Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

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Oh wow. This is delightful.

As a younger(?) (24) person I am astonished at how many options there were for different home computers back then. Computers computers computers. I wonder what the margins were like back then compared to today (HP and Dell have around 5%, and PCs arent even the most lucrative in % parts of their biz). Does anyone know where we could find such numbers?

I highly encourage people looking at prices to adjust for inflation to get a feel for things. Here's one such calculator: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

Word processing for $200 ($450), crappy games for $10-20 ($22-44 today), real games (page 48) for $15-35 ($33-78!!!). I feel spoiled rotten.

Today people throw better-than-the-best-games-in-this-catalog at us for free. For a lark. For a laugh cause they were bored and made something in Flash or Canvas that is fun and incredible and we click and move on.

I think its interesting how little game prices have moved since the cost of making a game has gone up so astronomically. I remember a lot of people balking when the change for A-titles went from 50 to 60 dollars, but in terms of money invested, that's so damn cheap.

I wonder if that contributes to modern game-makers hesitation to pursue really innovative titles. Common A-titles when I was growing up were things like The Secret of Monkey Island, a hilarious point-and-click adventure game, and Warcraft/Starcraft. Both of these genres are nearly dead in the mainstream except for names with a lot of clout behind them (Starcraft) and indie developers.

Big publishers, it seems, want to stick to the (admittedly very popular) formula of shooters where you fight Russians, Arabs, Aliens, and Zombies.

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Also note that not a single mouse (or pointing device of any kind) was mentioned in the catalog.

I actually don't find it very surprising that game prices haven't moved. Software is essentially a fixed cost affair. So although the cost of making a game is higher than in 1983, so too is the potential audience of the game. The higher costs can be spread out among the larger audience.

If you see paid iPhone games, for example, part of the reason prices are so low (generally $1-$5) is because the cost/complexity of making an iPhone game is very low, whereas the audience is extremely large.

A mid-80s era issue of Computer Shopper magazine is worth looking at. Giant magazine, literally hundreds of pages of ads for gear. Man, I loved those things.

Byte back in the early 80s too. Page after page of esoteric gear. So many different kinds of computers before the PC completely dominated the world.

The other really cool magazine was early 90s, I think. Midnight Engineering, run by a guy named William Gates (different one), which was all about tech entrepreneurship from the very bottom up. Guy printed the magazine himself, bought this huge industrial printing press. His columns on getting it up and running were one of the best parts of the magazine. Also, a running theme was that patents were useless for the little guy since you couldn't afford the costs of protecting them.

Same as it ever was.

Contemporaneous article on Midnight Engineering and the printing press: http://www.westword.com/1995-10-18/news/one-s-company/

More fun with Byte here:

ftp://helpedia.com/pub/archive/temp/Byte/

I'm curious why you didn't mention the $4999 computer ($11110 after inflation), which is the very first price you see. I'd guess that the reduced cost of hardware is at least one factor in why game prices haven't increased. Less because it makes the cost of producing a game lower, and more because it makes the market larger for selling the game into.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64, "each C64 had an estimated production cost of only US$135" while they were sold for $595.

That was probably the biggest margin as Commodore was fully vertically integrated.

Commodore - A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall covers the Commodore side of the "Troika of 77" (Tandy / Radio-Shack, Apple and Commodore" who made up the bulk of the volume sales in the early home computer market).

Commodore's ongoing hunt for vertical integration and their huge margins in periods were definitively impressive, and the numbers you cite probably indicate their peak margins (at least in percent)

But Commodore rode waves - they kept getting close to crisis and then rode through it once they had their next temporarily high margin product for a while, then their margins would get squeezed either by their competition or their own decisions, as their product lines were aging and they were too slow to replace them. It happened with the PET, the Vic-20, the C-64, and eventually did them in with the Amiga.

With the Vic-20 and C-64 it was actually Tramiel (Commodore's founder) himself that dropped margins massively to force Texas Instruments out of the home computer market.

The $595 price lasted for a very short time, as Commodore went through wave after wave of slashing VIC-20 prices (eventually to under $100) and C-64 prices. With a $100 trade-in offer, the C-64 dropped as low as $300 in 1983, and at Spring CES they dropped their prices to dealers to $200-$250...

The result was that TI lost $100 million a quarter, and was forced to quit the home computer market entirely. Commodore was still making money at those prices, but obviously their margins had been slashed massively, and so again R&D suffered.

Towards the end their vertical integration was pretty much gone - Commodore Semiconductor Group had seen so little investment that they were not competitive at all, and more and more of Commodore's chip manufacturing was done by partners.

BTW, I had a TI-99 4/A. It was an okay machine, but not part of the troika, and I think I was the only kid I knew with one. I do remember when TI decided to get out of the business and do a fireside sale of all its inventory. The computer which had been so expensive ended up under $99. But I still couldn't afford the expansion box which was needed to handle a disk drive.

Also, while it's been covered in HN before, you might be interested in Jimmy Maher's ongoing series on the history of interactive fiction, including how it's tied into the mainframe hardware of the 1970s and micro hardware of the 70s and 80s. It's at http://www.filfre.net/ .

Toward the end of their popularity (but before the C-128), I remember buying new (or packaged as) C-64's at Target for just above $100.

Up until 1998 or so, PCs regularly yielded 20%+ margins. I basically paid for college hocking PCs at retail 20 hours a week. Corporate sales guys made very nice livings selling PCs.

Looking on the "New! Monster Maze", the description reads, "By the way, they sometime shot through the walls!". Not sure if this a bug or a feature. Some one who played would be able to tell the experience.

Super Mario 64, and I think most of the other top-end N64 exclusives, had a $70 MSRP in 1996 dollars. According to that calculator, that's $99 in 2011 dollars.

I can't believe how cheap games are today.

I remember I wanted to buy Zaxxon for the Colecovision, and it was $59.99. This was in 1983. It seems that the top games are always $60. Of course, $60 in 1983 dollars is $140 in 2012 dollars. That's a lot of money for a faux-3D sidescroller!

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