Price price baby

In this day and age, everyone is looking for ways to save money. Cutting down on their entertainment budget is often the last thing people resort to, but it's still something that's affecting video game developers and publishers alike. There are those who say that games cost too much money, and should be priced to fit this economic climate. Of course, there have always been people who say video games are too expensive. As a child, I often remember reading magazine letters from kids, hoping that one day soon they could purchase their favorite form of entertainment with pocket money alone, and not have to wait for Christmas and birthdays. So do games really cost too much?

Today, video games have pretty much standardized pricing: A brand new title for a current-gen system will set you back $60. This wasn't always the case though. Before the advent of disc-based gaming, everything was on expensive-to-produce cartridges. In the early 90s, a Super Nintendo game could cost upwards of $50, with some reaching $80 or more. If we take the cost of Chrono Trigger back in 1995 and convert it to current day value (using an inflation calculator), it works out to be around $112; about twice as much as we're paying these days.

It makes sense that we would be paying less though. After all, the cost to manufacture a DVD is far less than the cost of a cartridge, especially one with extra graphics chips inside. But while the cost of manufacture may have gone down, the cost of production has sky-rocketed. It's tough to find any solid info on how much games cost to make back in the day, but today a company could easily spend $20 million on a big-budget title, when you factor in things like marketing. So if the cost to produce has gone up so much, shouldn't we, in fact, be paying a lot more for new games?

We also get more value for our dollar these days. Sure, if I really wanted to, I could have played Sonic the Hedgehog for dozens of hours, but most old games can be finished in far less time than that. There have always been longer titles, such as RPGs, but the majority of 8 and 16-bit games are only a few hours long from start to finish. Of course, the structure of games has changed over the years. Challenge once came from having to start right from the beginning upon dying, where as these days every most every game allows you to save your progress and continue from where you left off. Even bearing this in mind though, most new titles are at least 10-20 hours long, which can be extended thanks to harder difficulties, achievements, and online play. In fact, online play can infinitely extend the life of a product. There are plenty of people on my XBL friends list who still play Call of Duty 4 all the time, having gotten more than a year's worth of entertainment out of that $60 purchase.

So what if we forget about what games used to cost, and instead just think about gaming next to other forms of entertainment. If we consider that many people will happily spend $10 to go and see a two-hour movie (which doesn't even include the cost of concessions), then spending $60 on a game that could last you dozens of hours doesn't really seem too bad. Sure, there may be a much bigger initial cost, but a good game could entertain for weeks, months, or even years, depending on how much you enjoy it. If you were to go to the movies just once a week, it would still end up costing $40 a month, and this is assuming you went alone and never bought any snacks. This would also only provide entertainment for a couple of hours each Friday night, where as that new game could provide fun throughout the rest of the week too.

Publishers clearly understand that not everyone is happy with our current pricing structure, though. One way to combat this is to drop the cost of games once they've been out for a few months, or offer them on sale for a limited time. Then there are companies who produce free downloadable content which can extend the life of a game and keep people playing it for longer. But probably the biggest way companies can entice low-income families is through cheaper-to-make downloadable games. These days, consumers have a wide variety of brand new games to buy for a large number of systems. Xbox 360 has the Xbox Live Arcade, with retro and original games for as little as $5. The Playstation Network is similar, offering cheap titles for both PS3 and PSP. Even Nintendo's WiiWare is starting to take off, with some very interesting-sounding games that can acquired for next-to-nothing.

So when we factor in inflation, production costs, value-per-dollar, and the fact that publishers are offering lower-cost downloadable games, is $60 really too much for a brand new, high-budget title? I personally don't think so, and worry that lowering that cost would result in lower-quality games in the future. In fact, with every new console generation, we're only going to see increases in production costs, so that $60 price will probably go up at some point. It's honestly surprising that the standard cost of a game is only $10 more than it was on Playstation 1, more than ten years ago, but we can't expect publishers to keep it that low if we want games to keep getting better. I know that increased cost doesn't necessarily make a better game, but people always expect more realistic graphics, sound, and physics with each new console generation, all of which take money to develop.

In the end though, we have to accept that gaming is a unique art form that offers thrills no other type of entertainment can provide. There will always be people who argue that the cost is too high, but video games are providing countless hours of fun to millions of people all over the world, and how can one really put a price on that?