[PS3] Playstation 3 games costing between $59 and $99?

Quote:

Posted by RacinReaver
Am I the only person that's amazed how low game prices have stayed when everything else's price has gone up due to inflation? I remember shelling out $70 for SNES games more than 10 years ago, yet I can pick up a game like San Andreas which certainly cost much much more to create than, say, Harvest Moon, for $20 less (not to mention that the $70 of yesteryear is worth more than $70 today).

The higher cost of SNES games was party due to the cost of the media. Cartridges are considerably more expensive to produce than CDs or DVDs. Accounting for inflation, $50 for Grand Theft Auto is right about where it should be, as negligible as the price for the physical media is.

This is also why Sony is blatantly full of shit here when they start claiming that PS3 games are going to be so expensive because of the blu-ray discs. While I have no doubt that the hardware to burn the discs is a pricey investment, the physical discs themselves cannot be much more than a standard DVD. It's just a thin wafer of plastic and metal; the magic is in how tightly they can pack in the laser grooves.

For Sony's sake, let's hope their rep here is talking out of his ass. They've already nearly killed themselves with their $600 PS3. Charging $60 on the low end for games on top of that really WILL turn this into the 3D0 2.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Quote:

Posted by RacinReaver
Maybe you just don't realize how good of a deal we've been getting the past few years.

Personally, I could never believe that they were putting out new games at a $40 price point for major releases and have been waiting for them to go up ever since (especially with the size of games that are released nowadays and the sizes and budgets that are required to make top of the line titles).

That line of reasoning is why a lot of people are predicting a video game crash soon, because of the overemphasis on outragous production values.

The masses demand bigger, prettier, more time-intensive enhancements to their games, but at the same time there's only so much they're going to be willing to pay for said games, no matter how much development costs are. The budgets for these big ticket games are eventually going to spiral out of control, and either they charge outrageous prices for them, or gamers wind up disappointed at the lack of graphical advancement and quit buying games.

And meanwhile, in a distant land, Satoru Iwata is cackling madly.

How ya doing, buddy?