Game prices about to rise?

Fifty bucks is already a lot of money, and a price hike won't do much to expand the market. In fact, it might discourage casual gamers from buying anything but a few major titles each year, and encourage them to copy instead. Sure, the Maddens and the GTAs will keep selling regardless, but any title not supported by a well-established franchise and twenty million in marketing expenses will likely suffer an ignoble death through casual piracy.

The article is wrong about a few things, however. First off, inflation hasn't affected all media. With the advent of DVD, for example, movies have become cheaper than ever, and prices keep dropping. Volume and availability are key, and with major new releases sometimes retailing for fifteen to twenty dollars, sales quickly reach multiple millions. In fact, since DVD revolutionised the home video market, box office numbers are often dwarfed by 'ancillary' profits. (In certain cases, a cinema release is merely used as a springboard - and advertising campaign - for the eventual DVD release.)

Secondly, does anyone recall the prices of SNES, Sega Genesis, and Nintendo 64 cartridges back in the late 80s and 90s? Highly anticipated triple-A titles sometimes retailed for more than sixty dollars, especially those that included an extra chip on the cartridge - like Star Fox and Virtua Racing. I remember paying an enormous amount of money for Street Fighter II on my SNES. And let's not forget the decidedly niche SNK NeoGeo console, where ROMs would cost upwards of hundreds of dollars.

On the flip side, computer games in the 80s ranged from less than ten dollars for tape based Commodore 64 games, to almost a hundred bucks - at least in Norway - for big titles on floppy disks, back when that medium was a relative novelty.

Point is: games haven't always cost $50. That's not a universal truth. Since the advent of the CD-ROM console in the mid 90s, however, the prices have admittedly remained quite stable.

Cheap DVD media, larger volumes - big console titles often ship in the millions - and the increasingly mass-market targeting of games mean that the prices should go down, not up. The ideal price point for 'big' games ought to be between $29 and $39. For thirty buckaroos, I wouldn't hestitate to pick up a game just for the heck of it. At forty, I'm still willing to experiment. At fifty, however, I pick and choose with much more care, and I often end up waiting for the titles I'm not one hundred percent sure about (or the ones that have received excellent reviews across the board) to drop in price.

At $60? Well, I probably won't be buying as many games as I used to. And that's not a good thing.  ¶ 01:24