation suite, also for USD$6

Well, whatcha waiting for?

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Alioth]

IIRC, Elite for the Speccy - which came with a full user manual AND a novella - was about £12.99 when it first came out, in other words, about £30-£35 in today's money. That was by far the most expensive game at the time. £5 or £6 was considered "full price" in the mid 1980s.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[macraig]

BTW, TA is still being played online through several services and is still being actively modded.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Joce640k]

Nintendo/SEGA prices were much higher because Nintendo/SEGA took a big cut of the profits for the privilege of writing games for their console.

On top of that, only they could manufacture the cartridges and they charged a lot for that as well.

Plus ... development was very risky because they only accepted a fixed quota of games per year to keep the market from saturating. If they didn't like yours it wouldn't get published (and you only got *one* shot at acceptance ... you showed them the game and if they didn't like it you were dismissed, no second chance)

So yeah, comparing the price of NES games to Speccy games is pointless. Development costs for Japanese consoles were orders of magnitude more than for Speccy/C64.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[grumbel]

They missed out on the old Amigas, Spectrum and Commodore era. I remember picking games up for under £3.

But where that the high profile games and did you buy them brand new on launch day?

It is not exactly hard to find games for $5 or $10 these days either, but those games are of course not the Modern Warfare 2 that people buy right on the day of the release, but stuff that is a year or two old and in the bargain bin or indie stuff.

Overall game prices really haven't changed much at all, new Amiga/PC titles always used to be a cheaper then console stuff, in the 40EUR range, while consoles always where in the 50-60EUR range and that goes back to at least the times of the NES. In some cases game prices even have gone down, SNES stuff used to be 50EUR for first party and 65EUR or even 75EUR for third party stuff, that continued to the N64, on Gamecube they went down to 50-60EUR and now on Wii most games start at 40-45EUR. And of course we have super easy access to used games with eBay and Amazon these days and even just six month after release most game sell for half as much as they did on launch.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[loufoque]

I still play Day of the Tentacle on my phone.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Inda]

I too remember paying less thatn a fiver for Spectrum games. I also remember returning a lot of them because they wouldn't load...

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Dopefish_1]

There's also a small, but very dedicated community of MOO2 players. Check out #moo2 on irc.quakenet.org

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Lumpy]

4 year old game, the first zelda release for the Wii... is STILL $50.00

many game makers are refusing to drop prices on their games even years after release.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[mcgrew]

Video games ARE too expensive. IIRC I paid $30 for the original Duke Nukem registration and they threw in another shareware title to boot.

And "inflation" is a terrible metric for comparing prices. In 1990 a new computer was around $3,000-4,000, had a 20 meg hard drive (if that), 360k of ram. I paid 1/10th that for my Acer Aspire with its dual core CPU, 1 gig memory and 180 gigs drive space. In 1976 I paid $600 for a 25 inch TV set. Some prices have risen, some have gone down.

A far better metric is your country's minimum wage (the US has one of the lowest in the developed world). In 1990 (according to this graph) the US minimum wage was $2 less than it is today. That's a 29% increase. By that metric, the 1990 $30 game comes to about $36. They're charging $70 now. I'd say it's highway robbery, and is one reason I stopped playing video games.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Hatta]

Go down to your local Goodwill. In the past couple week's I've bought Outpost 2, both Aces games, Tie Fighter, Dark Colony, Return to Krondor, and Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego. All complete, in great condition, for $2.99 or less. Now really is a cheap time to be a gamer.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, that seems to be kind of a Nintendo speciality, most of their games stay rather highly priced for a long long time, even the used game sales often are a good bit higher then for a Xbox360/PS3 game. You very rarely see Nintendo games going into the sub-$10 category.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[ProppaT]

Well, if you want to put it into perspective, I paid ~ $70 a pop for Street Fighter II, Street Fighter II Turbo Edition, and Super Street Fighter II on the SNES. I bought a ton of platforms back in the day as well...most of which were rehashes of the last in the series.

World at War is considered a joke because of it's multiplayer patch. Many companies do DLC the right way. For example, Boarderlands provided a compelling single and multiplayer game from the get go, then provided 4 different DLCs...three of them being excellent additions to the game. While I bought platformer after platformer in the 80s and 90s, now there are games such as Little Big Planet that have infinite available stages.

It's hard to do a direct correlation because the game industry has changed so much over the past 30 years. I definitely think we have it good compared to how things used to be. In retrospect, it's ridiculous how much I spent on gaming as a kid when you take into account inflation and what you get now vs. what you got then.

I like buying DLC because it gives me extra content with games I love and own. I don't like games with a thousand different sequels.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[thyrial]

It's kind of a half assed article , Games didnt start with the megadrive/Genesis (..hell, Sega games didn't even start with the Meg/Gen!),I'd love to see a price comparison that included Atari VCS games both before and after the market (in the US collapsed[cos the video games crash didnt really hit europe as badly]).Also disk/tape based games as well:the fact that there were other 8 bit platforms other than the NES seems to have escaped a lot of US journalists writing about the retro era.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Hatta]

If you're making minimum wage, video games are still one of the cheapest forms of entertainment when you figure it in dollars per hour.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[BStroms]

I'm confused both by why you feel inflation is a terrible metric and why you feel the minimum wage would be a better metric. According to a department of labor page I pulled up here, in 2009 only 3% of workers aged 25 or up made at or below the minimum wage. So you've got a number that's only important to a very small percentage of adult workers that's supposed to someone be more important then inflation, which effects everyone?

I could see arguing about which inflation metric to use, ie core inflation rather than the overall inflation rate. However, I think minimum wage is far less valuable to compare prices between time periods than inflation.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Mongoose Disciple]

Also what idiot keeps his software company in California?

Someone who wants to pick from among the best programmers instead of just whoever happens to live in one state. And, I hate to break it to you, even in Iowa the salary for a good programmer with some experience is closer to 100k than 65k.

The job market's bad for a lot of fields, but it's not currently bad for good programmers.

Of course, if you want to take the viewpoint that all developers are equivalent, you certainly can run your business cheaper in Iowa. Let us know how that works out for you.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[drinkypoo]

If I send you a pic of the damaged Tie Fighter CD I made into a clock, will you hook me up with the game files? ;)

Tie Fighter is still the best space combat sim ever... there's games that do more now, but none of them are as polished. Sure, it's easier to polish a small piece of jewelry than a whole crown, but that's not the point, is it?

Re:I miss some of those old games

[gorzek]

There's also the fact that good programmers can afford to be choosy and most likely will not want to live someplace like Iowa. There's a reason programming is concentrated on the coasts: software engineers, by and large, like the urban lifestyle. They don't want to live out in Bumfuck with no major cities nearby.

(Obviously, there are exceptions and I don't mean that developers are a monolithic group, but the trends and demographics are certainly there.)

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Urza9814]

Thanks for the heads up. I loved the two Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games - but they had no DLC. Even if the price worked out to be the same in the end, I'm not paying for a game just to have to pay again to play it. Especially since I play multiplayer _some_, but not a lot. Enough that I'd want it, but not enough to justify $25 for it.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[gorzek]

This is quite common with games that are still popular many years after release. If your game is still selling a lot of copies 5 years after launch, why should you cut the price? Slashing prices is how you move more units. You don't bother if you're moving plenty of units already.

Diablo II is 10 years old and the Battle Chest still goes for $30-40. Blizzard must still be moving a decent number of copies otherwise they'd drop the price. Businesses do their best to maximize overall profit, so it doesn't make much sense to keep the price high if the game isn't selling.

As someone who frequently looks over bargain bins with games that are $10 and under, it's usually not a surprise what games wind up there: indie games that got no marketing, big-budget games that shipped with massive bugs and sold poorly, games that have since had one or more sequels (sequels tend to cannibalize sales of the original unless the sequel is just awful), and original versions of games that were later released with expansions in "gold" or "collector's editions." All of those make perfect sense from a business standpoint.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Guspaz]

If you're curious, using overall inflation rates, $69.99 in 1996 is $94.73 in 2009 dollars.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[gorzek]

Battlecruiser 3000AD had multiple sequels, any of which should work well under XP.

The original game should run reasonably under DOSBox, or possibly in a Windows DOS session with VDMSound.

There was a 2.0 version that was compatible with Windows 9x, however it is utterly unsupported under 2000/XP and I've heard varying reports as to whether it works. Seems to depend on your specific setup, but people have had good luck with the aforementioned VDMSound and using compatibility mode.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[commodore64_love]

>>>half-assed at best.

The article also acts as if games never existed until Nintendo invented them. Prior to NES there was the Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision, Odyssey. Plus computer-based gaming on the Atari and Commodores.

The most popular of these, the Atari VCS/2600, sold games for $30 new, and $25 for older titles.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[index0]

But after the initial costs, the duplication of the games cost almost nothing to the publisher and in 2010, there are more video game customers than there were in 1980s.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[gorzek]

I loved TIE Fighter primarily for the fact that you had to be good at flying your ship. For most of the game, you were in a craft with no shields and one or two hits would kill you. There's something satisfying about being able to take down waves of shielded fighters and even more shielded capital ships in a virtually defenseless TIE.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[demonbug]

The pricing on the DLC for World at War was/is pretty ridiculous. Numerous friends had it and finally talked me into getting the game; I couldn't believe how much they were charging for basically a couple of maps (things that you could download for free by the hundreds on any decent PC FPS). It was slightly mitigated by the fact that you can use the DLC on something like three or five different systems - one person pays, downloads on their PS3. Then, you can set up a user account for them on your PS3, where they can again download and install the DLC. Once you've installed it, even for a different account, you can use it on any accounts on that PS3. So, we effectively decreased the cost by 1/3 for each of us to get it (of course, if the hardware dies for any of us that person is out of luck).

I also couldn't believe how high the price has remained - a friend just bought a system for another friend (he found it for like $20 online, broken - spent about $50 buying parts to repair it, so came out to $70 for a PS3), when he went to get World at War (we like it better than MW2) it was still $30, $25 for a used copy. Pretty lame considering how old it is now, plus the cost of DLC.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[westlake]

The most popular of these, the Atari VCS/2600, sold games for $30 new, and $25 for older titles.

What cost $30 in 1978 cost $97.60 in 2009. The Inflation Calculator

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Machtyn]

The great thing about waiting, though, is that often you will get the original and expansions as one package for the same price as when the original came out. At least that's what I did with a few games.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[digitalunity]

I actually bought it because it was down to $30 and was really surprised by how much they wanted for the extra maps. If it was $5 or $10 for all the maps, that would have been ok. But to pay $30 at the store, and another $25 when I get home is just ridiculous.

I'd feel even more robbed if I bought it for $60 and still had to pay more when I get home.

