Today's reminder
Game prices have not even remotely kept up with inflation over the past 30 years. They SHOULD cost more just with inflation, without even considering what game budgets are in 2024 compared to what they were in 1995 etc.
Cute.
Average American salary in 1995 was $27,845.
Average American salary in 2023 was $59,428.
Adjusting for inflation, this means wages have stagnated over the past thirty years. (That's actually pretty bad).
A new Triple AAA game cost around $66.99 at launch in the US (Super Mario 64 as the example).
A new Triple AAA game costs $70.00 at launch in the US today.
This means retail games cost about half of what they cost in 1995.
The video game industry brought in approximately $33b in revenue (adjusted), while in In 2022, it was $182b in revenue.
Add this up, and you'll see that, despite retail games costing
half what they used to, and workers have literally no additional money to spend, gaming companies somehow make
554%
more money. This is because your terrible "reminder" doesn't equate for:
- Digital delivery and fatter margins
- Steam
- Xbox Live
- Game Pass
- Predatory monetisation practices
- Overpriced DLC
- Content cut-and-sold as DLC
- Repeatable microtransactions (XP boosters)
- One-off microtransactions (cosmetics)
- Loot boxes
- Consumer expansion
- More people buy and play games today than ever before
- Mass consolidation
- Fewer game companies splitting a larger pie
Games have been more expensive for a long time. The idea that games "need" to be more expensive is fueled solely by companies "needing" to make more money. They can't make less profits than last quarter, or their stock goes down, so they need to make more profits every year forever. That's obviously impossible, but they'll keep the lie going until they've crashed the industry. So, easiest way to make more money is just take more money from consumers while giving nothing back. But they already did that, so now the industry has reached a point where there's no more money left to steal, and they don't know how to innovate. So, we get corporate apologists riding in with this kind of non-sense: "games are too cheap!" while publishers rake in billions in
profits every year.
Publishers got addicted to free microtransaction money, now they need another golden goose - and there isn't one. It's not up to us to bail them out.