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The $60 truth - game prices on a decline
- Thread starter Rooble91
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I don't understand all the commotion. People who say it's more expensive now just have not been around long enough to remember the old prices. I know for sure i paid $89 for the first civilization. I also paid close to that for Pirates! (the original) and probably more for some Microprose titles. Cost of games have come DOWN. Only because they went up $10 now doesn't mean they're still DOWN from a long time ago.
Computer gaming was a VERY expensive hobby, more expensive than most here could afford in the 80ies and early 90ies. My first harddrive cost me $800 and it was only like 16MB (!!! - not GB, no, MEGAbytes). Computer gaming is dirt cheap nowadays.
Computer gaming was a VERY expensive hobby, more expensive than most here could afford in the 80ies and early 90ies. My first harddrive cost me $800 and it was only like 16MB (!!! - not GB, no, MEGAbytes). Computer gaming is dirt cheap nowadays.
LOL, yup. Those prices were obscene. How'd we "kids" get by? It sure was tough putting those over on the parents.
I assume that because economic cost is the cost that actually matters to the debate of whether or not games are too expensive.
If someone's wages aren't keeping pace with inflation, then their problem isn't the cost of games, it's their wages. There's nothing the gaming industry can do about that.
WabeWalker
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Well for me, gaming, dollar for dollar, is easily the most inexpensive thing I do.
As an example, take Civ V and F1 2010, the two titles I bought on the same day a couple of weeks ago. Steam informs me that I've spent 35 hours on F1 and 11 hours on Civ V. With both titles, I feel like I'm only getting started. Last Tuesday I bought FIFA 11 for the PC and if I'm to go by the amount of time I spent on the 360 version then I'll spend literally hundreds of hours playing FIFA online over the next 12 months (and on the PC I don't have to pay for a Live Gold account - online play is free!). Admittedly, these titles are exceptional, and have high replay value, to say the least, but even if I spend 'only' 25 hours or so on a title (Bioshock 2, say), I still feel that it's great value for my money.
If I go out with friends to a movie, and dinner is involved, then I'm dropping fifty bucks easily. Throw in a cab, and maybe a cheap whore on the way home afterwards (I'm single, my friends are all married), then the cost goes up exponentially.
Most times, the morning after, I'll kind of regret having spent that money. These days I'd much rather buy something like Gothic 4 or New Vegas.
I sometimes see young people saying that they're going to walk away from gaming and spend more time with people. Really. I did that for about ten years. Gave up gaming and developed a nasty problem with booze. The one thing I learned is that you can't find salvation in other people, it lies within. The only person who can make you happy is you.
On a cold, rainy Friday night, with the winds howling, and the rains lashing against my window, I want to be at my PC playing New Vegas or something, not in the city getting smashed, or sitting in a theater watching some crap movie.
As an example, take Civ V and F1 2010, the two titles I bought on the same day a couple of weeks ago. Steam informs me that I've spent 35 hours on F1 and 11 hours on Civ V. With both titles, I feel like I'm only getting started. Last Tuesday I bought FIFA 11 for the PC and if I'm to go by the amount of time I spent on the 360 version then I'll spend literally hundreds of hours playing FIFA online over the next 12 months (and on the PC I don't have to pay for a Live Gold account - online play is free!). Admittedly, these titles are exceptional, and have high replay value, to say the least, but even if I spend 'only' 25 hours or so on a title (Bioshock 2, say), I still feel that it's great value for my money.
If I go out with friends to a movie, and dinner is involved, then I'm dropping fifty bucks easily. Throw in a cab, and maybe a cheap whore on the way home afterwards (I'm single, my friends are all married), then the cost goes up exponentially.
Most times, the morning after, I'll kind of regret having spent that money. These days I'd much rather buy something like Gothic 4 or New Vegas.
I sometimes see young people saying that they're going to walk away from gaming and spend more time with people. Really. I did that for about ten years. Gave up gaming and developed a nasty problem with booze. The one thing I learned is that you can't find salvation in other people, it lies within. The only person who can make you happy is you.
On a cold, rainy Friday night, with the winds howling, and the rains lashing against my window, I want to be at my PC playing New Vegas or something, not in the city getting smashed, or sitting in a theater watching some crap movie.
PrincessFrosty
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The cost that actually matters is the price of the game compared to the amount of your wage, that decides how many units you can afford per pay cheque
In a lot of cases under this measurement games are more expensive (less units per time) that's through a rise in price of games, not because of a drop in wage.
Too expensive implies some sort of value judgment, independent of their historical cost or inflationary index; looking at the CPI isnt going to definitely settle a value judgment (as this is impossible since value judgments are ultimately personal opinion and need no rationale). The article was, in any case, about whether they are more expensive.
