Comment by ViktorRay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ViktorRay | Hacker News Reader

Worth mentioning that games are still among the cheapest forms of entertainment when you look at dollars per hour.

Lets say Mario Kart had a cost of 40 dollars. If you played that version of Mario Kart 20 hours over your lifetime that is 2 dollars per hour of entertainment. If you played it 40 hours over your lifetime that is 1 dollar per hour of entertainment.

This new Mario Kart costs 80 bucks. So now the cost per hour has gone to maybe 4 dollars an hour or 2 dollars an hour.

Ultimately this is still one of the cheapest forms of entertainment. The only thing cheaper would be watching free videos on YouTube or Tik Tok. Or maybe Netflix streaming (but even this depends on how many hours a month you spend watching Netflix stuff).

Of course the best form of entertainment is still reading books. It's the form that is the best for you as a person and it is still the cheapest considering the price of books and how many hours it takes to read a good book. And books are free at your local public library so that's even better.

This seems so far from the truth IMO.

I go and play pickleball outside at the park with friends for several hours a week.

All I spent was $50 on a paddle and $70 shoes and a $2 ball, and I could have spent less...

I play about 3 times a week for 2-3 hours at a time, so about 6-9 hours a week.

The paddle will last years, not exactly sure about the shoes, but still, you can play with your street shoes and it would be fine...

Anyways, even for a single 5 month stretch of warm weather for me way up in Wisconsin, this is less than $1 per hour. I spent $122 and I will play 120-180 hours easily from May-Sept outside for free.

This is the same for playing tennis, or basketball or soccer or frisbee golf, etc etc at the park with friends, or even with meetup groups if you don't have friends to play with.

This is so much cheaper entertainment than video gaming.

What about meetup groups that I go to play board games with people? I do this several hours a month too and it costs me nothing but the gas to get there. The meetup group often provides all the board games for free and there a dozens to choose from.

I can come up with tons of more examples of basically free or very cheap entertainment.

If we're only in the realm of video games, Nintendo has some of the highest prices for their games, and rarely drop below half price. This does factor in somewhat, since their games (assuming you get a physical version) maintain their value better.

I think Nintendo should include a few months of free online play for their flagship titles with Nintendo Online service. The fact that all online activity is basically gated to a monthly subscription is one of the few things I dislike as a consumer about Nintendo's product strategy.

If we're going across different "entertainment" forms, I would argue the cheapest form of entertainment is probably football, aka soccer, or something similar as that just requires a ball.

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