Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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?
-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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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