If you've ever been around forums, especially game and pop culture based ones, there is a complaint that runs through them all. That complaint is that video games and DVD's are too expensive these days, and you know what, every time I hear that, I think about how short our collective attention span is.
This is for North America by the way, because I know people who live in other regions get utterly reamed by local pricing. I just thought I would note that.
For instance, I remember back in the early 1980's, my parents bought my sister
Centipede for the 2600 and it was 50 dollars. In today's dollars, that is $110.
And after the video game crash, I was getting games like
Defender,
E.T. and the like out of electronic department bins for 2-10 dollars, or 4-20 dollars today.
In 1984, my father bought a used copy of
Apocalypse Now on VHS for $80, which today would be 164 bucks! I mean, you can buy a two-disc DVD set from Amazon of that for $15? I think he paid 60-70 for
Raiders of the Lost Ark around that time too.
And after Christmas 1986, I got a Nintendo that didn't have
Super Mario Brothers, so I had to go and buy that for 35, which is $67.85 by today's standards. And I remember getting a number of games in that system's lifespan at 50-60 dollars, even near the end of its lifespan, so there were titles I was paying nearly 100 2008 dollars for.
About that same time, I remember going out and getting a VHS copy of
Ghostbusters 2 for around 30... which is nearly 50 today.
Skipping ahead, I bought
Final Fantasy III for the Super Nintendo for 65 dollars, which is about 95 today (though this is one of those rare cases where it is something in the gaming world that has kept its value).
Now that you've gotten the basic gist of what I am doing, I can speed things up to get to my point.
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for the Sega Saturn, January 1997: 70 dollars = $93.50
FIFA 2000 for Playstation, December 1999: 60 dollars = $74.31
The Matrix Reloaded (Widescreen) on DVD the week it was released in 2003: 28 dollars = $31.67
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the Playstation 2, May 2005 60 dollars = $65.62
So when you look at game prices, they have basically stayed pretty numerically consistent for decades. I mean since 1982, books have gotten more expensive, going to the movies has gotten more expensive, cable prices have gotten more expensive... but electronic entertainment has pretty much cost the same amount of money numerically (and thus, been slowly getting cheaper by standard inflationary terms). Aside from a 5-10 dollar buffer here and there, game prices have been remarkably consistent over the years, and considering the cost of development for interactive entertainment has grown so much over the past few software generations, it is remarkable that the price point has remained so consistent (because think about it...
E.T. was developed in 5 weeks by basically one guy).
And for everything that Blu-Ray offers and some of the prices of those discs online, well, I don't think they are asking too much. I've seen movies that just came out in the format being offered for under 20 dollars online... which is competitive with a lot of formats when they were this age, and a down right steal compared with how much VHS was at this point in its lifecycle.
So is that how spoiled we've become... that a product that in comparison with its brethren, no scratch that, in comparison with almost every other thing out there, hasn't really substantially increased in price over a long period of time is yet, still somehow overpriced? How does that work again?
Note: I am certainly not adverse to lower prices... I am just saying people need a little perspective when looking at this whole issue.
Tags:
pricing, video games, movies, dvds, vhs, blu ray, atari, nintendo, sony, playstation, sega saturn, super mario, centipede, final fantasy III, grand theft auto, san andreas, ultimate mortal kombat 3, apocalypse now, raiders of the lost ark, matrix reloaded, fifa 2000, ghostbusters 2
