A frequent complaint you hear from gamers these days is the rising cost of games – especially when you factor in the scummy DLC and games-as-service models.
But a running theme of this blog is putting current events in historical perspective. So it must be asked: Are video games that much more expensive than they were back in the day?
The answer might surprise you.
Over time the price of new games increased with a cycle of approximately 5 to 7 years, as shown in Graph 1. The price increase seems to occur during significant upgrades in the console lifecycle (such as when game technology moved into new graphical improvements or when optical drives were added). For example, between 1993 and 2001 the average cost for a new console game was $49.99, but in 2005 with the release of the Xbox 360 and PS3 that increased to $59.99.
Seems like an open and shut case, right?
But wait – there’s more …
It is obvious that prices have increased over time. We should expect this given the prowess of modern consoles, the cost of making games and the rhythm of naturally incurring inflation. In Graph 2, here are those same release prices but adjusted for 2022 price equivalent, using a US inflation calculator.
Inflation ruins everything.
Except for new game prices, which are below their historic average when you adjust for it.
This means that a 1977 Atari 2600 game today would retail at the equivalent of just under $200. As time progresses, the price of games falls in relative terms. Games for the Xbox One and PS4 that retailed for $59.99 back in 2013, today would be sold at $76.30 if game publishers followed inflationary pressures. Even the $69.99 games that released back in 2020 would today be priced at $80.13 (if game prices were kept at a constant pace with inflation). That is a 14% increase.
This means that although the average price of new video games increased in price in absolute terms, they got cheaper over the years in relative terms. Between 1977 and 2020 the average relative price of games declined by almost 2% every year.
In Graph 3, these two prices, the absolute and the relative, are shown side by side.
So it isn’t all bad news.
Not that you should be buying new AAA games, since the big studios hate you.
The even better news is, you have alternatives.
You can buy new games in the spirit of the old ones by going outside AAA. Indie and middle market games are more than half the price of AAA, and they comprise every genre and style the mainstream has forgotten.
You shouldn’t be complaining about AAA prices because, if you had taste in games, you wouldn’t be playing them anyway. You can get much better games for far cheaper prices.
*more than half the price
They’re all uniformly under 30-40 bucks, some as low as a few bucks.
Pizza Tower costs 20 bones and is better than any AAA game released in living memory.
Pizza Tower is a perfect example. This is the sort of game you’d be paying $60 for back on the SNES/Genesis and now you can get a comparable NEW experience for 20 bucks. Which it should be since it isn’t a physical product. Like the difference between ebooks and hard copies.
The industry is just fine. It’s AAA that is the problem.
The base price has definitely went down, but determining the total price relative to the value of the product received.
Most obviously DLC is rampant now. In the 90s you would be paying for a complete game and at worst would have to buy an expansion pack or two later (though if you didn’t, you’d still have a perfectly decent game.) Now games often require DLC to be fun. The most obvious examples of this would be “free to play” games which are often miserable without DLC/micotransactions (and quite expensive once you start paying for those) and fighting games which often ship with a bare bones roster and charge ridiculous prices to fill it out. (Though you could argue that Capcom was experimenting with this idea all they way back in the Street Fighter 2 days.)
But games also just ship with less stuff. This is probably most obvious with console games, where the cost of creating a cartridge was a significant part of the cost of the game. You don’t really lose anything by having the game on a cheap CD instead so we still gained there (though oftentimes you don’t even get the CD now.) But it used to be standard for games to ship at least with manuals, and often quite extensive manuals. These often went quite in depth into the various mechanics of the game (for example the Sim City 2000 manual describes exactly how the game determines where to put traffic, in addition to listing all features of all buildings/zones/constructions that you can purchase.) Now you often do not get a manual at all, meaning both that they do not have to pay for the costs of physically making a manual, but as you usually do not get a pdf manual either they did not have to pay anyone to write it. Its more common for companies to just tell you to check the fan wiki or, if you are particularly unlucky, a reddit or discord. Games also used to commonly ship with maps, story material like journals, reference cards, etc.
When you subtract out the costs of production, the cost of shipping the extra “goodies” and the DLC, are game companies effectively getting less money?
It’s a variant of the potato chip scam. A succession of bean counters at Frito-Lay figure out they can score points with corporate by removing 1 chip from each bag. Spread out over millions of bags, the slight weight reduction saves the company big bucks in overhead.
The problem is, this process keeps repeating until every bag is 2/3 air.
I knew AAA was dead when “Hades”, one of the greatest games ever made, an absolute masterpiece of game design, lost in almost all game of the year awards to corporate skinsuit “The Last of Us 2”.
Honestly I have a real love/hate relationship with the original “The Last of Us”. On its own I do think it’s a good game with a good story. I don’t think it was some revolutionary never before seen masterpiece, and that’s what it was treated as.
It made very little use (not none but very little) of the medium of a game as a storytelling device, and I consider that a real problem. “Hades” in contrast brilliantly uses the game mechanics to inform its storytelling.
My signal that AAA gaming had lost relevance was all the back with Bioshock.
Was Bioshock a good game? Yeah, it was fun with a neat story, though it did have some problems (no good balance around dying, you could largely ignore plasmids, etc.) But it was treated as some huge revolution, when in reality it was just a competently done story based FPS. It didn’t really do anything that original System Shock games, or stuff like Half-Life 1/2, hadn’t done already.
Yeah I am fond of BioShock and I still think it’s good. Some of the environment designs are amazing. But was it revolutionary? No.
“The Last of Us” is even worse, because while it is competently done it really does NOTHING new. Yes, it has a good story. Lots of games did and made better use of the medium as a storytelling device (including BioShock!). That’s nothing new. The gameplay is nothing new. The graphics aged out so quickly it literally got remade within the decade to update the graphics.
“BioShock” wasn’t revolutionary either but it at least gave us one of gaming’s iconic settings in Rapture (contra some I’ve heard I think Rapture mostly earns its reputation as a setting). “The Last of Us” gave us…what? Good enemy AI and a pretty good story? It didn’t really give the medium anything it didn’t already have.
Which isn’t the game’s fault. Again, the game is good. No serious issues. I happily played it and would again. Compared to an indie game like, say, “Mark of the Ninja” though and I’ll take the latter every day.
BioShock excelled as a storytelling vehicle. It had one of the few game endings that have brought a tear to my eye.
BioShock Infinite, on the other hand, was a long escort mission wrapped in anti-Christian nihilism. The soundtrack was the only part that wasn’t overhyped to the rafters.
BioShock Infinite had some good points but the story was loathsome. The best part of it by far was the second DLC, which was a stealth game set in Rapture.
Brian,
I wonder if 8 and 16 bit 2D games will make a comeback. Not for the nostalgia but simply a desire to play challenging games that entertain. Noting more.
xavier
Didn’t that already happen?
Somewhat unrelated but could provide some insight into younger generations as well as falling into the category of strangeness.
The Bionicle dream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYdgYOcFRK8
Personally I have never experienced this despite being in the generation described in the video, and also being into bionicles. (though not to the fanatical levels that some appear to have taken it.) but I do understand the appeal, and am curious to hear the opinions of others who are interested in the debacle of the generations.