To be fair, I think DLC can be a good way to help raise revenue on used game sales. The DLC gets tied to the account that downloaded it, so even if I sell it used, the original publisher might get some money from the next "licensee". Not saying its right, but I think I know why publishers like DLC.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[Machtyn]

I'm not sure what the game prices were in 1996, but I know that when I was a teen buying games (1988-1993) I wouldn't lay down over $30. Of course, my mentality carried over to now, where the game has to be absolutely extraordinary for me to lay down more than that price. (Valve's Orange Box was one. Getting a dozen Popcap games for $90 through Steam was another.)

I'll probably pick up Diablo III when it comes out, but I am going to look for the price point to be at $45. Anything over $50 and I will wait until the next year when the expansion comes out and I can pick up the combo. (And if they force us to run local games through battle.net, I will likely not pick it up at all.)

Re:I miss some of those old games

[hedwards]

There's nothing inherently wrong with that. However anybody that does that and doesn't put any work into making sure that it works with the latest hardware is being a dick. There is legitimately some work that needs to be done to keep games functioning over a lifespan that long.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[gorzek]

Games that still sell well tend to also be actively supported. Diablo II had a patch come out this year! Blizzard still maintains it and has had a pretty good history of doing so.

I'm sure there are exceptions. I'd like to hear about games that are several years old, still selling for over $20, yet are not supported at all (and the developer hasn't gone bankrupt or something.)

Re:I miss some of those old games

[tompaulco]

Actually according to the link you provided, the INFLATION ADJUSTED minimum wage is $2 more than it was in 1990, meaning that minimum wage has outpaced what the government thinks the inflation rate is.
In terms of real dollars, the minimum wage is twice what it was in 1990, meaning a a $30 game should cost $60 now, if you used minimum wage as a metric.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[mcgrew]

I'm confused both by why you feel inflation is a terrible metric and why you feel the minimum wage would be a better metric.

I thought I was clear, but I guess not. Inflation pretty much correlates with two things: gasoline prices (and there's likely causuality there, as everything has to be transported, and plastic is made out of oil), and the stock market. I cheer when the stock market drops; it means prices won't go up so fast (unless Ford or Carter are President), and gasoline will get cheaper.

I mentioned the price of a 1990 PC vs. today, and a 1976 TV compared to today. Food isn't factored into inflation, but durable goods (washing machines, toasters, stuff you just don't buy every week) are.

The minimum wage, otoh, is pretty much a standard metric. When the minimum wage rises, usually everyone else's wages (except the rich) do, too. The minimum wage is pretty much the baseline, lowest paid working person's salary, and that poor sap's buying power is an indication of how expensive something is.

Your "3% of workers aged 25 or up" is pretty meaningless; how about the percentage of workers over 18, or percentage of workers not living with their parents (there are 30 and 40 year olds living with their parents)? Why 25 years? My sister and her husband were 17 when they married and went out on their own. My youngest daughter's 23 and living in another state. She makes more than minimum wage, but if she made minimum wage her wages wouldn't count in your linked statistic. Here's a better statistic from your link: "Together, these 3.6 million workers with wages at or below the minimum made up 4.9 percent of all hourly-paid workers." One in every twenty American workers makes minimum wage or less. Counting only those over 25 is disingenuous at best.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[grumbel]

You can't compare yesterdays indie games with todays commercial AAA titles, you have to compare like with like, and indie titles are plenty on the iPhone or XboxLive indie section and sell for like $1-$5, no price increase there, meanwhile the big titles on the C64 where just as expensive as todays PC titles.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[plumby]

I'm not talking about "Indie" games. I'm talking about the biggest releases from the biggest companies of the mid-80s gaming scene (at least in the UK). Companies like Ocean, Imagine, Activision, Ultimate etc. I understand that there's more cost involved in producing todays games. But that's not the claim in the article. The claim is that game costs haven't risen,and they quite clearly have.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[grumbel]

All the price lists I have looked at say something different (price in DM, lists from 1985/1986 Germany): Apple II with prices up to $100 per game and Amiga games in normal PC price range, Spectrum and C64 prices tend to be a little cheaper then Amiga/Atari stuff, being in the $15-$30 range, but even on those systems there are a few games that have normal todays PC pricing, all that ignoring inflation.

I have yet to see a price list where games really are across the board substantially cheap then they are today.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[plumby]

Not many people were buying Apple II games, and Amiga is a little after when I first started buying games (82/83). If you were into games in the UK, the chances are that you had a Speccy.

Check out the Crash software catalogue http://www.crashonline.org.uk/cat01/index.htm from 1983. Vast majority of prices in the £5-£6 range. There's a few up to around £7 and The Hobbit at £14.95, but that included the book.

£6 in 1983 is (according to the BoE inflation calculator) equivalent to £15 in today's money, far cheaper than the £30-£40 that most of top sellers go for today.

Again, I understand why this is the case, but the point remains that it is the case, - most popular commercial games were a lot cheaper when I first started buying them than they are today, at least in the UK.

Re:I miss some of those old games

[tehcyder]

And "inflation" is a terrible metric for comparing prices.

Yeah, what a total waste of time, when all you need to do is compare the price of a stable commodity like buggy whips.

N64?

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me a break.

Genesis. Phantasy Star IV. $99. Pfft.

Love the modern baaaawing about game prices. You kids have *no* idea.

Re:N64?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pff, yeah, if you compare the worst prices of the past with the average prices of today. Genesis games were pricey, as were N64 and a few lesser known consoles. But the NES games were like $30, PC games in the mid 90s were usually around $40. (In the late 90s the PC games were technically $50 but would almost immediately be on sale for $40 anyway).

Alas, your fond childhood memories must bow to statistics. In that time we've gone from cartridges full of expensive chips or boxes full of expensive heavy floppies, to extremely cheap optical media. (Well, the most successful handheld is still using chips, but the chips are pretty cheap these days and the games are still only like $40). Development costs for some games went up by some large multiple, but the size of the gaming market (the number of copies a popular game will sell) went up even more. Seriously, Phantasy Star IV didn't break a million sales, but some stuff today has passed 20 million. Even with the biggest recession in 70 years.

DVD vs cartridge

[Anonymous Coward]

Cartridge (ROM) based games are more expensive to manufacture than CD/DVDs. Perhaps a comparison of like for like would be better.

Re:DVD vs cartridge

[fishbowl]

>Cartridge (ROM) based games are more expensive to manufacture than CD/DVDs. Perhaps a comparison of like for like would be better.

Ok, but what about the billions and billions of dollars they don't lose to piracy? Doesn't that factor into the pricing somehow?

Re:DVD vs cartridge

[Calydor]

You're absolutely right, games released on DVDs in the 80s and early 90s were so expensive I can't even find records of the prices!

Reality check: The medium for the games has changed. The only real comparison to be made is "What does one game cost?", maybe with some fancy math involving the average amount of hours of gameplay you get for your money.

Re:DVD vs cartridge

[totally bogus dude]

There's a lot more people playing (and buying) games today. Total sales is what really matter, and even if your modern game has a piracy rate of 75%, it's likely you'll be selling more copies than a 'similar' game did 10-15 years ago which had a piracy rate of 1%.

Then there's the issue with trying to work out what the actual losses are. i.e. if your game cannot be pirated, then many of the people who would've pirated it simply won't play it. So, the high rates of piracy we have now don't necessarily indicate that if we'd had a secure cartridge system for PC games the industry would be making massively more money than it does now.

Re:DVD vs cartridge

[lowlymarine]

Ok, but what about the billions and billions of dollars they don't lose to piracy? Doesn't that factor into the pricing somehow?

It's generally a bad idea to try to factor imaginary money into your pricing scheme.

Re:DVD vs cartridge

[Anonymous Coward]

a) Back in those days the whole industry wasn't worth a billion dollars
b) Half my NES and Genesis collection was made up of pirated cartridges my buddy's dad bought in Chinatown.

Re:DVD vs cartridge

[bickle]

Exactly. This article selectively looks at the history of prices, choosing the data that supports their thesis and ignoring that which doesn't. It's concerned mainly with cartridge based games that grew to insanely high prices, but neglects the major drop in prices when companies moved to optical disc based systems. At the Playstation launch, many titles debuted at $39.

The current pricing scheme is quite a hike. And more so when you figure that you often don't even get the full game at that price. You need to buy DLC to unlock content on the disc that you already paid for. The price can easily bump up to $69.99.

Re:DVD vs cartridge

[hedwards]

I think the implication is that if the media costs less, then the cost needs to be justified in some other way, otherwise we're getting screwed. And I think there is a bit of that going on, I doubt that the PC version of Fallout 3 would've been released back then, because nobody would want to play a game that buggy. And there wasn't the mentality to fix it later that seems to permeate these days.

Re:DVD vs cartridge

[mcgrew]

Oh, there is LOTS of money lost to piracy; or at least, the fear of piracy. DRM means "don't buy this!!!" to a lot of us. That's a whole lot of lost sales. The pirates themselves don't cost the producers anything; they wouldn't be buying it anyway. But the futile attempts to stop piracy stop a lot of us who might otherwise buy a game or CD from having anything at all to do with that game or CD.

Hell, God only knows how much of money Sony lost when their XCP DRM infested my PC because my daughter trusted that a big corporation wouldn't put malware on a music CD. I'll never buy anything made by Sony again, and I paid $1,000 for my 42 inch Trinitron (before,of course, they planted malware on my computer). Had it not been for XCP they would have made thousands more from me, but they'll never get another dime of my hard earned money.

So actually it's WORSE than a bad idea.

Re:DVD vs cartridge

[Tharsman]

>Cartridge (ROM) based games are more expensive to manufacture than CD/DVDs. Perhaps a comparison of like for like would be better.

Ok, but what about the billions and billions of dollars they don't lose to piracy? Doesn't that factor into the pricing somehow?

A more accurate question is on game development budget. These days, the budget for games is extreme.

More missing.

[santax]

The much higher production cost and lower market hasn't been factored in either. I can remember back somewhere in 198* that msx games were 80 guldens here (that about 30 euro now) and those games had prints of about 1000-5000 pieces. How do you mean it's getting cheaper? No it isn't.

Re:More missing.

[malzfreund]

A lot of wrong stuff here. First of all, EUR 30 in the mid-80s is equivalent to roughly EUR 55 today due to the effects of inflation (these are approximate numbers for countries like Germany and the Netherlands). Inflation was slightly higher in the US, so a larger increase in dollar prices was necessary over there to compensate producers for rising input prices. Second, I don't think MSX games are really representative for what OP is referring to. MSX was never really mainstream in the US and Europe. Third, production cost have risen tremendously, yes. But a good chunk of the cost of producing a video game is fixed. And since the market for video games has grown tremendously over the last three decades, those fixed cost are distributed over a much larger number of games sold, therefore facilitating lower video game prices (in real terms).

Re:More missing.

[Anonymous Coward]

I fucking hate it when people go on about "adjusted for inflation" arguments.

