That video seems to be talking mainly about consoles, specifically how most people would buy them after price drops, and how price drops dont happen as much or dont go down nearly as much.
It seems to ignore the fact that Switch 2 is a new system so talking about price cuts is premature and apples-to-oranges at this point.
But THIS conversation was about games, I thought. And price drops happen MUCH more frequently especially on digital storefronts nowadays (excluding Nintendo's first party games, sure - granted).
I typically wait to buy most of my games until they go on sale on Steam or some other digital store. I very frequently get games for 50-90% off. This really didn't happen in the pre-Gamestop era. And when it did they were used games.
But I will grant you that the issue is more complicated than I was making it out to be.
I was oversimplifying it a bit, but honestly the whole thing just feels like whining to me.
Also, I did not understand your point about wages not increasing since the 90s. That is nowhere near true; minimum wage alone has like tripled and I know average household income has increased a lot too. Actual buying power maybe has not increased, but thats literally what inflation is -- more money for the same buying power.
Am I misunderstanding what you were saying?
The video has 2 parts, second one is on game prices, that said as i said in my first post the guy misses a few things that are important to the conversation about game prices.
Actual buying power has steadily decreased since the 90's and wages have mostly stagnated for most of the united states, some states have forced the minimum wage to increase, namely places on the west coast, but this is effectively putting the cart before the horse, wage increases mean nothing if the cost of living goes up with those wages, which it did, this is why alot of the states that have somewhat stagnant minimum wages tend to have a actual cost of living ratio change less than ones that implemented a minimum wage increase, those companies offset the costs by raising costs locally.
Wages have generally stagnated in many lower class job fields and not changed or gone down in actual numbers since the 90's, namely due to foreign born labor, the ones that were especially effected were in the service industry and transportation industries like truck driving, while certain middle class industries did in fact increase in wages, the actual value of their cash went down to make it stagnate, there's more involved than foreign labor but in the lower class sector it is probably the single biggest culprit, however this is getting very close to politics and i want to avoid that here.
What my point is, is that they could raise it to 200$ a game, the problem is people are getting to the point they can no longer afford the games, even at 70$ some people simply stopped buying games at that price, even at 60$ the amount of buyers was starting to decrease overall, so the saying "just don't buy it" applies here but that's literally the last thing these companies want as they sell by volume, not by single purchaser, games are getting to the point of going from "entertainment medium" to "luxury good" for many people, we might complain but the simple truth is the gaming industry outside of pc has been stagnating since the ps4 era sales wise, with the exception of switch which was cheaper than the other 2, so this will likely cause even more of a crash.
My point is, if they want to go back to the level of sales in the 90's then they can up the costs as much as they want, but eventually it will hit a breaking point. when trying to get more people.
The problem is these companies NEED people to buy their games at 80$, we might buy them when they go on sale (though i'm sure some people just pirate them), but the companies need them to sell at a higher cost to offset development costs, if they raise it too high, it will kill alot of companies.
Nintendo "might" succeed at 80$, so may microsoft, but the knock on effects on the industry are going to be massive, not to mention DLC, which is actually making games cost closer to 150$ in some cases.
The TL;DR of what i'm saying is alot of people can't afford games at 60, 70 made this worse, 80 might actually kill the console market, pc will survive as alot of games come out cheaper on pc, but consoles are slowly pricing out the average consumer, keep in mind the US is the richest market, imagine how this will effect places like say, latin america or eastern europe, or heck japan, considering their economy's in a depression currently.
