Why are video games so expensive these days?
By @edent
· games · 15 comments · 750 words · read ~369 times.
I was looking to buy the latest Zelda game for my wife as a present (Shhh! Don't tell her!) and it was SIXTY BLOODY QUID! For a video game!
That seems extortionate. I remember, when I were a lad, video games cost... wait? Do I remember? Or is it just rose tinted glasses?
I remember saving up my pocket-money for weeks on end, and getting an advance on my birthday money, in order to be able to buy Sonic 2 for the Megadrive. Let's check the archives... Sonic 2 cost about £40 when released.
Hmmm... forty quid in '92, plus inflation, takes us to about... £80.
I remember, a few years later, the huge fuss that was caused by Sega releasing Street Fighter II on the Megadrive. The 24Mb cartridge cost SIXTY BLOODY QUID. Oh, and the new six button controller would set you back £15.
Inflation adjusted, a £15 game controller becomes about £30 today. Which is roughly the same cost as a PlayStation controller.
Why has software become cheaper while hardware peripheral prices have stayed static?
Part of it is that games are now almost purely software. Games used to be delivered on hardware cartridges. These were costly - which led to multiple lawsuits.
Nowadays, most games are delivered over the Internet - the cost of delivering megabytes over the net is miniscule compared to shipping boxes around the world. The remainder are burned onto optical media - which are cheap to purchase and light enough to ship cheaply. Nintendo also sells games on proprietary flash cartridges - just like the olden days - but it is now much cheaper to manufacture physically smaller carts with larger amounts of data.
But lower manufacturing and distributing is offset by the labour it takes to make a game.
Zelda had a staff of 300 hundred people working on it for 4 years
Sonic took 100 people a mere 2 years.
The real reason seems to be the sheer size of the market now. On the day of release - "Sonic 2sday" - Sega sold 750,000 copies of the game in the UK alone. Lifetime sales are estimated to be around 6 million worldwide.
By contrast, two years after launch, Zelda had sold over 12 million copies. As of now, it is close to 30 million copies
And that's it, really. Yes, there are bigger teams working for longer on more complicated games, more amazing graphics, more intricate soundscapes. And I'm sure marketing budgets and executive bonuses have also ballooned. But manufacturing and distributing is now ridiculously cheap. And there are many more people willing to buy games.
That means video game prices have fallen over the years.
But price is not the only metric. We also have to consider value.
The last Zelda game offered about 50 hours of gameplay to the average user..
Sonic 2? A paltry 3 hours - although there's no "save game" functionality, so it is likely to provide entertainment for a lot longer.
Imagine going back to the 1990s and telling your younger self that the future has epic cinematic games, with an orchestral score, which you can play for months, and it costs less than Sonic! Your fragile little mind would explode.
Anyway, I thought I was grumpy with the cost of games. I now realise that I live in a time of embarrassingly cheap entertainment.
Looks like my wife will have a new game to review soon!
@Edent one aspect you didn't take up in your article that does make the games seem too expensive is the actual value.
There are well priced games (based on the cost to make them) that still don't deliver good value for your money.
Indiegames like Stardew Valley is an example that blows pretty much all "Triple-A" titles out of the water when it comes to value.
Not sure it is a fair comparison to make since they really are very different things, but as a consumer of games it is relevant.
@Edent A metric I like to use when considering the cost of a video game and whether it's worth it to me is "£1-£2 per hour of gameplay". I don't necessarily judge that against how long it'd take to beat the main story of the game, the completionist in me likes to do every little side mission if I can, but more "how much replay value can I extract out of this to make it worth plonking £70 on"
@Edent A good personal example of this: I recently bought Gran Turismo 7 on the PS5, at full price (£69.99 on PS Store). I ended up sinking about 50 hours into it in order to complete all of the menu books, do some time trials and circuit experiences, etc... which works out to an hourly cost of about £1.40. I'd be hard pressed to entertain myself for that long for 70 quid, especially since the devs keep adding little bits of content that keep me coming back for more.
also Nintendo first-party stuff is kind of an outlier in that it starts at £60 and more or less stays there - almost everything else I've bought on Switch was deeply discounted in a sale
@Edent I remember games being £2.99 for a Commodore 64 tape...
@Edent Nice! The well loved classic, um, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on the N64 cost £70 in 1997, or £126 now
@Edent @bobthomson70 I remember paying £65 for Street Fighter 2 in the early 90s for the SNES.
@Edent I guess there were always more expensive games, but I always have fond memories of the £2.99 bargain games bins which seem to have fallen by the wayside - sure, free games exist these days (and I'm not talking about ad-supported stuff), but there didn't ever seem to be a huge difference between the standard of budget tapes and more expensive games and I don't think the same can be said of modern games.
@Edent 1K breakout on the ZX81 cost me £2.99 from IJK computers in Uxbridge in early 1982. Lot of money for a 12 year old!
Don't think 400 people worked on developing it though.
@Edent @sinky I’ve previously looked back at adjusted prices for Spectrum games I bought in the early 80s and those were expensive. Later Ultimate ones for example. Of course piracy was absolutely rife at that time so not many originals in the average person’s library of games.
@Edent Ahaha. I have that thought about a lot of things nowadays.
Things that I expect to be about 30€ which are instead about 50€. And then I look up inflation and I'm like oh.
And then I remember that actually, back when those things were 30€ (or £25 as I was in UK then), I thought they were too expensive and should have been more like £18/20€. Ad infinitum...
I think it's just 'getting old'.
@Edent It really is wild how inflation has crept up on us and "expensive" games today are actually cheaper than they were decades ago.
One other thing that contributes to game prices staying stable or dropping in absolute terms is that game manufacturers capture a larger percentage of the retail price these days. Games sold physically have to account for the retailer and distributor's profits so in the past they'd get maybe 50% of the retail price while with digital downloads it's more like 70% to 100% depending on the storefront.
Alex B says:
"Because people pay that much for games."
Well, enough people do, anyway.
I'm not a big fan of cost-per-hour metrics for entertainment: all things being equal is a short-but-enjoyable game (or book, or film) better value than a long-but-dull game? I believe it is.
Instead, my metrics are a) a pint of beer in a pub: about £4 and I'll get about 30 minutes of enjoyment out of it, and won't worry too much if it wasn't my favourite beer ever - I'll just remember not to buy it again, and b) a music CD at £12-16, which lasts about an hour, but good ones have great replay value. Again, if it doesn't immediately grab me, that doesn't worry me - I might not be in the right frame of mind to enjoy it, and if I hang onto it, it might catch me in the right frame of mind to become a favourite later (this has happened on several occasions). My metrics are probably also anchored by the (nominal!) prices I remember paying when I started buying games: £5-6 for a typical game, £10-15 for what we'd now call a "triple A game". And, later, £1.99-2.99 for budget games.
@Edent even "physical" games these days are primarily just keys to allow you to play the game that's been downloaded and installed onto a system - most likely with a day-one patch applied since physical media manufacture has such a long lead time you have to commit to it many months before the actual release. So, you usually end up "shipping" the game twice - once for the media production, once for the digital release - and most players end up downloading it anyway even if they have a disc/cartridge
@Edent no way I can complete sonic 2 in 3 hours... Actually not sure I can complete it at all any more.
Interesting to see the price comparison though, thanks
More comments on Mastodon.