https://ma.fellr.net/@fell/111504811722666890
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You won’t like hearing this, but video games must become more expensive. When I was little, my dad got me a PlayStation 2 for christmas, but without any games. My mum was very generous and took me out to pick two games for it. They were 60€ each. Nowadays you would call those full-price games. But now, 20 years later, a full-price game is still about 60€. If you correct that for inflation, it should really be 86€ now. And that’s not even covering the fact that games have massively increased in visual fidelity, which is much more expensive to produce. If you don’t want games to be littered with microtransactions or ads, then you have to accept that a regular video game must be at least 90€. (98 USD, 77 GBP, 149 AUD, 134 CAD) #Gaming #GameDev #GameDevelopment #Steam #Inflation #Economy #PlayStation
Can’t wait to buy the next installment of insert sports game here/call of duty for 100 USD base, 200 for the dlc, maybe even 300 for the ultimate deluxe extreme version.
Ok now adjust my salary by inflation
my favorite living Russian is FitGirl
It is absolutely true that, adjusted for inflation, video games were more expensive in ye olden days; an NES at launch costed more, inflation adjusted, than a PS5 costs today.
The fatal flaw they’ve committed here is that they’re applying macroeconomic shifts to a microeconomic product. Inflation is a measure of total prices, prices can go down or stay neutral in one sector while drastically increasing in others and hence net inflation. Tech is notorious as a sector where real prices have dropped, as there’s way more factors in prices than “muh polygon count.” The PS2 era was much less competitive than the current era, for example.
ALSO you don’t raise prices to “adjust to inflation,” that’s not how inflation works. Raising prices IS the inflation.
And inflation doesn’t work the same way uniformly across all products. Electronics and entertainment products famously tend to decrease in value in real dollars… hell sometimes even just in absolute terms, pretty sure a computer cost more in 1990 dollars in 1990 than one did in 2005 in 2005 dollars. The strategy for these products is to become profitable by becoming less niche because people tend to have a pretty low tolerance for expensive entertainment products.
