Farewell to the $60 Video Game | Hacker News Reader

Farewell to the $60 Video Game

theringer.com

11 pointsafkqs10 comments

It's been gone for a while, sure the "base" game may have stayed at 60 but every game has come with season passes and more expensive editions with more features for a long time.

The closer you get to "$100 a game" the fewer sales you'll make.

Personally, I'm already at the point where I'm feeling seriously shitty paying $60 for a new release. I have to weigh my personal desire for the content with the price, and often I've declined to pick something up. I'll wait for a sale.

Justify a higher price all you want. At the end of the day, this is the argument my mind goes through. Jacking up that price just makes the argument with my wallet end that much sooner.

I'm curious about the anchoring of that. What are you weighing your personal desire against? What else would you do with that money?

I don't game much, but I get the impression that a AAA game costs $60 and provides about 20-30 hours of entertainment. That's cheaper than a a movie theater and roughly on a par with a rental movie. It's more expensive than watching the streaming service you're already paying for, but would a streaming service have that much more content you want to watch? Or were you thinking of a completely different activity -- exercise, reading, etc?

You seem to have a pretty firm idea of how you feel about it, so I'm curious. HN readers are often in fairly well-paid professions and even $60 is unlikely to be a serious cost, so I'm interested in how they go about making spending decisions.

You can still get it much cheaper if you are ok waiting a few months.

Idk, I would be happy to pay several hundred dollars each for a couple of the games I’ve played over the last few years. I sank like, 100+ hours each into The Witcher 3 and Breath of the Wild, and I paid maybe $25 and $60 for them respectively. Considering that’s 2-4 movie tickets, or 1-2 entrees at a Manhattan restaurant, the value per entertainment seems remarkably high even at $60/ game.

For an example of even stickier prices, see skateboard decks:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/a34ede/why-have-skateboards-...

Well yeah, aside from game studios and companies growing, there's also inflation. So yeah, this happens every other year or so.

> Incredibly, Black Ops Cold War will cost $59.99 on the PS4 and Xbox One—the same price Call of Duty 2 retailed at in 2005. But on the next-gen consoles, the game will have a higher price point: $69.99.

Better technology makes things cheaper. If it doesn't, that's a problem and we should be asking ourselves why.

Better technology for gaming has simply raised the bar for how high game production values can become:

https://www.raphkoster.com/2018/01/17/the-cost-of-games/

Some games are also starting to include ads even after paying full price. So they’re getting more expensive, while getting worse in certain ways. Awesome.

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