Age of the Geek

+10 Resistance to Economic Theory
     Preparing for the arrival of the Nintendo Switch has me thinking again about the unusual nature of the video game industry, particularly when it comes to pricing.
     As I've noted in the past, the retail price of video games has been strangely resistant to basically all economic factors. Inflation hasn't caused prices to go up. A larger market and ever increasing competition hasn't caused them to go down. Games are far more expensive to develop than they were decades ago, but they are far cheaper to produce and distribute. In 2005 the standard price of games jumped from $50 to $60. Gamers feared that would be the start of a regular trend in gradual increases. Instead, it seems that the entire industry is centering itself around keeping the standard retail price of games at $60 at all costs.
     But something has to give somewhere and even that $60 benchmark has become more flexible in recent times. In fact, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find a complete game at that exact price point. For your high-profile mainstream titles, $60 is often just the starting point.
     Capcom's "Resident Evil 7" released last week at the standard retail price of $60 and while you can get a satisfying experience for that amount, the full experience will cost you an extra $30 for all of the upcoming downloadable content.
     Other games rely on smaller, but more frequent transactions. In Blizzard's "Overwatch," for example, you don't have to spend money on anything once you've bought the base game. Once you've bought the game, you get all the new maps and characters forever. However, for just a dollar, you can buy a box with four random cosmetic items. Many players, myself included, have already put more money into these boxes than the initial cost of the game itself.
     This is the new normal for triple-A titles. $60 for the base game, with the option to buy extra content later.
     I've long been concerned about the inherent dangers of this practice. It's proven too tempting for game developers to slice completed content out of a game, only to sell it separately down the road. That practice is still an issue, but it's one that we might just have to accept as a concession to keep the base price of games low.
     Consumers should always resist practices that lower the value proposition of a product, but let's face it, we're getting a steal these days.
     "The Legend of Zelda," released in 1986, was developed by eight people. The game's soundtrack is little more than a series of beeps on a 20 second loop, every word of dialogue in the game can be transcribed to a single piece of paper, and it can be beaten in an evening by even a casual player.
     For "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild," the number of flute players performing the game's orchestrated soundtrack probably exceeds the total development team of the original NES game. To say nothing of the programmers, artists, voice actors, and game designers that have contributed to the title over the last four or five years.
     The original Zelda game retailed at $49.99 in 1986, which amounts to $109.47 in today's dollars. "Breath of the Wild" will retail at $59.99 when it comes out next month. Nowhere else are you going to find that kind of stability in pricing.
     A comic book in 1986 cost 75 cents. Today they cost $3.99.
     The average movie ticket price in 1986 was $3.71. Today it's $8.65.
     So if getting the "complete experience" of a video game really costs $90 instead of $60, maybe that's not so out of line. Especially since it's optional to begin with.
     Granted as a PC gamer that pays on average $6 for a video game, rather than $60, it still seems like a pretty high price point. But the games I usually buy aren't the ones with million dollar budgets. They're smaller games, generally made by a handful of people with rudimentary resources. The kind of games that would cost $49.99 thirty years ago.
     In the end, it's all about value proposition. The price of games may be the same, but the value continues to grow.
     When you look at it that way, it's amazing how inexpensive a hobby gaming has become, even if my wallet may beg to differ.
     Travis Fischer is a newswriter for Mid-America Publishing and generally ends up playing an old Sonic the Hedgehog game anyway.