If you're going to adjust the prices we're talking about for inflation, adjust MY FUCKING SALARY for inflation as well.

After adjusting for inflation, I'm making a LOT less than I was back then even tho if you just look at the fucking numbers I'm technically making "more". In short, most peoples raises aren't keeping up with inflation. If yours is, gratz. You're not in the majority.

Re:More missing.

[kryogen1x]

First of all, EUR 30 in the mid-80s is equivalent to roughly EUR 55 today due to the effects of inflation

Newsflash, the Euro didn't even exist in the mid-80s.

Re:More missing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not rally true, the inflation is a bad measure of how the cost of life went up as it only monitor some prices, for example in the mid 80 I was earning the equivalent of around 1100€ and know I earn 2000€ but ironically in the mid 80 I had more expendable money than today even with a similar consume in term of services and basic expenditures( around 400€ in the 80 vs 300€ today).

Re:More missing.

[2fuf]

Actually, where OP is from (Netherlands), it's the norm to correct salaries for inflation. If your salary is never corrected for inflation, your employer is reaping the benefits and leaving you out cold. I know US employment rules are very different, but not correcting for inflation means you're earning less money every month. Maybe you should make it part of your contract negotiations to have periodical indexation of your salary. You would only be asking for what's fair.

Re:More missing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ups... the 400 vs 300 is the remaining expendable money.

Re:More missing.

[Anonymous Coward]

True. But what you may or may not know is that some Euro countries still display prices in their former currencies for reference and the conversion rate that was used for the transition still applies.

I offer this as an example. In Spain, where I live, you still find apartment and houses listed in both Euros and Pesetas. Some supermarkets and stores also display prices in both currencies.

The point is that even if the Euro didn't existe in the '80s it is still possible to do the math and figure out how much something from way back then would be worth today.

Re:More missing.

[Vectormatic]

Actually, where OP is from (Netherlands), it's the norm to correct salaries for inflation. If your salary is never corrected for inflation, your employer is reaping the benefits and leaving you out cold. I know US employment rules are very different, but not correcting for inflation means you're earning less money every month. Maybe you should make it part of your contract negotiations to have periodical indexation of your salary. You would only be asking for what's fair.

dutch guy here.. I never got any inflation correction, it just happens that this year my annual raise was higher then the inflation (still at the start of my cariere, so now i still have some growth there), but many of my coworkers got a 0% raise this year (and previous years). The same thing at my previous jobs, i did get raises (due to personal growth/promotion), but never inflation correction

Re:More missing.

[2fuf]

Dutch guy here as well. You must be aware of the unions yearly salary indexation agreements as part of the annual budget, which are formalized as part of the collective labor agreements (CAO). I don't know about your particular case or your co-workers, but more than half of the Dutch employees work for companies that fall under CAO agreements.

Re:More missing.

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, EUR 30 in the mid-80s is equivalent to roughly EUR 55 today due to the effects of inflation

Newsflash, the Euro didn't even exist in the mid-80s.

hence the modifier 'now'

Re:More missing.

[QuantumBeep]

First of all, EUR 30 in the mid-80s is equivalent to roughly EUR 55 today

30 Euro in the when?

Re:More missing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gulden? Are you from like Middle Earth or something?

Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a popular fact here on Slashdot, but true. I've mentioned this many times when people were complaining about game prices.

When I was younger the standard price for an SNES game was 129 guilders, which equals 59 euros. Nowadays new console games also cost 59 euros, except Wii games which are normally 49 euros. Accounting for inflation, games have gotten much cheaper. Also, I'm not sure about this, but I get the impression games hit the bargain bin much faster these days (except big sellers like Mario Kart and Modern Warfare).

My problem with game prices is the difference between US and EU prices. We usually pay in euros what you guys pay in dollars, so we pay much more (even if you take into account that the EU price does include sales tax).

Re:Yeah

[sardaukar_siet]

SNES (and all cartridge-based) games were MUCH more expensive to make than current gen ones. So, even IF games are cheaper now, publishers' profit margins are definitely higher.

Re:Yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps in terms of production cost. Development cost of (retail) games tends to be much, much higher nowadays. We're talking multi-million dollar projects here.

I have no idea whether publisher's profit margins have gone up or down. It doesn't really matter all that to the discussion at hand anyway. The article addresses the very common complaint (especially on /.) that "video games have gotten more expensive," and the article simply shows that that's factually incorrect.

Re:Yeah

[RogueyWon]

I can't speak for Euro-based comparisons, but I do know that the US/UK games price comparison is more complicated than it seems. The UK does, at first glance, seem to get a bad deal on high-street games sales. While highly dependant upon the exchange rate, UK RRPs do tend to look around 25% higher, in my experience.

However...

I go to the US several times a year and always tend to pick up a few games while I'm out there, particularly if the exchange rate is good. What I always notice is how much slower US high-street retailers are to discount games, compared with their UK counterparts, and how few special-offers there are available in the US. I've seen games that are two or three months old and which weren't huge hits still retailing for $60 in Gamestop. In the UK, by contrast, such a game would generally have had in the region of a third knocked off its price by that point (and sometimes more if it had proven a difficult game to shift). Indeed, unless the game you want is either a really major release or right down at the other end of the scale in the "small, cult release" category, you can generally get more than 20% off the RRP just by waiting 2 weeks or so.

That said, we do tend to get stiffed in download-sales a bit, where certain retailers have a habit of just replacing the $ sign with a £. We also get the aggravating situation where some games that are released in the US never make it out over here (eg. Deathsmiles) or take many months to make it over (eg. Persona 3 and 4).

Re:Yeah

[Vectormatic]

(except big sellers like Mario Kart and Modern Warfare).

Mario kart has nothing to do with sales, nintendo just NEVER drop prices or anything, i'll bet you that if you can find an original GBA game from nintendo in shops, it'll still cost at least 90% of what it did at introduction

Re:Yeah

[BenoitRen]

My problem with game prices is the difference between US and EU prices. We usually pay in euros what you guys pay in dollars, so we pay much more (even if you take into account that the EU price does include sales tax).

Different economies. You can't compare the prices.

Re:Yeah

[mjwx]

Not a popular fact here on Slashdot, but true. I've mentioned this many times when people were complaining about game prices.

When I bought a PS game in the 90's it was A$90, now it's up to A$110.

The only thing that has changed is that our economy is a lot better. Realistically, prices should have gone down with larger sales but they dont do this because people are used to paying A$90. The price in present day A$ goes up with each generation, they went up by A$10 with the Xbox/PS2 and went up again with the Xbox360/PS3. Only PC games in Australia have reduced in price due to competition from more stores entering the games market and grey imports.

Re:Yeah

[tehcyder]

I have no idea whether publisher's profit margins have gone up or down. It doesn't really matter all that to the discussion at hand anyway

But it matters in the wider scheme of things.

If publisher's profits have not decreased even though games are still cheaper, this would be compelling evidence that "piracy" is not having any great effect on the games industry.

A couple of points missed by the article...

[julesh]

1. Console game prices have always been higher than PC (and, earlier, home computer) game prices. When most of us complain about game prices, it's the PC games we're complaining about.

2. The real-terms cost of other forms of entertainment have dropped over the same period. At least where I am, a chart CD used to cost £15 and is now more like £10; according to the Bank of England inflation calculator [horrible flash thing] that's £25-£10 reduction, or a drop of more than half in real terms cost. Other forms of entertainment have reduced similarly. So, by comparison to the competition, games *are* more expensive.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[cheesybagel]

Console game prices were initially higher because you had to account for the cost of manufacturing the cartridges. However today all consoles use DVDs or built-in storage of some sort so that cost is no longer justified. But the games still cost a boatload. The justification is that the production costs are higher.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can remember when beer was 50p a pint.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[PhrstBrn]

Console games are licensed, PC games are not. I don't know how much it costs to publish a game for the Xbox360/PS3/Wii, but it's more than zero. Publishing a game for the PC costs nothing in licensing fees.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

Console games are licensed, PC games are not. I don't know how much it costs to publish a game for the Xbox360/PS3/Wii, but it's more than zero. Publishing a game for the PC costs nothing in licensing fees.

If you are willing to write a game engine from scratch, sure there are no licensing fees. Most game developers license the engines from the likes of Id Software and Epic.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[advocate_one]

chart CDs used to have at least 20 tracks on them... now they've been dropping the number of tracks right down to just enough to qualify as a CD for the CD chart...

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[yuriks]

Console games are licensed, PC games are not. I don't know how much it costs to publish a game for the Xbox360/PS3/Wii, but it's more than zero. Publishing a game for the PC costs nothing in licensing fees.

If you are willing to write a game engine from scratch, sure there are no licensing fees. Most game developers license the engines from the likes of Id Software and Epic.

Yes there are. All console manufacturers demand licensing fees for developing and publishing software for their consoles.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[RogueyWon]

PC game prices used to be more expensive as well. I still have the original boxes for a few old PC games, with price stickers still intact. Their Finest Hour (1989 flight sim) cost £50. Ultima VII cost £40. The original X-Wing cost £45. So too did TIE Fighter. The B-Wing expansion pack for X-Wing cost £30. Gunship 2000 cost £50. Even before you adjust for inflation, it's clear that in the UK at least, PC games have gotten substantially cheaper. I can't remember the last time I spent more than £30 on a PC game that wasn't some kind of special edition.

That said, the packaging that these old games came in was vastly more elaborate than anything you'd get today. Their Finest Hour and Ultima VII in particular have all kinds of neat stuff in the box; mini-history books and cloth maps and the like.

Prices seemed to fall gradually throughout the mid and late 90s, looking at the games in my storage cupboard that still have price labels (a factor that makes it harder to track the trend once modern packaging with its emphasis on shrink-wrapping came in.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[Vectormatic]

me too, three years ago on holiday in the czech republic :)

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[Keerok]

anonymous coward is saying that "If you are willing to write a game engine frome scratch ( for the PC), there are not licensing fees". So hes agreeing with you, but pointing out that: - Most Game developers pay for a Game engine via licensing Fees

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good observation. I think there were a fair number of LP records that only had about 10 songs on them. I like having more songs for my dollar but also like it when the artist knows enough to realize they aren't all gems and saves my ears the misery.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[elrous0]

Not all forms of entertainment have dropped. Ticket prices for movies and concerts have increased by substantial amounts, even adjusting for inflation. Back in 1980, a console game would cost you about $30 ($77 adjusted in today's dollars). A movie ticket would cost about $2.50 (about $6.50 in today's dollars). Now, unless you're buying some sort of special edition, console games cost a lot less that $77 (and that's even more impressive considering what it costs to develop a game today vs. what it cost in 1980). But movie tickets cost a lot MORE than $6.50 (and god help you if it's in 3D, you'll need a loan for that).

