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Games went through a period of being cheap, well, relatively cheap, from about 2001 - 2016.
Before that they were expensive due to manufacturing costs. After that they are expensive because of shareholders and standard pricing.
Arguments are made by business types that we get far more value an hour per dollar than say a book or a movie. This is just trying to justify greed. Mario kart world is not worth 80, game is barebones, has a fun set of cups for maybe 1 or 2 playthroughs but does not have the replay value of almost every Mario kart beforehand.
Video games make more money than any other type of media, by a large margin, this is were the modern issue of it's expense is coming from. There's also the issue of triple A games not being budgeted correctly and causing a massive money sink that needs to be recuperated.
All this just to say it went from expensive manufacturing cost, to affordable, to inflated pricing that genuinely cannot be justified outside of mismanaged development costs, even then it's clearly just inflated pricing as manufacturing costs aren't even in the equation for the most part anymore, so It's clearly becoming a "luxury".
As for the why direction of "luxury", proof of this is the price of modern GPU's(a knock on effect from AI boom and crypto mining) and even the marketing of the switch 2, Nintendo do not want to be the affordable family console anymore but a high end tech product, chasing the high end PC market would also be affecting this, this is where the tech whales are. This is also why we started getting "pro" monikers on consoles, some people take that word very seriously.
Buying a high end PC/Laptop specifically for gaming and not just upgrading ram or a GPU is costing between €3,500 - €6,000 in Europe with it being around $500-800 cheaper in America. Ironically most PC gamers own a mid range PC at best, that usually tends to match current console generation in terms of how games look and run as the games tends to be excessively optimised to run on consoles, but are often bought still many times more than the price of a ps5, because of the stigma of "console player". There's definitely a broken almost classist mindset around a lot of this and that's it's own terrible can of worms.
I literally only bought a high end Laptop for developer reasons, but I am well aware that spending that much to play games at 240fps is some serious whale behaviour.
Before that they were expensive due to manufacturing costs. After that they are expensive because of shareholders and standard pricing.
Arguments are made by business types that we get far more value an hour per dollar than say a book or a movie. This is just trying to justify greed. Mario kart world is not worth 80, game is barebones, has a fun set of cups for maybe 1 or 2 playthroughs but does not have the replay value of almost every Mario kart beforehand.
Video games make more money than any other type of media, by a large margin, this is were the modern issue of it's expense is coming from. There's also the issue of triple A games not being budgeted correctly and causing a massive money sink that needs to be recuperated.
All this just to say it went from expensive manufacturing cost, to affordable, to inflated pricing that genuinely cannot be justified outside of mismanaged development costs, even then it's clearly just inflated pricing as manufacturing costs aren't even in the equation for the most part anymore, so It's clearly becoming a "luxury".
As for the why direction of "luxury", proof of this is the price of modern GPU's(a knock on effect from AI boom and crypto mining) and even the marketing of the switch 2, Nintendo do not want to be the affordable family console anymore but a high end tech product, chasing the high end PC market would also be affecting this, this is where the tech whales are. This is also why we started getting "pro" monikers on consoles, some people take that word very seriously.
Buying a high end PC/Laptop specifically for gaming and not just upgrading ram or a GPU is costing between €3,500 - €6,000 in Europe with it being around $500-800 cheaper in America. Ironically most PC gamers own a mid range PC at best, that usually tends to match current console generation in terms of how games look and run as the games tends to be excessively optimised to run on consoles, but are often bought still many times more than the price of a ps5, because of the stigma of "console player". There's definitely a broken almost classist mindset around a lot of this and that's it's own terrible can of worms.
I literally only bought a high end Laptop for developer reasons, but I am well aware that spending that much to play games at 240fps is some serious whale behaviour.
