Why the 'games are cheaper than ever argument' is complete bullshit.

[Fonejackerjon]

Ever here on games sites how games are cheaper than ever? how they havent gone up in price? and some website say games should now cost about $100.

I have one word for that bullshit!

Consumer entertainment products anywhere other than the games industry ACTUALLY reduce in price over the years to come.

Remember how much VHS videos used to cost? about £30+ Ex-rental tapes used to cost £100 or more, I shit you not.


Remember CD's? Whole albums used to cost over £20 singles used to cost £4. Now full albums are less than £10 and singles cost under a £1. The price of consumer electronics decrease in every single other sector except games, its total shit.

So the next time you hear this argument you can say that, historically, movies, music and any other entertainment medium decrease in price rather than increase. So in other words Gaming in the only industry that still has yet to evolve.

 

[tippy2k2]

That may be technically correct but games ARE cheaper than ever...as long as you're willing to wait about nine months.

Except for Madden 25 (which I got $20 off for buying right away), I don't think I've paid more than $20 on a game in quite a long while.

"Why tippy2k2, of course that's the case when you're living in 1999 and buying Xbox and PS2 games!" I hear the voices in my head saying.

Well that is wrong voices in my head; here are a few of the games I just bought recently (and this is all on console, I can't imagine what this list would look like if I played with STEAM)

Assassins Creed 4 for $15 on Amazon (10 months old)
Metro Last Light for $10 on Xbox Live (1 year 1 month old)
Saints Row 4 for $25 on Black Friday at Walmart (less than 3 months after release)
Batman Arkham Origins for $25 on Black Friday at Walkmart (less than 3 months after release)

And those are just my own personal examples of games I found for cheap. Games start at $60-70 but they plummet in price so quickly that unless you absolutely HAVE to have the game right away, gaming is incredibly cheap.

 

[Fonejackerjon]

That may be technically correct but games ARE cheaper than ever...as long as you're willing to wait about nine months.

Except for Madden 25 (which I got $20 off for buying right away), I don't think I've paid more than $20 on a game in quite a long while.

"Why tippy2k2, of course that's the case when you're living in 1999 and buying Xbox and PS2 games!" I hear the voices in my head saying.

Well that is wrong voices in my head; here are a few of the games I just bought recently (and this is all on console, I can't imagine what this list would look like if I played with STEAM)

Assassins Creed 4 for $15 on Amazon (10 months old)
Metro Last Light for $10 on Xbox Live (1 year 1 month old)
Saints Row 4 for $25 on Black Friday at Walmart (less than 3 months after release)
Batman Arkham Origins for $25 on Black Friday at Walkmart (less than 3 months after release)

And those are just my own personal examples of games I found for cheap. Games start at $60-70 but they plummet in price so quickly that unless you absolutely HAVE to have the game right away, gaming is incredibly cheap.

Good points it just annoys me that people think that $60 is ok to pay for a video game in 2014. A single piece of entertainment costing $60 just doesn't make sense, Yes GTA and Skyrim might be worth it but lets face it 90% of games are crap.

 

[tippy2k2]

Good points it just annoys me that people think that $60 is ok to pay for a video game in 2014. A single piece of entertainment costing $60 just doesn't make sense, Yes GTA and Skyrim might be worth it but lets face it 90% of games are crap.

And to be fair to your argument, the fact that they do drop so quickly could be a point in your favor (products don't drop in price like that if the demand is still there).

I have zero problem with how games are priced because I have no problem waiting for a game (I probably do full price on one to three games per year). The market will take the games at $60 so they will be priced at $60. If the market would accept games at $100, the games would be priced at $100. I just wait until the game drops to a price that I deem acceptable.

 

[Lilani]

What web sites say games SHOULD cost $100?

And the prices of VHS tapes is a completely different situation. The reason tapes cost so much when they initially came out is because they were new. The same thing happened to CDs, you said it yourself. They used to cost a lot, now they cost nothing. You simply left out the other half of the VHS story--when they became common their price dropped as well, and now that they are obsolete they are worthless.

The same thing is happening with CDs. Fewer people are buying physical CDs, they're all buying digital. Whole albums still cost $10 to $20 on digital, and singles only cost less because iTunes set the standard for digital at $1.99 for a song (up from $1.29, which is still up from their original price of $.99 for an individual song). The only reason you can pick up a CD for $4 at the store is because they're trying to get rid of them. CDs take up shelf space and they want them out of there. With digital there is no such problem with shelf space, so often you'll find an album for pennies at the store and the same album will be $10 on iTunes.