And concert tickets...jesus, if you even have to ask. I can remember paying $25 for good concert tickets (for mainstream bands) just 20 years ago. Today it's crazy what you pay even for tickets to no-name bands' concerts.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[grumbel]

Console game prices were initially higher because you had to account for the cost of manufacturing the cartridges. However today all consoles use DVDs or built-in storage of some sort so that cost is no longer justified.

Meanwhile production costs for games have sky-rocketed, also the market has increased and a hell of a lot of other variables have changed, to many to really account. What matters is how much you as a gamer pay for a game and that price has pretty much stayed the same for 20 years or even go down (even ignoring inflation).

The only thing that really has increased is the price for the hardware. I bought a NES for 144DM (~75EUR) and a SNES for 266DM (~130EUR), those prices weren't on launch day, but the SNES was still rather new back then. An Xbox360, five years after launch, is still pretty much twice that price and the prices for a second controller are also rather high, multiple times of what you would pay for an NES or SNES controller. Of course, the complexity of those has increased a lot, so that might at least in a small part justified.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[julesh]

chart CDs used to have at least 20 tracks on them...

Really? When I think back to the stuff I bought in the 90s, I don't think many had more than 15. Also, until relatively recently, CDs were limited in run time to 74 minutes, and with the average length of a song in the late 80s/early 90s being about 4 minutes, fitting on 20 would have been unusual.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[ildon]

And to make that identical game for the 360 you'd have to pay microsoft to run your game through certification and pay for licensing ON TOP of your game engine license.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[blizz017]

Still missing the point.. There's a fee associated for selling a title on a console.. outside of any production costs; Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo all charge a specific amount of money so that games can be played on their systems; these are called 'Publisher License Agreements' here's an example of one for the Xbox360 between Microsoft and THQ: http://legal.realdealdocs.com/index.php/2008/04/18/xbox-360-publisher-license-agreement/ Basically Microsoft gets royalties for every 360 title sold; Sony gets royalties for every PS3 title sold; Nintendo gets royalties for every Wii title sold.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[gorzek]

But there is nothing that says you have to buy an engine for a PC game. For a home console you have no choice--it's pay to play.

There are also immensely more resources for today's game developers, many of which can be acquired at no cost and with no licensing fees. The barrier to entry in the PC gaming world has never been lower.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

When most of us complain about game prices, it's the PC games we're complaining about.

How the fuck do you know that?

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[Inoen]

As far as i recall, it's was around $5 fixed price per manufactured copy for the PS2 (manufactured - not sold!).

Xbox was at a similar amount. I don't think this figure has changed much for the later consoles.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Console game prices have always been higher than PC (and, earlier, home computer) game prices. When most of us complain about game prices, it's the PC games we're complaining about.

PC games were definitely more expensive back then. Here is a list of some retail prices of games from the 80s and 90s:

Under a Killing Moon: $99.95
Time Zone: $99.95
Dune (CD): $99.95
Journeyman Project: $79.95
Day of the Tentacle (CD): $69.95
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (CD): $69.95
King's Quest 6 (CD): $79.95
Dagger of Amon Ra (CD): $69.95
Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller: $79.99
Myst: $59.95
Space Quest 4 (CD) $69.95
Dark Seed: $69.95
Death Gate: $59.95

Data from the above is from the following sources:

Compute Magazine
Coming Soon Magazine
The Book of Adventure Games by Kim Schuette
Sierra Catalogs

Obviously, there were still budget games in the $30-$40 range and any savvy buyer would wait for a sale, but the games were definitely more expensive on the PC than they are now.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[geekoid]

I paid 4.50 to see Star Wars when it came out. I paid 10.50 to see Ep III. Not really much of an increase for 3 decade difference. If you factior inflation, I should have paid over 15 dollars to see EP. III. I have no idea where you were seeing 1st run movie for 2.50 in the 80s, however adjusting for inflation it comes to 8.50 in 2009, not 6.50.

I paid 50 dollars for Batman:Arkham for the ps3. that's the same as paying 19.53 in 1980.

yeah, concert ticket when bananas. I really can not imagine paying 100 dollars(or a lot more) for a concert ticket. way to much money to pay to listen to some drunk ahole screaming incorrect lyrics while I'm trying to watch the concert.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[elrous0]

According to Box Office Mojo, the average movie ticket price in 1980 was $2.69 ($2.23 in 1977 when Star Wars came out). I'm not sure where you were paying $4.50 in 1977, but it must have been in the middle of Manhattan or something.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[Ranzear]

And concert tickets...jesus, if you even have to ask. I can remember paying $25 for good concert tickets (for mainstream bands) just 20 years ago. Today it's crazy what you pay even for tickets to no-name bands' concerts.

I saw Apocalyptica for just $25 a few weeks ago by buying the ticket at the door. What you're likely encountering is Ticketmaster's runabout scam, which after fees turns that '$25 at the door' into $48 or more. They even intentionally put their site into maintenance mode just as new tickets are released and link to a site that has no mention of Ticketmaster, yet is owned by them, which sells the tickets at up to 10x their box-office price.

The tickets themselves haven't gotten more expensive, really to the contrary, but the fees and greed of the company who monopolizes them has indeed gotten out of hand.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[bigstrat2003]

Don't worry, PC game developers are shifting to the $60 price point that the 360 and PS3 have. It started, to the best of my recollection with MW2, which I refused to buy on that basis (but it still sold millions, of course). I also recall AC2 for the PC doing the same shit, and most recently, SC2 (which again, sold millions). It won't be long before companies catch on to the fact that they can charge $10 extra and not really damage their sales, and they all jack the prices up.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[Anonymous Coward]

What a crock. Games previously required only small teams and a few months' development, with early 80s titles often being developed by single people over the course of weeks. Games now require production teams and budgets which rival that of cinema.

Re:A couple of points missed by the article...

[tehcyder]

And concert tickets...jesus, if you even have to ask. I can remember paying $25 for good concert tickets (for mainstream bands) just 20 years ago. Today it's crazy what you pay even for tickets to no-name bands' concerts.

Maybe bands are following the slashdot model of not worrying about physical media sales, but instead concentrating on making money from live concerts?

PC games definitely cheaper

[Xest]

PC games have definitely become cheaper. I remember in the 90s paying £40 for some games (I paid £44.99 for Warcraft II as it was the cheapest I could find it at on release!), usually though they were around the £29.99 mark with the odd £34.99 game. At the start of this century they seemed to all pretty much go up to £34.99 as standard, but in recent years the trend has reversed, and £24.99 seems to be common for new releases, sometimes even lower - £22.99 or so.

I've never historically been much of a console gamer, although did own a few consoles I never bought more than a handful of games for them until this generation. I've noticed XBox 360 games used to be £39.99 or thereabouts as standard on release, but nowadays they seem to be closer to £34.99 a lot of the time, sometimes only £29.99. Major releases are still usually higher, and Call of Duty tries to sell at £44.99 because Activision are a bunch of profiteering twats, but then, supermarkets in the UK Sold MW2 at £28 on release night so it shows it pays to shop around so you can avoid the Call of Duty tax if you buy it. Certainly the general trend seems to be that in the 5 years since release, 360 games are, on average, a bit cheaper now.

Of course there are stores that'll get you games a little cheaper than these prices, but I'm referring to the usual advertised price from the typical non-discount mainstream stores for the most part because it's hard to compare to the discounted prices when they vary so wildly from title to title!

Re:PC games definitely cheaper

[nem75]

PC games have definitely become cheaper. I remember in the 90s paying £40 for some games (I paid £44.99 for Warcraft II as it was the cheapest I could find it at on release!), usually though they were around the £29.99 mark with the odd £34.99 game. At the start of this century they seemed to all pretty much go up to £34.99 as standard, but in recent years the trend has reversed, and £24.99 seems to be common for new releases, sometimes even lower - £22.99 or so.

For whatever reason the UK seems to be special in this case, computer game prices there are way lower than in the rest of Europe. So much so that some publishers ask Amazon.co.uk to not ship certain games to the continent (at least they did this in some cases last year). Anyway, when I buy new games I buy in the UK, it's way cheaper than in Germany e.g.

Re:PC games definitely cheaper

[ZosoZ]

Yup, they were definitely more expensive in the 90s. When PC Zone magazine folded recently I dug out a the first one I bought, Issue 7 from October 1993. From the adverts in there Lands of Lore had an RRP of £35.99, Clash of Steel and Simon the Sorcerer were £39.99, and Seal Team and NHL Hockey were £44.99. Those were on floppy; a multimedia verision of King’s Quest VI on CD ROM was another fiver on top at £49.99. Granted that was RRP, mail order companies knocked a bit off the prices, the cheapest was “Only the Best Computer Software” of Bristol with Lands of Lore at £24.99 and the CD ROM King’s Quest VI at £32.99.

Re:PC games definitely cheaper

[sa1lnr]

"(I paid £44.99 for Warcraft II as it was the cheapest I could find it at on release!)"

One word, Blizzard. Their games were always more expensive, everyone else was more or less around the £30 mark for a full game and £20 for an expansion.

The first Diablo was the same £45 when everyone else was at £30.

Re:PC games definitely cheaper

[Inda]

I ship a lot of my games to European countries after a sale on eBay. I even charge stupid amounts of postage and the buyers seem happy to pay.

Re:PC games definitely cheaper

[slyrat]

PC games have definitely become cheaper. I remember in the 90s paying £40 for some games (I paid £44.99 for Warcraft II as it was the cheapest I could find it at on release!), usually though they were around the £29.99 mark with the odd £34.99 game. At the start of this century they seemed to all pretty much go up to £34.99 as standard, but in recent years the trend has reversed, and £24.99 seems to be common for new releases, sometimes even lower - £22.99 or so.

There is also the fact that most PC games are now bought exclusively over download services like Steam. In Steam's case there are also sales. It seems very rare nowadays for console games to ever have changes in price, other than because of age.

Re:PC games definitely cheaper

[Spatial]

It's awesome: I got Metro 2033 + Red Faction Guerilla for 15 euros.

Between AUK and Steam sales, I can't remember the last time I paid more than 20 euros for a game.

Re:PC games definitely cheaper

[tehcyder]

Call of Duty tries to sell at £44.99 because Activision are a bunch of profiteering twats

What, did you think they were some sort of gaming charity?

Price is not the only factor to consider

[gravos]

Remember that even if the real price of new games rise, that doesn't mean a gamer is in a worse situation than he would have been in the past. Quite the opposite in fact.

Today you can play thousands of older titles for very low prices. There are probably 10 times as many freeware games available today as there were 30 years ago. You can get on youtube and watch "Let's Play's" of virtually every popular NES and SNES title for free. Many of these games are only surpassed by current titles in the graphics department.

In other words, it's a great time to be a gamer even if you don't buy a single "new" game.

Re:Price is not the only factor to consider

[Anonymous Coward]

But can I watch "Let's Play's" with your mom on YouTube?