Depending on your metric for determining expense, the answer can go many ways. For example, if our metric is:
1) Price more expensive
2) Price/income ratio dependant on the persons income
3) Price increase vs. CPI less expensive
1 is probably what most people are talking about, and 2 is probably a good measure of tangible perception of cost. 3 attempts to incorporate opportunity cost into the metric, but ultimately seems arbitrary, as the CPI is a partial and inaccurate measure of ones other expenses it also ignores personal income which is obviously a hugely significant factor in determining perceived expense.
This comment about whose problem it is, is a non sequitur. Obviously the game industry cant do anything about peoples income, but that has no bearing on whether games are more expensive than they used to be. They are independent questions. Incidentally, the article being discussed is entirely about the latter, and not at all about the former.
RM_Bulldog
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what i dont like is paying for DL content that was withheld from the game to make extra $ or this f2p crap trend where mmos try to get more money from subscribers, i think the game companies are gettign even more greedy not less
My income has increased substantially over the last 10 years. I'm making more than four times the dollar amount as I used to. By your same argument, games are also less expensive than they used to be.
"expensive" is a term that can apply to an individual's perspective or to an item in the economy as a whole. Both of you are using the term differently, so either agree about what your are going to argue about or drop it.
You're oversimplifying. And you know what, you're still wrong. According to the US Census Bureau, median income in the US has grown from $34k/year in 1995 to $49.8k/year in 2009 (not adjusted for inflation). That's a 46% increase. Meanwhile, games have increased from $50 to $60 in the same period (note that I'm restricting this to CD based games), a 25% increase.
So let's recap. This data is through 2009 and captures the effects of the recession. These are median wages, not means, so they're not biased by extra-ordinary gains to high income earners. We've trimmed the time period to not include cartridge based games which were significantly more expensive. And we're completely ignoring inflation, because for completely unsubstantiated reasons you don't think it matters.
These numbers are about as favorable to your position as we can possibly make them, and they still show that games have gotten cheaper (by your own metric) over the course of the last decade and a half.
For the large majority of people games have gotten cheaper. There's really no other conclusion to be made here.
It's not a non sequitur, it's completely relevant to the discussion. There's an assumption going unspoken in all of these dissenting posts that goes something like this: games are more expensive than they used to be, therefore it's incumbent on game companies to lower the prices.
If games are more expensive because publishers are charging more, then that assumption potentially holds. But if games are more expensive simply because you're making less money, then the one does not necessarily follow the other. It's a distinction that needs to be made.
That's not true at all. At the very least, I am a dissenting poster, and I can assure you I don't feel that way.
What special powers do you have which enable you to know the inner, and yet unspoken thoughts, of "all" dissenting posters? It seems absurd that you could know this.
Did anyone in this thread make such a claim? I don't think so, but I didn't read the rest of the thread especially hard. Did my post you were replying to make such a claim? No, it didn't. That's pretty non sequitur.
I love all the economists in here. A very interesting read and I agree on your points. I'd like to argue (tangentially) that while game prices have effectively decreased in real value, it isn't because they have become deflationary, rather:
1. The tools to develop games have become more mature
2. More competition in the marketplace
3. A bigger marketplace
4. More talent to create games/more schooling etc., which along with the improved software development, leads to more efficient game-making.
I will also go out on a limb and claim that without my previous points, the real price of games should have increased, not decreased, over the past decade, from:
1. Larger demand - more gamers
2. Higher real income - both because of average median income increases, and because I would wager the average age of gamers has shifted higher, and middle-aged men who started gaming and continue now will have achieved wage increases from professional promotion.
I'm sure i've missed a bunch of other factors, but it is definitely something to consider. And as far as inflation goes, it is something most people don't correctly understand and tend to ignore; however, it is very real. It just so happens that the rate of inflation has been historically low throughout the last decade.
Median wage increasing does not give you sufficient data to conclude whether "For the large majority of people games have gotten cheaper". In fact you can't even conclude that for a majority of people based soley on median wage.
If you want, I can give an example income distribution which illustrates this.
Starcrossed
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I remember games like Space Invaders for the Atari 2600 being in the $100 range at the local dept. store at release.
Here is a rather pathological example which demonstrates this:
Consider the income distribution:
$10 - 9 people
$6 - 1 person
$5 - 10 people
Median income is $5-6 depending on your method of calculation.
$7 - 10 people
$6 - 1 person
$1 - 9 people
Median income is $6-7 (higher),but the majority of people have less money.
Thank you for illustrating so well the point I made earlier in this thread (should have taken my own advice).