As for games, yeah prices are going up, but so are costs of development for AAA games. It used to be very small teams working on games, now they have international teams of thousands of people working on games that cost millions just to CREATE. As the cost of AAA games go up, other companies start charging more for their games too because the bar has been raised for them. Smaller games cost much less, and there are lots of things like the Humble Bundle and GoG and Steam which provide the sorts of deals that brick and mortar stores are unable to provide because unlike online they don't have unlimited stock.

So yeah prices have gone up, but comparing modern games to VHS and CD is just silly because while VHS and CDs are being outmoded, modern games are still MODERN, and thus worth a lot. The only thing that makes the comparison work is if you compare last-gen games to VHS and CDs, and that makes them look a lot more alike. Retailers have outright stopped carrying or buying back anything PS2 or older. Excepting classic or rare games, those older games are extremely cheap in the places that do sell them. The only reason their prices might remain higher than old VHS or CDs is because unlike video or audio, it is very difficult to convert a game to a newer or more durable format unless the studio officially ports and re-releases the game on digital markets or makes an HD remix.

Old movies are easy to convert to up-to-date formats, old games are very difficult to port. So while the Disney film Song of the South hasn't been officially released on tape in its entirety, people have converted what versions they do have (theater copies, etc) and there are places it has been put online. However, there was an old game I remember playing in my childhood which was called Claw. It was a platformer, and it was cool, but it was only on Windows 98 and now it is gone forever. I don't believe anyone has ever bothered emulating it, so that game is gone forever.

Some films are like that too, but again converting film to digital is a much simpler task than emulating a game that was designed to run on an OS that was outmoded more than a decade ago.

 

[Angelblaze]

ummm...op... I don't think your looking at everything right.

 

[veloper]

Nope, games have become cheaper, even if SOME other products have become even cheaper still.

The pricetag for new games has remained mostly the same, but the value of the dollar or the euro goes down by a couple percent each year on average.
It's all about what people are willing to pay for games anyway.

 

[josemlopes]

Games have become more expensive to make over time while music remains the same (I suppose).

And you can still find games being sold cheaper like Sniper Elite 3 or Wasteland 2, they came out costing around 40$ I think. Add to that the huge amount of games that come out costing less then 20$ like Insurgency and Road Redemption.

 

[StriderShinryu]

It's all about what people are willing to pay for games anyway.

This is largely where we're at right now. Most gamers know that prices are somewhat variable, with all but a select few titles getting sales (aka those by Nintendo) within months of release and with "complete" editions including all extra content releasing after that. If someone is okay with paying full release price for a game (and I certainly do sometimes) then I don't see the issue as that clearly doesn't stop the prices from going down later anyway.

As for the prices now compared to then question, they are definitely cheaper now at least here in Canada. I remember paying upwards of $100 for many games on the SNES and they really didn't go down in price much at all. Largely I would say that games have pretty much stayed in same relative price range since the PSX era though.

 

[MirenBainesUSMC]

I don't mind if an initial game breaks out the gate at 60.00. The development teams, employees, and the various entities that are out there to make profit...well they need to make a profit so I'd say its a fair.

As most posters have already said, it rarely keeps up at 60.00, especially when you have online retailers whom have used market vendors. Even if the government allowed states to tax internet sales, its still a bargain vs the brick and mortar.

I ocassionaly peek to see what the average retailers ( Walmart,Gamestop, Target, ect) sell titles for and it makes me chuckle inside because it is too expensive based upon the deals you can get elsewhere.

There's also always that percentage of consumers that buy a game whom may either beat it in a week, or play for a few hours to decide that it " sucked" and automatically places it for sale/takes it back.

Lastly - there was a discussion before the Xbone One and Ps4 came out that the individual games would be priced around 70.00 to 80.00 a piece and the game community/blogs/online community went ballistic. This topped with Microsoft's disastrous PR in which they said there would be no used game market for its product. Make no mistake that Sony would likely want to do this to but since they saw Microsoft get it first, they quietly declined. When you start reaching 70.00 to 80.00 a piece, its obvious that some people whom would buy say 3-10 games a year would most def drop to maybe 2 or 3, since the world economy isn't too well. This would also have put much tougher scruitney upon the game developers where they would have to provide top quality or get clobbered in the market. So they settled at 60.00. If people were willing to pay 100.00 a game, they would indeed pump that up to probably 110.00 just to see if they could get more profit out of the deal.