Re:Price is not the only factor to consider

[nyctopterus]

Also, there are hundreds of indie games which generally come in under £10, and can be excellent.

Looking through the new releases on Steam for Mac (where older an indie games make up a bigger slice of the pie I will admit), the prices are as follows £5.09, £2.99, £7.19, £6.99, £5.99, £15.99, £12.99, £8.99, £12.99, and £3.99. This doesn't seem expensive!

Re:Price is not the only factor to consider

[archen]

I pay a fraction of what I would have had to pay 20 years ago. However I don't buy hot off the presses games either. If you wait about 2 years to buy a release, you can buy them brand new for about $20. Two decades ago stores rarely kept games in stock like that, so it was buy it new or you might not be able to get it at all down the road. Availability through the Internet changed things a lot.

Re:Price is not the only factor to consider

[Nyder]

...You can get on youtube and watch "Let's Play's" of virtually every popular NES and SNES title for free.....

Explain to me the part where I want to get on youtube and watch videos of people playing video games. And please convince why this would be better then actually playing the video games myself?

Re:Price is not the only factor to consider

[hedwards]

But the question is are we getting a better value for the money? In the past patches to released software were few and far between. Reason being that it had to be a significant bug in order to justify fixing it, and it had to also not be noticeable during the QA phase of things.

These days companies frequently seem to assume that you're paying to beta test their crap. As much as I liked Fallout 3, it was unreasonably buggy, the PS3 version was quite a bit better, but quite frankly the PC version should never have been released.

Also, from the inception of shareware you've always been able to get a demo of some sort, that is until relatively recently where it's suddenly become difficult to get demos again.

Re:Price is not the only factor to consider

[IorDMUX]

Explain to me the part where I want to get on youtube and watch videos of people playing video games. And please convince why this would be better then actually playing the video games myself?

The commentary. The humor. The insightful analysis of the story.

Personally, I prefer to read screenshot-style Let's Play's, but I usually don't read them to learn about the game or to get the enjoyment that I would have earned from playing it myself.

Instead, I read Nakar's Ultima series for his unusual take on the characters, his peanut gallery dialog, and his game exploits and knowledge of hidden secrets.
I read the Quest For Glory 1-5 Let's Play because I loved his well-fleshed-out rendition of the Hero, which is not present in the actual games.
I read the Neverwinter Nights 2 Let's Play's because Lt. Danger wrote it alongside a graduate-level Lit student's analysis of the game's themes, tie-ins, ethics, and even deconstruction of the fantasy type.
I read The Dark Id's Resident Evil series because it was simply laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Re:Price is not the only factor to consider

[Sparton]

Some games work well as movies, or are more interesting with the grinding taken out (good story, perhaps not as good gameplay). Also, you can watch someone breeze through a game faster then you stumbling through it, so you can "experience" more games in a shorter period of time.

Another big reason I enjoy Let's Play's is that is a more passive activity. Most games I would play before bed would keep my brain active and make it harder to go to sleep, but watching videos or reading won't cause that issue for me.

And finally, as a game designer, it allows me to digest more information than I could do by playing. Commentary about gameplay issues, development concerns, and exploits commonly make it into many LP's, making them as entertaining as they are educational.

War in Russia Atari 800

[clickclickdrone]

If you wanted War in Russia by SSI, it was GBP80 in 1981/2. To put this in perspective, I worked in a bank then and my take home pay was about GBP140 so we're talking 2-3 weeks pay.
The real killer though were the carts for that console which took the same game carts as its equivelent in the arcades and they were GBP250 each.

Re:War in Russia Atari 800

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The real killer though were the carts for that console which took the same game carts as its equivelent in the arcades and they were GBP250 each.

Say what? What arcade games were on cartridges that could be plugged into an atari 800?

Re:War in Russia Atari 800

[clickclickdrone]

>Say what? What arcade games were on cartridges that could be plugged into an atari 800?
No. There was a Japanese system that was used in arcades that had great big carts allowing you to use the same cabinet/hardware but changing the game every so often. They brought out a home version that took the same carts and they were veeery expensive.

Re:War in Russia Atari 800

[Anonymous Coward]

He doesn't refer to the Atari 800 but "that console", and I think that's SNK's NeoGeo.

Re:War in Russia Atari 800

[clickclickdrone]

Just checked again, it was Neo Geo.

Re:War in Russia Atari 800

[Joce640k]

I think he's talking about the Neo Geo - a programmable arcade machine for the home (with prices to match).

Re:War in Russia Atari 800

[Anonymous Coward]

But... it was by SSI!

The (mouse friendly, better res, same gameplay) Mac port of their original Reach for the Stars DOS game is one of my favourite games ever.

This article makes me upset

[Notlupus]

I'm not sure what point this blog is trying to convey. Games are cheaper now than they were 10-15 years ago, so what? Games 10-15 years ago were also 4-5 times longer, and (arguably) better. The problem isn't that games are so expensive, it's that games are so low in quality these days that they are not worth the bloody money. A 6 hour, single-player, shitfest that's only around to serve as a DLC platform for $60, or Banjo Kazooie for $80. I know what I'd go for. "This is a fine time to be a gamer" my ass.

Re:This article makes me upset

[Anonymous Coward]

Longer games!?!?!?!

Lower quality games?!

You must have missed out on the NES, where mind you some of the best games ever existed, but along with that and at the same price were tons of repetitive dreck fests. Nintendo 64 games were expensive for their generation, and frankly a lot of the best ones sucked. Goldeneye was good (mostly becuase of multiplayer), I breezed through Banjo-Kazooie, so I have no clue where you're coming from with its gameplay being 4-5 times longer than a game today. You must really REALLY suck at platformers.

Go play Metal Gear Solid 4 and tell me that games today are crappier. Go play something other than Crap of Duty, and tell me about 6 hour single player experience. Hell Starcraft II had a longer singleplayer experience than 6 hours, unless you skip every cutscene and then why not just hop onto battle.net?

Did you play Oblivion, it was leaps and bounds beyond Morrowind which was so far beyond Daggerfall.

What can you possibly have to say was wrong with Fallout 3?

Hell how is DLC so different from expansion packs, my Quake II Quad Damage pack came with an expansion CD that was all community generated content! Same with my Doom II Master Levels. At least now we're getting new maps from the game makers.

Sure some modern games blow goats compared to earlier generations (FFXIII anyone?), but your statement is baseless and shows a severe ignorance of gaming.

Go play some real games, because frankly your gamer cred is revoked.

Re:This article makes me upset

[Shikaku]

Don't you mean watch Metal Gear Solid 4?

*ducks*

Re:This article makes me upset

[Anonymous Coward]

You win this time...oh crap I'm not logged in. :(

3 Battyone

Re:This article makes me upset

[cheesybagel]

It took me less time to finish StarCraft II than the original StarCraft. Fallout 3 is nice.

Re:This article makes me upset

[fishbowl]

There were games in the early 1980s that I wish I'd had the chance to play, but they tended to be expensive.
Starfleet Orion, Temple of Apshai, and the SubLogic Flight Simulator were pretty big purchases for me.
On the other hand, those games were *great*, and I got more gameplay out of those and certain others than a lot of later games all put together.

Re:This article makes me upset

[clickclickdrone]

>Temple of Apshai
Oh hell yes. I couldn't believe how much game was packed into a single 88k floppy disk back then. I used to play this to death. When they later released a version (pretty sure it was Atari 800) with uprated graphics, I bought it all over again and it was awesome.
Thing was, back then, most of these games were like little movies in your head. The game couldn't really show what was happening in any real way so you had to imagine the various monsters, the creeping round corners and it often got genuinely scary.
It's a bit like when text adventures gave way to graphic adventures. Sure, they were technically far superior but something of the experience got lost along the way.
Off on a total tangent, my son asked me last night if there were Xboxes when I was a kid and when I stopped to explain how things were, I realised I've been playing computer games of some sort or another since 1977/78, 33 years, Jeeze...

Re:This article makes me upset

[Notlupus]

You should try working on engaging in an active discussion without sounding like a total dick.

Re:This article makes me upset

[c0lo]

Did you play Oblivion, ...

I did.

...it was leaps and bounds beyond Morrowind

no, it wasn't, not to my taste.
Which actually reveals the whole kit and caboodle of the issue: while you can hope to compare prices between now-and-then, the entertainment value of the games is something you can't measure (BTW: is still like better Joan Baez than Gaga.. lady or not. Guess what age I am? Don't try, you'd be wrong)

Re:This article makes me upset

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with what you're saying in principle, but sometimes you also have to give more credit to the ones that came first. For example, Oblivion was in no way "leaps and bounds" ahead of Morrowind except graphically. Oblivion had bad console-itis with that ugly interface, and a game world with FAR less variety and diversity than Morrowind. It was a very good game but it came across as bland/sterile compared to Morrowind. And everything that Oblivion did right, Morrowind had done first.

Re:This article makes me upset

[grumbel]

A 6 hour, single-player, shitfest that's only around to serve as a DLC platform for $60, or Banjo Kazooie for $80.

There is an easy solution: Just do not buy the shitty games. If you buy the good ones instead you really won't have much issue, a Fallout 3, Oblivion, Mass Effect or Dragon Age will give you some 30+ hours of gameplay for cheap. Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 provide you tons of gameplay as well and you can probably buy both for less the $80. And even if neither of that isn't good enough, just play some old classics that you might have missed back then.

Not everything is perfect with todays games and some trends are questionable, but at the end of the day there are still more good games around then I have time to play.

Re:This article makes me upset

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you play Oblivion, it was leaps and bounds beyond Morrowind which was so far beyond Daggerfall.

I did, but I didn't finish it, because I got bored halfway. Apparently they invested so much time in improving its graphics, that they forgot that a game requires an intriguing storyline and credible characters. If all I wanted was to passively look at a slideshow of beautiful but repetitive landscapes, I'd take my car and go outside.

The same applies to other games where IMHO realism takes precedence over the fun of playing: take GTA4. You have to regularly pick up your cousin and bring him out to play darts, otherwise he will get offended. What? I'd find that extremely boring in real life, why sould I enjoy doing it in a video game?

Finally, I'd like to share my 2c about the price of video games: when I was a child, a Commodore 64 game costed about one third of my father's daily wage (this was the metric I used, back then, to evaluate the expensiveness of an item). I remember that console games were much more expensive, and that's why I owned none. Today, a new PS3 game can cost 75 €, that is, 120% of the average daily wage in my country. Fortunately used games exist (and that's why I disagree when people say that physical media should be abolished).

Re:This article makes me upset

[Hatta]

A 6 hour, single-player, shitfest that's only around to serve as a DLC platform for $60, or Banjo Kazooie for $80. I know what I'd go for. "This is a fine time to be a gamer" my ass.

But today you can choose between the single player shitfest for $60, or Banjo Kazooie for $10. That's certainly better than being stuck with Banjo Kazooie for $80.

