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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."
Give me a break.
Genesis. Phantasy Star IV. $99. Pfft.
Love the modern baaaawing about game prices. You kids have *no* idea.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
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.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
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.
Don't you mean watch Metal Gear Solid 4?
*ducks*
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.
I'm pretty certain that games for my Amiga were considerably cheaper than those on the Sega Mega Drive.
It took me less time to finish StarCraft II than the original StarCraft. Fallout 3 is nice.
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.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
>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?
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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.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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)
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
>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...
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
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.
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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.
You should try working on engaging in an active discussion without sounding like a total dick.
... today's cutting edge games.
Ah, an oxymoron from my today's reading of /.
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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.
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.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.
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)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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).
No sig today...
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.
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.
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!
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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?
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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
BTW, TA is still being played online through several services and is still being actively modded.
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.
No sig today...
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.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
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.
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
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.
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.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
I still play Day of the Tentacle on my phone.
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.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I too remember paying less thatn a fiver for Spectrum games. I also remember returning a lot of them because they wouldn't load...
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There's also a small, but very dedicated community of MOO2 players. Check out #moo2 on irc.quakenet.org
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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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
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).
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.
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.
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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.
bet it would show you use to get a lot more for your money in the past.
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.
Steam sales.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.)
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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.
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.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
If you're curious, using overall inflation rates, $69.99 in 1996 is $94.73 in 2009 dollars.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
>>>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.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
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.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
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.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
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.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Check out my world simulator thingy.
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.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
Free Martian Whores!
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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>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.
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.
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.
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).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Be seeing you...
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.
That just means you're not really interested in games, big fucking deal.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If your wages have remained unchanged since the 80s you should seek urgent advice. From a psychiatrist, probably.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It's because the US left the gold standard, and legalised homoerotic pornography, Marxist terrorism and Islam. Probably.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Yeah, what a total waste of time, when all you need to do is compare the price of a stable commodity like buggy whips.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it