There is nothing wrong with that in the end - if you price yourself out of the market ( Xbox 1), you loose. Some say both Sony and Microsoft make the consoles at a loss and that their really just interesting side-ventures aside from their core business of electronics, computer software and gadgets/appliances.

 

[Bad Jim]

There is also the fact that most games from the 90s had production values similar to modern indies. What was $60 then would be a $15 indie game on XBLA today.

The latest books, music, movies etc were about as good then as they are now because the markets were mature.

 

[MysticSlayer]

Snip

You're leaving an important part about the argument out: It requires taking inflation into consideration. As one poster has already pointed out, there were plenty of $60 games even back in the SNES era, but today, after inflation is taken into account, those would cost over $100. The NES games, many of which were around $40, would cost $80 today, yet we are still paying only $60 for games that have significantly better technology behind them and are many times much larger in terms of content. Now, I'm not entirely sure if games are cheaper now than they were during the PS2 era, but they are significantly cheaper now than they have been in the past, at least when inflation is taken into consideration.

There's also the whole situation that things like Steam and Humble Bundle often allow us to purchase games for significantly less than we normally would be able to without them.

 

[MirenBainesUSMC]

I mean the Witcher III can be pre-ordered on Steam for sometimes 10-20% off if you've been following it.

 

[Something Amyss]

The real issue is that it's what people are willing to pay and what the industry insists is the correct price (or too low).

Music prices were kept artificially high in the 90s. The same was true in the 80s with cassettes and the 70s with vinyl. The major turning point was when people stopped buying 25 dollar albums for one song. While they blamed it on piracy, I think it's more likely a generation of consumers just stopped caring as much (especially since the trend started a couple years before P2P became a thing). Digital music would then provide an a la carte scenario which would bring many people back into the fold (though I prefer full albums, even with digital).

Well that is wrong voices in my head; here are a few of the games I just bought recently (and this is all on console, I can't imagine what this list would look like if I played with STEAM)

Once you factor in sales/discounts/used games/whatever, I've only paid more than five dollars for a CD once in the last year. I will be paying ten dollars for another in a few days, so make that two if you really want. This kind of comparison is rather useless.

And the prices of VHS tapes is a completely different situation. The reason tapes cost so much when they initially came out is because they were new. The same thing happened to CDs, you said it yourself. They used to cost a lot, now they cost nothing. You simply left out the other half of the VHS story--when they became common their price dropped as well, and now that they are obsolete they are worthless.

You do understand that before games were released on common media, this was still an issue. As such, a lot of the comparisons are comparing a time with a shift to standard media to a point where expensive and proprietary carts were being used. Media is still a strong element here.

Much of the rest of your criticism is valid, but doesn't necessarily explain the price discrepancy. Converting old games only works if we're talking about old games (which actually often cost less for the ports and HD remakes and whatnot), and many movies are remixed and remastered taking countless man hours to accomplish. This can take longer than a game's development cycle. Hell, some CDs take longer to remaster than a game's development cycle.

Games have become more expensive to make over time while music remains the same (I suppose).

Music may not have increased in cost by the same level, but the cost to produce big acts has gone up significantly.

 

[Something Amyss]

You're leaving an important part about the argument out: It requires taking inflation into consideration.

His point is that with inflation, these other media have still managed to decrease in price. And inflation is only one factor. One, of course, that only works as an argument here if you don't compare apples to apples.

 

[josemlopes]

Games have become more expensive to make over time while music remains the same (I suppose).

Music may not have increased in cost by the same level, but the cost to produce big acts has gone up significantly.

Then that is what needs to be compared, not singles. How much would a consumer pay for a big act back then compared to now?

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Games are cheaper but your money is worth less. Adjusting for inflation you're probably paying $40 for a brand new game in yesteryear's dollars. So in a sense they're cheaper since brand new games cost about the same numbered price back in the day.
Hell I remember when the voice packs for Wing Commander II came out (what people would call DLC today or in some circles a ripoff) it was about $30 new. That would be a $50 DLC that amounted to just voice acting today. Imagine paying that?
Amazing isn't it?

 

[Bad Jim]

Games have become more expensive to make over time while music remains the same (I suppose).

Music may not have increased in cost by the same level, but the cost to produce big acts has gone up significantly.

Led Zeppelin were touring in their own private Boeing 720 passenger jet. I doubt costs have gone up significantly from that sort of extravagance. Games, on the other hand, have seen production costs rise by 3-4 orders of magnitude.