Let's recap the apparent hurdles one is expected to jump through in order to make an accepted point that game prices are getting cheaper over time. First we must demonstrate that the CPI is an accurate measure of inflation for both game prices and wages. If inflationary effects apply to games but not income, then we must defend the 200 year old concept of opportunity cost. If our arguments are deemed unconvincing there, we must show that without inflationary effects, game prices are a smaller percentage of wages than they were in the past. Most discussions would simply use the average, but since we're all educated folk here at Hard|forum and recognize that high income earners can bias an average, we'll use the median. Oh but wait, there exist some novelty distributions where an overall decrease results in an increase in the median. I'ts quite unlikely that actual income in the US is distributed anything like this (since such an distribution requires a significant decrease at the high end, and if anything the opposite is happening in the US today), but standards here on Hard|forum PC Gaming and Hardware forum are such that we simply cannot accept such inferior evidence.
Meanwhile the minimum required evidence that games are getting more expensive is what exactly? The Gamestop price tag on Teh Halos Reach is bigger than it was on Teh Halos 2?
Our take aways from this thread:
1. People have no understanding of household income, wages, CPI, and inflation on here. $60 today is LESS than $60 yesterday, its called the time value of money and is mesured by CPI. Same thing with the market and the constant "console" bitching that goes on here. Understand basic economics before you begin talking out your ass.
2. Us older guys remember the outrages prices for Video Games back in the day. I remember paying $79.99 for most of my SNES and NES games. My grandmother bought me Super Mario Bros. 3 and it was $63 in what '90? Gaming is relatively cheap now compared to the past. I have played 5 days on BFBC2 on my PS3, taking into account the cost of my PS3 I spent $560 on the system and game. Thats $4.60 an hour of entertainment expenses, I can barely eat at Mickey D's for that, of course I have other games on my PS3 so the amount is accually lower.
3. PrincessFrosty might want to consider putting a few feelers out their if his company hasn't given him a COLA raise every year. You work for a shitty company if this is the case.
1. People have no understanding of household income, wages, CPI, and inflation on here. $60 today is LESS than $60 yesterday, its called the time value of money and is mesured by CPI. Same thing with the market and the constant "console" bitching that goes on here. Understand basic economics before you begin talking out your ass.
2. Us older guys remember the outrages prices for Video Games back in the day. I remember paying $79.99 for most of my SNES and NES games. My grandmother bought me Super Mario Bros. 3 and it was $63 in what '90? Gaming is relatively cheap now compared to the past. I have played 5 days on BFBC2 on my PS3, taking into account the cost of my PS3 I spent $560 on the system and game. Thats $4.60 an hour of entertainment expenses, I can barely eat at Mickey D's for that, of course I have other games on my PS3 so the amount is accually lower.
3. PrincessFrosty might want to consider putting a few feelers out their if his company hasn't given him a COLA raise every year. You work for a shitty company if this is the case.
Actually just finished my masters in econ
Oh I completely agree. However, I think you'll find most of the people in here are still struggling too much with the concept that games have actually gotten cheaper to move on to discussing the reasons why that has happened.
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TheWeazmeister
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^^ this. When developers are releasing games that need to be patched before they can be played, there is something seriously wrong. Game quality has gone so prices should have gone down for inferior product anyhow.
Games are also much, much more complex to create.
Dion
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amen.
adapting an economic formula
game price = demand / supply
demand = the market for a game
supply = the number of similar games available
overall consumer market for games is much larger today than it was way back when, but at the same time there is much more competition on many different platforms. add to that the drop in hardware costs.
anyway all I see in the article is more justification for Kotic to raise prices. Which is fine for me since I am not one of his consumers.
game price = demand / supply
demand = the market for a game
supply = the number of similar games available
overall consumer market for games is much larger today than it was way back when, but at the same time there is much more competition on many different platforms. add to that the drop in hardware costs.
anyway all I see in the article is more justification for Kotic to raise prices. Which is fine for me since I am not one of his consumers.
TheCommander
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Games are cheaper these days and them being 60 dollars is no big deal since the price of games has not risen like everything else. I remember when games were around this price range and higher for the NES and SNES. Actually, I'm surprised games have stayed around 50-60 dollars for a long time.
You are talking about 10-20 years ago.
Back then how many people own this things, and now how many people buying it?
Do some calculation if you have too much time to do name calling...
We are talking about now, NOW... as in within 5-10 YEARS
Learn some basic econ 101 before you talk about something call "Short sighted"
there is something call "Supply and Demand", Price take a huge part of it...
*sigh*You are talking about 10-20 years ago.
Back then how many people own this things, and now how many people buying it?
Do some calculation if you have too much time to do name calling...
