It does buck the more recent trend, though! Especially relative to where the og switch launched. And unlike previous generations, we haven't seen price cuts over a console's lifetime. I think it's fair to characterize this as a bump up.
Thank you! People never factor inflation into this conversation. Folks complain about $80 games now, I paid $80 for Knights of the Old Republic 1 way back in 2003!!! It's remarkable how stable game prices have stayed.
I’m sorry but there is too much of this basic CPI inflation calculator stuff being applied to retro game system MSRP nonsense on my timeline tonight to not send me spiraling into an evangelical tweet warpath.
First thing I ever bought with my own money as a kid was the original Nintendo. I don't think I got it until 89 or 90. At the time it was $99 and that felt like a million dollars to me. Had to do chores for months to pay for that.
There really were no cheap games for the NES, whereas now between indie games, freemium games, and a huge back catalog, there are tons of options for under $10, under $20, etc.
not to mention the fact that the actual labor used to create those games and the development costs have skyrocketed in AAA titles. I think one of the Horizon games cost ~$250M to make. And now you can buy it for $40
I'm very much on the "this makes sense with inflation" train but the point of comparison should be to disc based games - that's when the cost of the media for consoles became very low.
So we should instead look at CDs on the PS1 in the 90s which were ~$40. That has kept pace leading to $80 now.
The value proposition for video games over time is absurd. 60$ today buys roughly a billion times as much video game, even though 60$ is worth a fraction as much!
People are presupposing this because Nintendo is selling a region-locked Switch 2 for ~$340 in Japan. The international versions are all region-free (they can play games from any region including Japan). Nintendo hasn't said anything about it officially.
This is more validation of the theory that luxuries used to be expensive while essentials were cheap and now luxuries are cheap while essentials are expensive.
tbh depends a lot on the essential. Big city housing, along with healthcare, childcare and education everywhere? Definitely. But food and transportation is a lot cheaper than it used to be.
I don't think those are the categories. Food (a clear essential) has gotten much cheaper and grad school (clearly not essential) has gotten way more expensive.
The split is really between things that require tons of labor (education, healthcare) and things that don't (software, electronics)
I wish more people would talk about how the thriving aftermarket for used video games was almost entirely fueled by these high prices and the collapse thereof coincides with games getting way cheaper.
This is probably much more to do with the rise in digital game downloads and the move making physical games not much more than unlock keys for a digital product on two of the major consoles for the last decade.
The collapse of the used video game aftermarket was in the 2000s, when the locals and mom n pops shut down in the face of the gamestop conglomerate. Yer thinking more of gamestop/physical games sales demise.
The consolidation of the used game market is not in any way the same as a collapse of the used game market.
I fully subsidized my gaming through college and up until 2013ish between games stop, yardsale subforums on web boards, dedicated websites for gameswaps, and Craigslist.
"The consolidation of the used game market is not in any way the same as a collapse of the used game market."
Yes it is. It's the same as when a walmart moved into a small town area in the 90s. "Consolidation" is not a benign occurrence. Blockbuster was the death of the local video rental store.
This is an ENTIRELY different issue from "games being cheaper collapsed the used games market." If you want to argue about consolidation being bad, do that.
That has nothing to do with the thriving aftermarket for used games well beyond what you're suggesting.
My sister and I had to not only beat SMB before we could get a new game, we had to do it when we could pause it, go get Dad from the garage, and show it to him so he had proof!
To say it was a big day when we finally did it was an understatement (to us, at any rate). We got SMB2. 😐
Yeah, back in the day it was pretty status-coded. If you had multiple consoles and/or a ton of games, then we assumed you had rich(er) parents. And then some kids got 'em because their dads liked to splurge on electronics.
TV sets were even worse. I was watching a clip from a 1983 episode of The Price is Right. They were giving away a 28-inch TV that cost $600 in 1983 dollars! Today, you can get a 40 inch model for $300.
