Microsoft Announces Xbox Console Price Hike, Xbox Games to Cost $80 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Announces Xbox Console Price Hike, Xbox Games to Cost $80

kotaku.com

As with COVID, companies are gonna use the excuse to raise prices everywhere.

The games aren’t shipped over from China. They aren’t imports. And yet…

I guess I didn't realize the tariffs would also have a piggyback effect for ALL goods. Yay.

I thought they already had another excuse: "macroeconomic factors and the market"? Or is it only used for when firing people or not increasing salaries?

Xbox already isn't selling well compared to the competition. I imagine this will not help.

> Xbox already isn't selling well compared to the competition. I imagine this will not help.

What you want to optimize is

(profit per customer) * (number of customers)

The economic assumption behind the price increase is that by this change the "profit per customer" increases "more" than "number of customers" decreases.

We will see ...

Fair point. I wasn't thinking just from a pure profit perspective. I was thinking maybe they'd be interested in having a product that's more popular in the marketplace, but maybe this is just them conceding defeat with regard to popularity and trying to squeeze profit.

Just watched a video about how they have virtually no unique titles, have compatibility issues between the disc and discless consoles and is a failing platform. Totally shocked they are raising prices like you. https://youtu.be/q9hRCVqxoic?si=z2Ya8jWRReM-Paqu

People say this, yet my Series X is by far the best expense from my entertainment budget by far. That combined with game pass permium is unreal value for money.

I've maybe bought 4 games at full price in the 4 years since I got it. I (and my wife) game on it almost daily.

Xbox is not focused on selling consoles and games. The focus is on game pass; they have more current subscribers than total consoles sold. This will just push more players to game pass instead of buying physical consoles/games.

I don’t think gamers are as price sensitive as believed.

How many people purchased computers that cost in the same realm as a mortgage payment? I personally know a several people who paid >$1500 for a GPU during COVID.

The price hike sucks but I doubt it will convince people to transition to a different hobby.

It’s also worth pointing out that the cost of games has been decreasing over time due to the AAA price remaining stagnant while inflation surges forward. SNES titles in the 1990ish era retailed for $60 USD, which is roughly $145 USD today.

I can remember paying $130 CAD for some SNES games back in the day. The price differed from title to title and some of them were really expensive.

> I don’t think gamers are as price sensitive as believed.

I think there are more or less two different useful definitions of gamers. People who do consider it a hobby, ie an area of active interest that they expect to spend considerable amounts of time, money, and attention on. And people who play games as entertainment or recreation only, but still prefer it over other consumption that could fill that time like streaming shows.

The time-use patterns might be similar (idk) but the price sensitivity may not be. If console and game prices are low enough it may be impossible to distinguish these two groups even. But at a certain point I expect them to diverge in their playing and spending habits.

Like nintendo's astounding success in the wii era was due to specifically targeting the second group. The different characteristics and pricing strategies of PC vs mobile games are a major split between them too. I think if console prices go up enough these groups will diverge even more. The less-price-sensitive "hobbyist gamers" mostly probably won't bail for another hobby, but the "entertainment gamers" certainly may; either for a different kind of gaming or for another source of recreation all together.

Current console gamers maybe, I always cared about prices on PC, and during my PS2 days, like 90% of the games I bought were 2nd hand and no more than 20 euros, between 2001 and 2004.

Where I did spent more money was the 300 euro for PS2Linux.

My solution to this is a combination of Game Pass and only buying games on sale. If you’re patient enough there is very little reason to pay full price for games.

I get the anger, but I also remember paying $60 for a Nintendo 64 game in 1997.

Those came as physical products with quite a few relatively expensive components. (And often, stuff like a manual.)

Versus a couple gigabytes of bandwidth.

Fair enough. Playstation games were $50.

This seems.. unwise if one where to consider the panem and circensis paradigma. Messing with this gets you carried away, out of office on shoulders..

Surely the tariffs won't impact digital game prices?

Game prices subsidize the hardware

Never pay more than 20 bucks [1] for a computer game.

[1] as of 1990. $48.94 adjusted for inflation.

Depends on the game for me, there are definitely games that I get $80 worth of value.

Hundreds of hours of enjoyment for $70 seems like a good trade.

> Hundreds of hours of enjoyment for $70

I'm not sure that $/hour is a great way to evaluate games, since it would encourage developers to pad games out with repetitive content.

That would be the "hours of engagement" metric, not "hours of enjoyment". The optimist in me hopes that people can tell the difference and disengage if a developer tries to intentionally confuse the two.

Repetitive content isn't enjoyable :)

Well… sometimes it is.

Why?

It's a quote from «The Secret of Monkey Island». Works as a law of nature unless proven otherwise.

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