Re:This article makes me upset

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you could be in your 50's, I suppose, but my guess is that you're probably a Millennial in your mid to late 20's.

Re:This article makes me upset

[mjwx]

It took me less time to finish StarCraft II than the original StarCraft.

True, but I wouldn't say there was less content in Starcraft II, it was just more streamlined in it's delivery. In Starcraft 1 I would spend 10 minutes doing absolutely nothing just waiting for resources in the Zerg Missions on Char because there was no way in hell you could approach any of the Terran bases without a sizable force. SC II stripped a lot of that away without sacrificing gameplay (lets face it, at it's heart Starcraft is a clickfest, but a very good one).

Re:This article makes me upset

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell how is DLC so different from expansion packs, my Quake II Quad Damage pack came with an expansion CD that was all community generated content! Same with my Doom II Master Levels. At least now we're getting new maps from the game makers.

In Quake2 I could download ActionQuake2 or any other number of great mods and have a blast. Not to mention all the custom maps. All free.

In MW2 I can choose between buying two map packs, each costing ~$15 and offering a pittance of maps, mostly ports from MW1 (which is the exact same engine, so I'd be surprised if they did anything more than copy the map files and related media).

Yeah, I'll take the old method with occasional expansions but the freedom to create and consume custom content any day.

Re:This article makes me upset

[Anonymous Coward]

temple of apshai in particular had an interesting setup - i think it had to do with copy protection as well as space limitations - where they delivered that black booklet with all the room, trap and treasure descriptions. I still have a copy of this booklet and reading through it keeps the thing fresh in my mind even decades later. Very very effective and like you say a rather creepy experience.

What about C64?

[Nursie]

Yeah, the N64 have been expensive, but C64 games were cheap in their time. I remember saving up my pocket money for 2.99 (pounds that is) tapes. There were premium titles, but they still never realyl cost more than 10 quid. About 22 pounds in today's money.

So really, about double that isn't much of a problem, given how much more effort goes in and how much more enjoyment I get out.

Re:What about C64?

[jamesh]

I had an Amstrad CPC 664 in the 8 bit era, and it because fairly obvious even to a 9 year old that games were a fair bit cheaper on tape than they were on disk (possibly because Amstrad had made an unfortunate choice of 3.25" disks which quickly became very expensive, but more likely it was just a 'whatever the market can bear' thing). So i'd buy them on tape and copy them to disk - a single disk could normally hold anywhere from 10-20 tape games per side. At the start the games were trivially protected with a system-honoured no-copy flag so that the basic calls wouldn't work, but that was easy enough to defeat, but they quickly became more elaborate from different tape image type flags to completely custom tape I/O routines (but that was easy enough - just let the custom I/O routine load the data into memory then save it yourself). It ended up being more fun copying the game from tape to disk than actually playing it :)

My biggest thrill was finding a text message after decrypting layer upon layer of encrypted code congratulating me for getting that far and inviting me to call a phone number in the UK (I assume) (possibly the police :)

Sad to think it will never quite be like that again...

Re:What about C64?

[clickclickdrone]

Didn't the Amstrad use a 3inch disk? I remember seeing a machine that did data conversion across disks/tapes and when I asked about anyone ever wanting data from Amstrads he said "Oh, the 3inch drive? It's cheaper than a blanking plate so we just stick one in but not bother wiring it up."

Re:What about C64?

[Joce640k]

Yep. A special 3-inch disk (which were much better made then the 3.5" PC ones)

Re:What about C64?

[grumbel]

Yeah, the N64 have been expensive, but C64 games were cheap in their time.

A little, but not even remotely that much: C64 prices (prices in DM, multiply by two to get EUR)

Prices there range from 20EUR-33EUR, not much of a difference compared to days PC prices today. A look at the Amazon.de best seller list shows me prices ranging from 15EUR-55EUR. With a game like Mass Effect 2, just nine month on the market, selling for just 16,40EUR. I find it a little hard to complain about that.

Re:What about C64?

[jamesh]

Didn't the Amstrad use a 3inch disk? I remember seeing a machine that did data conversion across disks/tapes and when I asked about anyone ever wanting data from Amstrads he said "Oh, the 3inch drive? It's cheaper than a blanking plate so we just stick one in but not bother wiring it up."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_cpc#Floppy_disk_drive

I always thought of it as a 3+1/4" disk but most of the literature these days calls it 3". The drive might have been cheap but in Australia we were paying $11/disk in the final days that we owned it.

Re:What about C64?

[jamesh]

We used to live by a dirt road often frequented by trucks (so dust everywhere), and had a few hundred 3" disks and at the time myself and my siblings were all under 15 years of age, so not necessarily the most careful of people, and I only remember having one failed disk ever.

This contrasts sharply with the 3.5" disks these days which can't be trusted to successfully carry your data from one side of the room to another (admittedly, any disk drive these days is likely covered in dust, and old, and the data density is about 8x compared to the old 3" disks).

Re:What about C64?

[CronoCloud]

Ah, you UK folk with your tapes. Admittedly the 1541 didn't have high penetration in the UK which explains why you lot were playing cheap ass platformers and arcade titles when in the US C64 RPG's and adventure games were a bit more popular. IIRC the average C64 RPG would sell for $49. Course, it probably came on 2 disks, with a big manual, and a cloth map.

Re:What about C64?

[hitmark]

Yea, i suspect many of the cracking groups and such was and are in action because of the showmanship of being able to claim that one have "picked the digital lock". A bit like counting coup, i guess.

Comparison in terms of production vs gains

[XAD1975]

It would be interesting to compare the prices broken down in percentages. How many %s for R&D, production costs, distribution, marketing, profit margin before tax, etc. I would suspect that over time, the costs have shifted towards marketing more than real innovation factors.

Re:Comparison in terms of production vs gains

[dangitman]

I would suspect that over time, the costs have shifted towards marketing more than real innovation factors.

I'm not sure why you would suspect that. Have you seen the credits for a modern game? Massive amounts of talent there. Meanwhile, back in the day, the games were created by one or a handful of people - while the elaborate box art and marketing had little to do with the game.

Most famously, there is E.T on the Atari 2600, where they paid a massive amount of money for the marketing power of the E.T brand, but the game was a primitive piece of shit, even for its time, that was rushed to market. The 80s was full of this kind of stuff. Today, even the film marketing tie-in games are held to a much higher standard. The emphasis on creativity and innovation is much higher than it was back then. It's a more competitive market, after all.

Re:Comparison in terms of production vs gains

[greed]

And, with all that, the market is much, much, much larger. The Commodore 64, over the course of 12 years, sold 17 million units. The Nintendo Wii, over a mere 4 years, sold 74 million units. (And yes, I'm using the respective Wikipedia pages as source.)

Of course, some of those C64s were bought by schools and other places unlikely to buy lots of game titles. Although there's a few people messing around with Wiis in rehab, I expect you'll find most people who buy a Wii intend to play games on it. (Whereas, most people worked hard to convince their parents that the C64 was for school, not about the games, really mom, I can do my homework on it, I can learn to program... hey, wait, I actually did learn to program and do my homework on it! But I played lots of games, too.)

Heck, Apple sold nearly 3.5 million machines in the spring quarter this year (), a year's worth of sales is nearly the entire lifecycle of C64s.

So, you can get away with smaller mark-up, in real value, because you can sell more copies. And we all know about the real cost of making a copy....

Being greedy

[xclr8r]

There are more consoles and PCs in the market making manuf./distribution cheaper per unit. Add download services to drive ala steam d2d etc and it is even cheaper. Having 4 recessions between now and then (we are currently in one) keeps prices low since you have to try and keep a house over your head... they are just being greedy I hate whiny pieces like this one. -troll be happy we aren't charging you more.

Cartiridges were always expensive

[91degrees]

I'm pretty certain that games for my Amiga were considerably cheaper than those on the Sega Mega Drive.

An historic perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

That should be "AN historic perspective" shouldn't it?

Second-hand games?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, you can get your games second-hand right now... but with the increasing use of online purchase tied into accounts, of serial activation and other such things, how much longer will it be before more publishers realise they can render it impossible to sell a game second-hand in the name of antipiracy? Ever tried reselling a game from Steam, or that you purchased on your iPhone from the app store? You can't, and that's exactly how the online distribution operators and games publishers want it.

$75

[Jay Tarbox]

As a teenager I paid $75 for The Ancient Art of War at Service Merchandise. I think MS Flight Simulator 1.0 was around that price too.

Re:$75

[Digital Vomit]

As a teenager I paid $75 for The Ancient Art of War

That game was worth every penny!

On a related note...

[John Pfeiffer]

I remember how much people complained about the price of the Playstation 3 when it first came out... (I still don't have one, or an Xbox 360, or a Wii, in case anyone wants to call me a fanboy.) I guess they forgot about the NEO-GEO. Hey, $599 is a pretty big chunk of change, no denying that. But the NEO-GEO home console debuted for $649...in 1990. (Which would make it over $990 in 2006 money.)

On the subject of game prices, NEO-GEO home cartridges were $200 and up at release, and the arcade operators were paying as much as $1000 a game for the arcade cartridges. (And that's in 1990 dollars!)

Ironically, right now, while NEO-GEO home console cartridges still go for between $100 and $500 for the more common games, those arcade cartridges can typically be had for under $100.

This would be why I bought a 4-slot NEO-GEO standup arcade cabinet for my birthday last year. ;) Good deals on some of the best arcade games of the 1990s and early 2000s!

Re:On a related note...

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, I remember drooling over Samurai Showdown as a kid. Weren't most the NEO-GEO arcade games set at about 50-75 cents a play. Seems like with the traffic in a busy mall or locale next to a music store they could easily recoup that $1000 cartridge investment.

So we are ignoring...

[The Hatchet]

The significantly higher costs of game production and distribution, along with the drastically inflated dollar? Hell, incomes are not exactly higher, but prices sure are steady, despite decreasing costs. They make easily twice the profit per sale as they did back then.

Clarity

[Anonymous Coward]

>But to be fair, DLC isn't factored in

What does the Democratic Leadership Council have to do with video games?

How about a little clarity in the summary before you start throwing around acronyms? Sort of a best practices thing, you know?

DLC, or Downloadable Content, in case anyone is curious.

I have no idea where they were shopping

[terrisus]

From the article:
"Yes, some N64 games retailed for as high as $80, but it was also the high end of a 60 to 80 dollar range,"

I never recall paying more than $59.99US for an N64 game (maybe one of the games that came with something else in the box, but other than that), and have a number of receipts still sitting around to verify that (prices below from ebworld.com from a couple of purchases in 2000. I would have posted the full emails, but slashdot's filter kept being upset with it).
People now always seem to talk about regularly paying $70 or $80 for N64 games, but, I have no clue at all where people were shopping where they were paying that.