As a parent of a kid who is the same age I was when I got an NES, and would balk at buying a current-gen console for him, this makes me feel stingy as hell
It's the game prices for me. I will wait years before picking a game up - Nintendo marking physical copies of games up to 90 dollars that will have 20 dollar off sales once in a while? No thanks.
the bigger issue for me is on the back end of the console cycle - it used to be that the new thing would be expensive but you could buy the old thing for $100 or $120, but price decreases for current-gen consoles have mostly just stopped, aside from timed sales
A lot more backwards compatibility has helped. For a long time when the new console came out it meant that no more new games were made for the old one and the new one couldn't play new games. Now the new console plays the new and old games so the old console still gets some new releases.
It’s fascinating the number of Nintendo fans who are just now discovering the economy is bad and things are more expensive. The games are gonna be $80USD and the console is $450USD and they’re all like “😮 but that’s not affordable on low or minimum wage???” Like yeah guys, shit sucks right now.
But also interesting that, if adjusting for inflation, the cost hasn’t really changed that much. Even the ps4 which came out in 2016 at $399USD would cost ~$520 in 2025 bucks. Nintendo’s own console have only shifted ~$50 up or down over 40 years when inflation adjusted.
The headline here is a bit misleading: the switch 2 is less expensive than both the NES and SNES and only ~$50 more than the last three major Nintendo consoles all of which would be ~$400 in 2025 $USD. So I guess it’s not even really that much of a price hike, wages are just so far behind inflation.
My first console was a Playstation and it would have been about $600 in today's dollars. Moore's law helps keep the prices fairly stable on a lot of technology things.
why are people acting like this is a crazy price for a NEW console when i just dropped $450 on a USED xbox series x in the fall??? video game consoles are luxuries and are priced as such???
This OG was also $200 in 1985. My first console, the Atari 2600 was $150 in ‘81ish and I only got it bc my family randomly bought some scratch offs for a Friday night and mine won $500 😂
Plus, Nintendo isn’t competing against itself, and even the bundle is reasonably priced compared to the now years-old current consoles from Microsoft and Sony
Try buying a Commodore 64 at launch in 1982 - $595 is just under $2000 today. The price dropped eventually, but I spent my entire childhood never saving up enough to buy one. Although, to be fair that was technically a PC that was as awesome as riding a water slide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uaYHYs4ubw
genuinely i think an under-studied reason for why gaming was the vanguard for the 21st century fascist resurgence is who can afford games and game consoles and what did their parents do for a living
It fucking blew my mind when I found out that shit. I messaged my mom and was like “I did not know how expensive video games were back in the day, thank you/I’m sorry.”
I was wringing my hands over the price of BotW then I saw how many hours I’d spent playing it and how that meant I’d paid like nothing an hour for what was obviously great enternainment seeing as I’d clocked something like 300 hours on it 😅 it came to like 2,5 NOK/hr I think.
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get the new when the snes is new, and buy old games at garage sales and second hand places
The math doesn’t math like you think it maths.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/pm7q5EzCew
It's the game prices that will basically never go on sale that I'm out on.
The highest priced (non-bundled) game in the Switch Store today is $70, or $34 in 1996 dollars (which was about the price of a Gameboy game).
https://bsky.app/profile/televisionaryzw.bsky.social/post/3lltuf6afno2z
So we should instead look at CDs on the PS1 in the 90s which were ~$40. That has kept pace leading to $80 now.
I didn't look up the original MK8 on WiiU, but I'm sure that'd be over $80 today.
Grateful though. Been gaming ever since.
The split is really between things that require tons of labor (education, healthcare) and things that don't (software, electronics)
I fully subsidized my gaming through college and up until 2013ish between games stop, yardsale subforums on web boards, dedicated websites for gameswaps, and Craigslist.
Yes it is. It's the same as when a walmart moved into a small town area in the 90s. "Consolidation" is not a benign occurrence. Blockbuster was the death of the local video rental store.
That has nothing to do with the thriving aftermarket for used games well beyond what you're suggesting.
To say it was a big day when we finally did it was an understatement (to us, at any rate). We got SMB2. 😐
I'm out on Nintendo this round cuz yikes on bike.
But it's locked to Japanese.
The ones you're comparing it to are when Nintendo made dedicated consoles with cutting edge tech. That stopped with the Wii.
Renting a game maybe two weekends in a row and just cramming in trying to beat it
Shining Force II was $80.
Towards the end of that year my friend found a c note in the gutter near his house and bought one the next day.
My current politics are not 100% uninformed by that event.