UK inflation rise partly caused by video game prices

Hime wrote:So how have games contributed to inflation when they stayed the same price or gotten cheaper over 20 years?

Except they haven't - games like SW Battlefront launched the shell of the game for normal rrp but then bolted on the rest through season passes and dlc, same with shadow of war etc, jacking up the price of the full experience through hiding the costs outside of the initial price of entry.

Trelliz wrote:

Hime wrote:So how have games contributed to inflation when they stayed the same price or gotten cheaper over 20 years?

Except they haven't - games like SW Battlefront launched the shell of the game for normal rrp but then bolted on the rest through season passes and dlc, same with shadow of war etc, jacking up the price of the full experience through hiding the costs outside of the initial price of entry.

Yeah but that's just complete and utter nonsense. Firstly SW Battlefront turned off paid micro transactions so that game would have no impact on inflation and SoW having a grind at the end is hardly "hiding content". The type of optional micro transactions in SoW have been around for years. Secondly, the fact that games were £50 twenty years ago means that every person who buys a game could spend a fair amount and it would just be videogames keeping up with inflation.

I meant the first battlefront which locked off loads of maps etc behind the season pass and shadow of war hid 2 orc clans in the special editions/season passes. You cannot buy a "full" mainstream game for less than about £70ish.

Trelliz wrote:I meant the first battlefront which locked off loads of maps etc behind the season pass and shadow of war hid 2 orc clans in the special editions/season passes. You cannot buy a "full" mainstream game for less than about £70ish.

Map packs and expansions have been around for ages.

Hime wrote:

Trelliz wrote:I meant the first battlefront which locked off loads of maps etc behind the season pass and shadow of war hid 2 orc clans in the special editions/season passes. You cannot buy a "full" mainstream game for less than about £70ish.

Map packs and expansions have been around for ages.

Indeed more recently Battlefield 2 had at least 2 boxed map expansions. Imagine buying a disk for maps. Madness.

Then they made them all free.

Hime wrote:

Trelliz wrote:I meant the first battlefront which locked off loads of maps etc behind the season pass and shadow of war hid 2 orc clans in the special editions/season passes. You cannot buy a "full" mainstream game for less than about £70ish.

Map packs and expansions have been around for ages.

Winckle wrote:

Hime wrote:

Trelliz wrote:I meant the first battlefront which locked off loads of maps etc behind the season pass and shadow of war hid 2 orc clans in the special editions/season passes. You cannot buy a "full" mainstream game for less than about £70ish.

Map packs and expansions have been around for ages.

Apart from the post that I quoted literally talking about map packs.

The point is that additional spending on top of the initial purchase of a game to get the 'complete' experience has been around for ages so wouldn't be the cause of video games affecting inflation.

Hime wrote:The point is that additional spending on top of the initial purchase of a game to get the 'complete' experience has been around for ages so wouldn't be the cause of video games affecting inflation.

Add-on payments have been around for some time now but it is the amount they cost that has driven the rise. Season passes can quite often be around the £33 mark now, pushing a download version of base game and season pass package towards the £90 stamp. Even looking at just base game pricing on the PS Store, this year it has risen from £55 to £60 for games from the major publishers such as EA.

As I posted previously, it can be tough to compare game prices as we can all pick and choose comparisons to suit our argument. Safe to say that big publishers have always pushed for higher pricing. I feel that gaming should be cheaper today when you consider the much larger consumer market and the capability to have zero physical media costs and far lower distribution costs.

Hime wrote:Map packs and expansions have been around for ages.

So has stoning people to death but that doesn't make it an agreeable judicial system. In the good old days map packs and expansions came out a few months after the game came out; a practice still around today in the likes of xcom 2 and civ 6, rather than coming out at the same time or before the main game, using them to upsell the "real" buying price. As with lootboxes these different silver, gold and super-duper editions aren't there for player choice, they're to push you to spend more because otherwise you aren't getting the full experience and are missing out.

I blame the Switch tax

Or maybe they looked at how much Super Mario Run cost and assumed that was inflation from the standard 69p mobile game

Trelliz wrote:

Hime wrote:Map packs and expansions have been around for ages.

So has stoning people to death but that doesn't make it an agreeable judicial system. In the good old days map packs and expansions came out a few months after the game came out; a practice still around today in the likes of xcom 2 and civ 6, rather than coming out at the same time or before the main game, using them to upsell the "real" buying price. As with lootboxes these different silver, gold and super-duper editions aren't there for player choice, they're to push you to spend more because otherwise you aren't getting the full experience and are missing out.

Ignoring the fact that there is maybe one game that doesn't offer the full experiance outside of loot boxes, none of that explains why additional payments would affect inflation now. If it is simply a case that more people are buying the elite gamer £90 deluxe digital copies, that's fair enough. I'm just curious is all.

jawafour wrote:

Peter Crisp wrote:I don't think most people remember the horror of paying £60 for an Atari 2600 game.

They certainly were expensive, Peter - I never had an Atari at the time but a pal of mine did.

I believe that games were priced at £29.99 around 1979... which is equivalent to £106 at today's prices . I now feel sorry for EA and Activision having to scrape by with games only selling at £55 .

What you're not taking into account was that the market was much much much smaller back then, whereas now they sell to millions, and these same millions are getting by on minimum wage.

$ilva $hadow wrote:What you're not taking into account was that the market was much much much smaller back then, whereas now they sell to millions, and these same millions are getting by on minimum wage.

I wasn’t being serious when I was jesting that those global companies are struggling to get by, $ilva... they’re money-making monsters .

money making monsters indeed.