https://ma.fellr.net/@fell/111504811722666890
Text from image:
You won’t like hearing this, but video games must become more expensive. When I was little, my dad got me a PlayStation 2 for christmas, but without any games. My mum was very generous and took me out to pick two games for it. They were 60€ each. Nowadays you would call those full-price games. But now, 20 years later, a full-price game is still about 60€. If you correct that for inflation, it should really be 86€ now. And that’s not even covering the fact that games have massively increased in visual fidelity, which is much more expensive to produce. If you don’t want games to be littered with microtransactions or ads, then you have to accept that a regular video game must be at least 90€. (98 USD, 77 GBP, 149 AUD, 134 CAD) #Gaming #GameDev #GameDevelopment #Steam #Inflation #Economy #PlayStation
Can’t wait to buy the next installment of insert sports game here/call of duty for 100 USD base, 200 for the dlc, maybe even 300 for the ultimate deluxe extreme version.
It is absolutely true that, adjusted for inflation, video games were more expensive in ye olden days; an NES at launch costed more, inflation adjusted, than a PS5 costs today.
The fatal flaw they’ve committed here is that they’re applying macroeconomic shifts to a microeconomic product. Inflation is a measure of total prices, prices can go down or stay neutral in one sector while drastically increasing in others and hence net inflation. Tech is notorious as a sector where real prices have dropped, as there’s way more factors in prices than “muh polygon count.” The PS2 era was much less competitive than the current era, for example.
Also, just, manufacturing has developed a lot. It’s possibly cheaper today for Nintendo to have a Switch cartridge made than it was to have an NES cartridge made back in the day, at least factoring in scale.
Not to mention they’re selling them to a exponentially larger market and are saving buckets of money by not bothering with physical products anymore