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Comment by MajimasEyepatch | Hacker News Reader

Did you feel that way in 2005 when the Xbox 360 was released and $60 was the new standard? Because $60 in 2005 has the same buying power as $97.41 today. This game, in real terms, is cheaper than Xbox 360 games were.

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The 1993 version of Doom was $40 plus shipping and handling. Let's ignore the shipping and handling.

That's $90 today.

I don't play very many video games anymore though I did play the hell out of Doom 30 years ago.

What I have noticed, as an outside observer looking in, about people who play video games today is that they seem to be among the most entitled people on the planet who love bitching about everything.

My theory on this is that gamers are no longer a niche demographic, but rather to some extent a large cross section of the population, having been raised with games and many still playing well into adulthood. Since the Internet is an extremism machine that further amplifies the loudest voices, it’s allowed the actions of the most obnoxious members of the group to become the representative voices in social media.

I think like most groups there is a silent majority getting on with it, and a loud minority picking fights online. That said, every time I have tried to take up a competitive online game with voice chat, I have regretted it.

There are some people who make gaming their whole identity, and when something happens that they don’t like, they act like gaming is a fundamental right instead of a luxury.

I understand this, but the economics of software in general is that you have high upfront costs and then the marginal costs are minimal. Better tooling has helped keep these upfront costs from growing too much (developing a game in 2025 is MUCH easier than in 2005), the distribution costs have shrunk too and the size of the market has exploded. Given these is it really unreasonable for consumers to expect the prices to stay flat?

> developing a game in 2025 is MUCH easier than in 2005

Developing a game is also a lot more expensive in 2025.

Maybe the biggest ones.

The biggest ones are the ones that are going to cost $70-80, which is what we’re talking about.

The economics of video games is that they are enterprise software, at least major releases from large companies are. They have large teams made up of intercommunicating subteams, large budgets, even bigger marketing budgets, corporate mission criticality (failure of a game can break a company or studio), and significant server infrastructure that must be kept online and maintained. These days they're even usually written as customizations to existing frameworks (called Unity or Unreal rather than Java EE or Spring).

So there are significant upfront and ongoing costs to releasing a game like Mario Kart World. $60 per copy just isn't going to cover those costs. The only options are to charge more upfront or introduce purchasable cosmetics and the like to extract that value from the customer another way.

Nintendo pricing is unique because they barely do sales, if a $60 Xbox 360 game was too expensive then you could just be patient and let the price creep downwards all the way to be bargain bin if desired. OTOH the last Mario Kart game from 8 years ago (which was a re-release of a Wii U game from 11 years ago) still retails for $50 to this day, even as the sequel is about to drop.

Zelda OOT was $60 in 1998, that's about $118 today.

Starfox 64 was $80 in 1997, about $160 today.

Consider wage growth adjusted for inflation as well and we discover that disposable incomes have gone up 1% on average in that period.

What is a video game if not an outlet for disposable income?

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