We are talking about now, NOW... as in within 5-10 YEARS
Learn some basic econ 101 before you talk about something call "Short sighted"
there is something call "Supply and Demand", Price take a huge part of it...
F=P*(1+i)^n
F is future value, P is present value, i is the interest rate (or in this case the rate of inflation), n is the number of years to compound it over.
The average rate of inflation over both the last 5 and 10 year periods has been 2.6% (2.8% over the last 20). At 2.6% it takes 8 years for a $50 price to inflate to over $60. Not 10-20, 8. That means that when you put down $60 at the Gamestop for Halo Reach, you paid less in real value for it than you did when you paid $50 for Halo 1 in 2001. That's how $50>$60. And that's why he's ridiculing you for spouting off about articles being full of shit and people needing to "learn some basic econ 101".
Points to Itchy for trying to hold back the tide.
Good luck.
Many don't have a basic understanding of money. $1 does not necessarily equal $1.
Also, if your income hasn't kept up with (or hopefully exceeded) inflation: A) Quit and get a better job. They obviously think of you as disposable, it's just too bad you didn't get the hint. And B) get sum lernin'. This will give you a better position to negotiate from in the future.
Good luck.
Many don't have a basic understanding of money. $1 does not necessarily equal $1.
Also, if your income hasn't kept up with (or hopefully exceeded) inflation: A) Quit and get a better job. They obviously think of you as disposable, it's just too bad you didn't get the hint. And B) get sum lernin'. This will give you a better position to negotiate from in the future.
Nobody seems to realize the problem. EA, Activision and Ubisoft are currently trying to hike the price of PC games to $60. The only reason console games are $60 is because of their $10 per-copy licensing fee which we don't have on the PC.
It's greed, plain and simple. When developers do this, I'm happy to obtain their games via other means.
It's greed, plain and simple. When developers do this, I'm happy to obtain their games via other means.
Godmachine
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PC games fall faster in price than just about anything else. Developing games is extremely costly and expensive , more so if its truly top quality. Game prices have risen and fell over the years constantly. But as time rolls on everything gets more expensive as its the natural progress of our economy. EA , Ubisoft and Activision are trying to hike them in some cases but even for those monster publishers its still pretty expensive to make and ship game titles across more than 1 platform.
I don't mind at all pay 60 bucks for a game if its top quality. And If I do mind I wait for a deal on Steam and I get it at the price I want. Patience wins this race.
I don't mind at all pay 60 bucks for a game if its top quality. And If I do mind I wait for a deal on Steam and I get it at the price I want. Patience wins this race.
Most of the $60 games so far are a fucking joke. Medal of Honor, for instance, is a console port - they added a cheap server browser that doesn't even work right and called it a PC version. I don't think I need to explain MW2. AC2 had that awesome DRM everyone loved.
SC2 is so far the only game that could possibly be called worth $60, and I only say that because it's a PC exclusive game that seems to have a lot of content. I did not buy it personally (or try it) as I'm not into that genre.
In any case, if you want $60 for a PC game that sells for the same price on the console, you'd better be providing me something extra for that $10 - mod tools, map tools, etc. Otherwise, as I said, I'm happy to obtain the game via other means. I'm also happy to pay for games, but only at a reasonable ($50) price.
EA , Ubisoft and Activision can hike their prices to whatever they want. All you have to do is buy the deals on steam and you will never run out of games to play. Yeah, you might wait longer than everyone else, but I find very few games I *HAVE* to have.
Gaming is definitely cheaper nowadays than it was 10+ years ago. 10 years ago we didn't have Steam + Direct2Drive + other online distributors offering crazy deals on a large selection of games. You were forced to buy it at full price at your local department store.
The best you could do was walk into your local mall and browse the bargain bins for cheap titles like Deer Hunter. If your patient and can resist buying a game at release you can almost always find it at a significant discount within a year.
I buy more games now than I ever bought before because of companies like Steam and Direct2Drive. They make it so convenient to purchase titles and carry practically any title you would ever want.
You have to look at the picture as a whole, as a whole it is much easier now to buy affordable games than it has ever been in the past.
The best you could do was walk into your local mall and browse the bargain bins for cheap titles like Deer Hunter. If your patient and can resist buying a game at release you can almost always find it at a significant discount within a year.
I buy more games now than I ever bought before because of companies like Steam and Direct2Drive. They make it so convenient to purchase titles and carry practically any title you would ever want.
You have to look at the picture as a whole, as a whole it is much easier now to buy affordable games than it has ever been in the past.
fattypants
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What? I paid $75 for Chrono Trigger at Target the week it came out.
I agree that games are overpriced ($40 would be about right, $35 for digital distribution), but people who think games used to cost less are either kidding themselves or they are children.