179934 $49.99 BANJO TOOIE N64
182565 $59.99 AIDYN CHRONICLES: 1ST MAGE N64
182829 $59.99 Mario Tennis
182835 $59.99 Legend of ZELDA 2: Majora's Mask
182837 $59.99 HEY YOU PIKACHU N64
182841 $59.99 PAPER MARIO STORY N64

162701 Perfect Dark $59.99
176879 OGRE BTLE 64 PRSN LORDLY CALIB $59.99
164384 Pokemon Stadium $59.99
175495 MARIO PARTY 2 N64 $49.99

Re:I have no idea where they were shopping

[grumbel]

First party Nintendo titles, most stuff in your list, always has been a good $10-$20 cheaper then third party titles.

Technology Bell Curve

[longbot]

Games used to have good reason to be expensive back when the technology was new expensive to produce. I remember many PC games in the 1990s being in the $40+ dollar realm, at least as new releases. But after the PS2 came out, games settled down to a general maximum of $30 ($29.99) for most titles... led by consoles, and aped by the PC releases of the time. Starting with one of the GTA games (I think it was Vice City) prices crept steadily upwards. First there was the occasional new release at $39.99 when everything else was $29.99. And then another $10 hike. And then a new generation of consoles came out. And prices hiked again. The PS3 I get prices being higher for, BluRay is a relatively new technology. But the Xbox 360 just uses standard DVDs that cost pennies apiece to press in bulk. There seems to me to have been a clear downward trend in pricing for several years until this last batch of consoles came out, followed by a sharp hike that has yet to level out to the previous lows. I think that the game makers have finally realized that there are people that will pay $60 for a new game, and that's the market they're going to chase... not those of us more casual players, or on a tighter budget.

Anyone remember the Odyssey2?

[Chordonblue]

I do, and there was a time where you could only find the carts at an actual Magnavox dealer (1978/9ish). I've always brought up the fact that games like Thunderball sold for $49.99 back then - around $170 today! Incredibly expensive - but that didn't stop us from managing to obtain about 30 games or so by 1982.

So yes, I would say even console games have become quite cheap in comparison - especially since you can now get many of them second hand.

I have been saying this to people for YEARS!!!

[MistrBlank]

I paid $80 new at Toys R Us for Civilization for the SNES. It was worth every penny, but the reality is that it shows you after nearly 20 years prices have actually gone down and production costs gone up (remember that we didn't need all the artists and level designers like we do today). On top of that, you look

Always been expensive

[domatic]

Atari 2600 titles went for $25 to $70 in their heyday and that was in early eighties dollars. Prices for Intellivision and Colecovision titles were comparable. During the crash of '84 you could snap them up for $5 or $10 apiece. As a kid I loved the crash for making a lot of games affordable but didn't understand at the time the industry was shutting down for a couple of years. When the NES came along, that sort of pricing continued adjusted upward a tick or two for inflation. If anything games are quite a bit cheaper to acquire nowadays since they still tend to be $15 to $70 depending if you're getting something used or a bit older although they try to get you with subscription services and downloadable content.

Re:Always been expensive

[sxedog]

I had mod points but needed to say it, I distinctly remember my dad cringing when he bought us Stampede! by activision for the Atari 2600. total cost = $59.99. In 1981 My mom and dad back then were well off, but when I think nowadays with my wage buying games for my family (Wii games) and spending the same amount, I can't help but think we might have been getting ripped off back then.

Times have changed, games are a dime a dozen and the magic of 'electronic games' is gone. thus people's perceived values of what they should cost (comparing it to the sweat shop goods you can get at Walmart) is that the games are expensive.

Re:Always been expensive

[mattack2]

I remember paying $40 for Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600 with my own money (probably paper route money). Yow, that was an early shocker. (Then again, I am somewhat of a defender (no pun intended) of Pac Man on the 2600, due to the hardware limitations.)

Re:Always been expensive

[domatic]

(Then again, I am somewhat of a defender (no pun intended) of Pac Man on the 2600, due to the hardware limitations.)

You really shouldn't be. It was thrown together and slapdash. The 2600 was capable of a better Pac-Man and several homebrewers have proved it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOHGz5f5Hmg

That one is the original 4k codebase of A2600 Pac-Man expanded to 8k. The maze is the same but the colors, sounds, and animations are improved.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-TdtJ2_ggY

This one is Ms. Pac-Man hacked into Pac-Man. Ms. Pac-Man itself was proof Pac-Man could have been better.
http://www.atariage.com/screenshot_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=1022

No video for this one. This was a 2600 Pac-Man done from scratch in 99 and is very hard to find.
Incidentally, the youtube videos are unkind in that they don't capture flickering sprites well. The objects don't disappear like that in actual play.I took it for granted Defender had to suck on the 2600 until I saw Defender II (Stargate):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKac14skeSA

I'm not saying it wasn't a very limited console; it was. But with more ram and rom in the carts and talented developers it was capable of more than commonly supposed.

Re:Always been expensive

[mattack2]

Yeah, but those homebrews are obviously done MUCH later, and you yourself mention "more RAM and ROM in the carts". 2600 Pac-Man was even done before the Activision games, which typically were more "advanced".

So we can continue to have differing opinions. I'm generally referring to games at that time, and still think it's fun (or at least was fun) when you don't compare it to the original... whereas 2600 Donkey Kong made me bummed I paid $40 for it.

Re:Always been expensive

[domatic]

There is still the matter of what Atari charged for 2600 Pac-Man and the fact that Ms. Pac-Man didn't suck. At a minimum the maze and colors could have been more accurate without increasing the size of the rom; the main reason the homebrews are larger is they try to include the intermissions, have the eyes of the ghosts follow Pac-Man, have the fruits change with the levels, and other aspects of the arcade version.

I doubt Activision or Imagic would have released such a lame Pac-Man if one of them were fortunate enough to have that license. Even at that time, the 4k games they were producing tended to "push" the 2600 more.

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[account_deleted]

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Depends on the platform

[grapeape]

I can remember paying over $75 for Zelda back in the day, and remember my parents refusing to get Phantasy Star for me because it was insanely expensive. Some games were cheap, I can remember several Data East titles on the C=64 that I picked up new at Babbages for under $15. The biggest thing to remember is that those games do not come anything close in comparison as far as production quality and content goes, many aren't nearly as fun IMHO but they are still far more expensive to create. In comparing the modern game prices and classics its probably more fair to compare the PSN, wiiware, mini's, pop cap and xbox arcade titles than the big ones, they have far more in common and in that comparison prices have undoubtedly come down.

Common Wisdom?

[jlf278]

I find it incredibly hard to believe that "common wisdom" says games are trending more expensive. I've owned about a dozen systems staring with the Atari Pong (which had no games to purchase. You could play pong...and pong with multiple paddles...and it was amazing). When I finally got to the age where I was purchasing my own NES games, I remember shelling out $50 a game. Obviously with inflation, that'd be signiicantly more than the $60/game price you see now ($50 for wii). Worse yet, I bought Mega Man a couple years after it first came out and Toys R Us was still charging $50! These days 6months to 1 year after release, you can pick up most games for $20 or so. Even pre-orders are regularly priced $10 or $20 off. And if you consider the used games market (eBay, not gamestop), downloadable games, old game compilations, etc. you can easily build a solid (if antiquated) collection that you'll never have enough time to fully play and enjoy. Finally, going back to Atari and NES games now, it's easy to see how (nostalgia aside) game quality has improved drastically. Comparing Sky Kid to Halo Reach is like comparing apples to a michelin-starred 5-course meal.

As an aside - I have a very fond memory of spending hours and hours looking through my entire collection of Nintendo Power magazines compiling a list of 20 or so games I wanted to buy used. At the time, there were no used game stores where I lived, but my dad knew of one in Colorado where he flew out for business infrequently. So I gave him my list of games and waited an excruciating week for him to come back. He did fairly well, scoring at least half the games on the list (probably the cheaper ones). And I was blown away when he told me he got them for under $200 total. I excitedly jammed them into my NES one after the other - a big mistake at the time. Anyone familiar with the prime days of the NES knows that you play one game at a time until you've squeezed every last bittersweet drop of entertainment out the cartridge. You were supposed to beat the game several times, often requiring playing the first board 800 times due to difficulty and lack of game saves. And before my foray into used games, that's exactly how it worked because games were actually quite expensive. None could boast 100 hours of content, maybe 2 hours of content that took 100 hours to beat without losing a life (contra) or 10 hours of content that you played through 10 times (final fantasy).

Re:Common Wisdom?

[grumbel]

I find it incredibly hard to believe that "common wisdom" says games are trending more expensive.

The problem with the common wisdom is that it is rather short sighted. There was an increase in game prices going from the Xbox1/Playstation2 to the Xbox360/Playstation3, namely going from $50-$60 to $60-$70, but that seems all that people remember. It is easily ignored that game prices now seem to drop faster then ever, the used game market is full of cheap stuff and 20 years ago prices where pretty much the same as they are today anyway.

Production costs were higher then.

[SamuraiHoedown]

Cartridges are more expensive than discs. In addition to the chips that contained the game, many cartridges also included batteries so they could store saved data. That's why if if you try to access saved games on old NES carts today they are more than likely not there.

normalize price with playing time

[Dan667]

bet it would show you use to get a lot more for your money in the past.

Re:normalize price with playing time

[geekoid]

I paid 10 bucks for team fortress 2. I have over 600 hours of play.
Wow, 60 bucks, 15 a month, 40 hours a month.

Re:normalize price with playing time

[Dan667]

great game, but it is easily an outlier.

Re:normalize price with playing time

[grumbel]

An Atari 2600 game would entertain you for what? Half an hour maybe? Even your average NES or SNES game could be beaten in like two hours. That's hardly more value then your 6-8 hour action game today.

Sure with RPGs the situation is a little different, but those still take you 30h-100h today.

Re:normalize price with playing time

[mattack2]

You must have VERY high entertainment requirements. Sure, your "average" game might not entertain you or a random person for long, but one is likely to pick games that WILL entertain them.

Many of the 2600 games I still have will entertain me for more than 2 hours. Other classic arcade games, way more than that.

Two words

[Veggiesama]

Steam sales.

When Games were Novel

[stewbacca]

When games were new and novel (like my C64, Atari 5200), I expected very high prices. Call it early adoption, if you will.

Inflation occurs, but the price of video games should DECREASE relative to inflation over time as they become more efficiently developed and distributed.

Re:When Games were Novel

[stewbacca]

oops...somehow I doubled the awesomeness of my Atari 2600 and made it a 5200...

Re:When Games were Novel

[grumbel]

Games with the complexity of an old C64 games you can buy for the iPhone for $2, happy now?

Play behind

[skyggen]

I pay for the games I know will rock me (GTA, Fallout, SC). Those companies have built a quality name for that GAME franchise not the DEVELOPER company. As for Example, I have pre-ordered Fallout: New Vegas even though the DEVELOPER has changed because I can so trust in that games franchise quality. Otherwise Gamefly is how I pick up new titles, its by far cheaper to rent and play a game for a number of reasons; I can bet any Prince of Persia/or simple in a couple of days of gameplay and they have very little replay value, so IMO $20 is too much so I just rent and beat; Other games from unknown or new publishers or developers who I'm to believe are getting worse not better (EA anything not sports), once again rent and test, This kept me from buying several bad rpgs.; Lastly some games are good but not worth their release price but I still have the want to own them, I rent the game play through the tutorial, save my game, return the game, wait 6-9 months, goto bestbuy ask for game, pay $20, done.

Torrents!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to torrents my game cost is much lower now than when I was a kid. Zero actually.

I'm the perfect example of the "one pirated copy != one lost sale" reality. I didn't buy a single videogame between the end of college and the rise of p2p. I had no way to pirate them. When I couldn't get games for free I spent my money and leisure time on other things. When p2p arrived and games became easily available for free I began to dabble again. Videogames are like sex with a fat chick. When it's available "for nothing" I might take it. Expect me to wine and dine her...not interested!

Re:Torrents!

[tehcyder]

When I couldn't get games for free I spent my money and leisure time on other things.

That just means you're not really interested in games, big fucking deal.

Price of games doesn't account for...

[blahplusplus]

... wage stagnation. While it says "We're paying less" if your wage has remained constant as well, aren't you paying the same?

Re:Price of games doesn't account for...

[tehcyder]

If your wages have remained unchanged since the 80s you should seek urgent advice. From a psychiatrist, probably.

been video gaming for 3 decades and i'm broke!

[Nyder]

ya, like 3 decades. Damn, that makes me sort of old.

But I try to remember the price I paid for video games and honestly, I can't remember.

But I sure as fuck know I did NOT pay over $50 for a video game. I have a hard time spending that sort of money on video games. I'd rather get a few used games then pay that much for a video game.

Not to mention over the years I've learned that very few games made are worth the price you pay for them. In fact, most the publishers like to make crappy games for a quick buck, amoungst their few decent titles.

But as for the article, i'm not sure including inflation really counts. oh sure, you math geeks, & account clods probably think I just divided by 0, but the reality of the market is perception. Ya, perception. it's never about the numbers, it's about what the consumers think. If they think that paying $60 is too much for a console game, they probably won't buy it. Part of why PC games are cheaper, they know we aren't stupid and won't buy overpriced games. Of course, the threat that we can pirate it easy always help.

The problem is, the current big boys of the gaming industry, are being ran by accounts and shareholders, and they want all the money they can get from us. In fact, they are modeling themselves so well after their Hollywood counterparts, that I'm sort of surprised that people don't make a bigger deal about it.

Re:been video gaming for 3 decades and i'm broke!

[grumbel]

If you can't remember the prices, maybe you should look them up (list from 1990, price in DM) instead of basing your argument on a pair of rose tinted glasses. Plenty of games in that list in the $30-$50 range, but also a few games for $70, which is kind of pretty much exactly what we have today.

Re:been video gaming for 3 decades and i'm broke!

[Nyder]

If you can't remember the prices, maybe you should look them up (list from 1990, price in DM) instead of basing your argument on a pair of rose tinted glasses. Plenty of games in that list in the $30-$50 range, but also a few games for $70, which is kind of pretty much exactly what we have today.

So what your saying is, since I said I never paid more the $50 for a game, and most being $30-$50, that I should look it up because of my rose colored glasses?

Seems to me even though I didn't think I remembered, i did remember just fine. Not sure what you are going on about though.

Re:been video gaming for 3 decades and i'm broke!

[grumbel]

So what your saying is, since I said I never paid more the $50 for a game, and most being $30-$50, that I should look it up because of my rose colored glasses?

You can't complain over the $60-$70 games today while at the same time ignoring the $60-$70 games of the past. If you don't want to spend no more then $50 for a game you can do that today just fine, just don't buy stuff at launch day and prices will drop quick. I hardly ever payed more then $30 for a game in the last few years.

I used to buy Atari 2600 games

[hellop2]

for $2-3 at KB Toys in the 80's.

Now, tell me where you can buy a game in a store for $2.00 nowadays.

Re:I used to buy Atari 2600 games

[neminem]

GameStop. But only if the game was extremely terrible and nobody actually wanted it.

(That said, I used to buy NES games in the range of 2-5 bucks, in the early 90s. Not from a store, though - yard sales were a fantastic way to get console games for stupidly cheap back then. I'm not sure the same is really true anymore, but I also haven't looked at a yard sale in ages. So maybe it is.)

cost/hour

[Ephemeriis]

What about the cost per hour of gameplay?

Seems to me that 20-30 hours of gameplay used to be the norm... Now you're usually seeing 8-10, and then relying on multiplayer to keep it interesting after that.

Inflation

[Anonymous Coward]

The real shocking news to me is that a 2010 Dollar is only worth about 65 1993 US Cents.

As for the comparison, game development is much more expensive today but the market compared to 1993 also is HUGE. I have a feeling that everything could be better if the prices were much cheaper (people would buy more and pirate less).

Re:Inflation

[tehcyder]

The real shocking news to me is that a 2010 Dollar is only worth about 65 1993 US Cents.

It's because the US left the gold standard, and legalised homoerotic pornography, Marxist terrorism and Islam. Probably.

Horse Fucking Shit

[sexconker]

1: Nobody with a brain ever fucking paid more than $50 for a game. I don't give a shit if it was Chrono Trigger or some allegedly expensive N64 game. All you had to do was look in the Sunday newspaper, find an ad for the game from some shop listing it for $50, and then take the ad to your retailer of choice for a price match. Invariably there was a shop selling the game for $50, or at least erroneously advertising that they did.

2: Video games are software. The market has fucking exploded since the 80s and 90s. The sheer volume of sales should mean prices would be a fraction of what they were before. While games have gotten more expensive to make, the expensive cartridges are gone, the instruction manuals are black and white, short, and even disappearing, and many games are delivered digitally. The per unit cost of a game has fallen dramatically. If your $100,000,000 game bombs, then perhaps you should have focused on making a good game instead of advertising and hype.

3: "Adjusted for inflation..." is just a bad troll. Until my salary is adjusted for inflation, the phrase is just a fucking insult.

Re:Horse Fucking Shit

[grumbel]

1) That is complete and utter nonsense, plenty of people payed for more then $50 for games, because that is the only price at which you can buy them new on launch day.

2) And just as the market has grown, so have the production costs. Instead of one guy taking six month for a game, you have hundred people taking three years, that costs has to go somewhere. If you don't like high budget games, you are free to buy indie stuff or iPhone games, they cost around $1-$15.

3) Even when you ignore inflations, game prices have still stayed pretty much constant for 20 years.

Re:Horse Fucking Shit

[sexconker]

1) Only people without a brain. Like I said, price matching. And yes, on launch day.

2) Market growth has far out-paced production cost increases.

3) Nope.

inflation doesnt matter

[bhcompy]

Price compared to inflation doesn't really matter. Most games do not have ongoing development costs. They just need sales to cover total costs and generate profit. Waverace was 80 bucks, but they had a much smaller market. More units means less price per unit in order to cover costs.

LOL BUYING GAMES

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who actually spends that much money on games is an idiot. DLC and all the other extra addon bullshit is ridiculous. a game should be complete when it comes out and shouldn't charge for updates/DLC/maps or any of that other crap. When it comes to PC gaming steam destroys every other company when it comes to prices and their games are pretty much the only ones worth having. I haven't played a third party game worth buying in years either because of crazy DRM (I'm looking at you ubisoft) or its just not a good game. As for consoles, who cares? PS2, (the best console of all time) gamecube, and all the classic consoles work just fine on PC so whats the point in buying a new xbox 360 every month to play one or two decent exclusives? honestly its just not worth the money anymore.

Game prices are too high, always have been

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who set these prices care far more about profits than customers. It's considered smart to take as much out as mathematically possible despite the fact that such one-sided transactions are unsustainable. From what I can see, gaming companies have been using one abusive marketing technique after another in order to exploit the market and the public. It's a shame there wasn't a real open market in terms of retail or platform. Of course, business people don't really believe in crap like competition, unless it can be tightly controlled. Think Apple, Microsoft, Sony, etc. really care about mutually beneficial relationships? Nah, they just rally wanna waste you, and move on to even more fresh meat.

Re:Game prices are too high, always have been

[grumbel]

The people who set these prices care far more about profits than customers.

Which is kind of natural, as profit is what pays their rent.

It's a shame there wasn't a real open market in terms of retail or platform.

Its called indie game development on the PC, has existed for at least ten years.

shrug

[Anonymous Coward]

I never pay the initial retail price for a game. I just buy used or when on sale. Being about two years behind the curve is very economical, and the games are just as much fun as they originally were.

So, I'm a cheap bastard. At least I buy my games, instead of just downloading them in violation of copyright laws.

6 Million is the most a Genesis game ever sold

[AmigaHeretic]

Sonic the Hedgehog 2, the best selling Sega Genesis game of all time, sold 6 million copies. (Released in 1992 and calculating sales through 2006)

Halo: Reach has just sold 5 million copies in 2 weeks.

Games should be cheaper

[Jellodyne]

When VHS tapes of movies were $80-120, nobody bought them. Once the movie business realized that they could make a lot more money selling them at $10-30 they exploded in volume. I suspect a similar effect would happen with games were they priced comparable to movies. At $60, I rarely buy games. I check reviews, I wait for the price to drop (and usually forget about it) and maybe if it goes on sale on Steam in a couple years time I pick it up on the cheap. I've bought too many $60 games that rarely get played. But if they were at an MSRP of $30, with release day deals around $20 and $10 bargain bins (like DVD or Blu-Ray), I'd buy a lot more, and so would a lot of other people. Yes, games are expensive to develop. So are movies. The marginal cost of 1 unit is very low, and at half or a third the price, you'd probably see at least 4 times the sales. There's a reason Nintendo DS games always top the sales lists.

Re:Games should be cheaper

[brkello]

It doesn't make sense for them to sell it for cheaper because plenty of people will spend the $60. If you don't want to spend that much, get it used or when they drop the price later. They might get more initial sales if they sold it for $20. But it wouldn't make up for the money they would have made if they sold it at $60. Besides, the same people who wouldn't but if for $60...a lot of them wouldn't buy it for the reduced price and again get it used for even cheaper. The market clearly is doing fine at about the $60 price point. There is no business reason to reduce it the way you suggest.

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Reasonable

[Abdul Jakul]

Well I think it's alright to purchase a game for $30-50 but purchasing a crappy DLC for $7? with only less than an hour of gameplay? If you play RPG you must know this game and it's producer! I'm going to piratebay anyway. ahahhaa Garage Door Insulation