Edit: Some salty commenters here. This isn’t my graph, just one I grabbed. Notes aren’t mine.
I’m a huge proponent for inflation adjusted livable minimum wage- which should be close to $30 an hour these days. Also hugely worried about our housing cost trends.
I’m only pointing out that expecting games to cost 40-60 for life is a little silly- yall still paying $.10 for a loaf of bread? I remember when games inched from $40 to $60 and everyone lost their minds- no one complains about it anymore. Don’t wanna pay retail? Wait for sales, bundles, used copies.
Okay, but now do housing and groceries and you’ll see why people don’t have extra money laying around for another Nintendo and its Mario kart.
Economics is significantly more complicated than a bar graph of inflation-adjusted video game price tags lol. Hell, even just value of each game in their respective release time period is more complicated than that. I doubt there’s anything unique to this new game (other racing games have done the open world thing several times starting like 15 years ago), but the kart racer genre itself was new back in the 90s.
Looking up the source, they state: “At the turn of the century, a flat screen TV would cost around 17% of the median income of the time ($42,148). In the early aughts though, prices began to fall quickly. Today, a new TV will cost less than 1% of the U.S. median income ($54,132).”
So a Flat screen TV used to cost around $7165, and does now cost around $541, which is about 7.5% of the original value.
That means a deflation by 92.5%.
Edit: seems the previous line might not apply to the US because insanity.
The real issue is that inflation only accounts hire much more things cost, but not the trend on salaries. If salaries and costs follow the same slope, you’re “even”. The problem is when costs increase at a faster rate than income.
Edit: these notes have been addressed in OP’s post
Note: Salary growth has outpaced inflation.
You know what else has outpaced inflation? The cost of living. Purchasing power for middle and lower class people is far less than what it used to be. “Inflation” doesn’t account for that.
Nintendo games never go on sale. And if somebody buys a Switch game, dumps the ROM, and sells it to you, your Nintendo account gets banned because the ID in the header matches the one being distributed over the Internet.
Volume of video game sales has changed monstrously over the years as it moved from a niche hobby to mainstream
SNES Mario kart - 8.76 million copies sold worldwide
Switch Mario kart 8 - 67.34 million copies sold world wide.
SNES mario kart (inflation adjusted) earnings - 1,095,000,000
Switch Mario kart earnings - 5,252,520,000
Game dev budgets have obviously exploded in that time and nintendo doesn’t disclose their budgets but on average its estimated snes titles got about 1-2 million and switch/wii u titles got 30ish million. That’s a sizable increase in development that wildly outpaces inflation, for sure, but their earnings obviously did too.
Also, people tend not to account for manufacturing drops. Cost to produce dropped dramatically when things moved from cartridges to optical formats. Dropped somewhat in the move to digital distribution, though not as much as you might think.
Removing significant printed instruction manuals helped, too. Printing has gotten really expensive over the last 30 years. Falcon 4.0 came with a spiral bound book written by an actual F-16 pilot, and it was basically an F-16 flight manual. Nobody expects that to ever happen again. Not with a base game, anyway. That game was about $53 at launch (going by the “Chips and Bits” ad toward the back of this old CGW magazine).
There’s a good $20-30 in reduced production costs that were never directly passed on to customers.
Snes carts were $20-60 not including license fees without the game. They also had a 100% markup at retail. Small 8GB switch carts are about $10 with $12, including licensing, and have a 40% markup. The take home for a publisher was $2-5 for snes and should be $18 for a switch game on the small cart on $60 at retail. Digital take home is $40. Comparing the take home price for the consumer is disingenuous. It is especially bad when we are not comparing to Gameboy and includes optical media when it is essentially free with the box.
The publishers are getting a minimum 9x more take home now on the expensive switch carts and licensing. Thr wiiu and ps4 were more like 11-12x with the ps5 and digital switch games even more. Those far outback inflation and even outback the increase in dev costs most of the time.
your pricing is higher when volume of sales is lower because you have to cover overheads and still make a profit.
When volume is significantly higher the pricing can be lower. You can still cover your overheads because even though you make less money per unit, you overall still can make the same amount (or in this case, 5x as much) because of the increased sales volume
The “need to increase prices” is motivated by several factors like a weak yen and remaining fear from the commercial failure of the Wii U but it’s primarily greed and hostility to consumers. Mario kart is the most successful nintendo game so it is not fair to use it solely as the metric but it is also not as if their other games all suffer and that they don’t make shitloads of cash; 11 billion last year and 12 billion the year before.
And those numbers don’t include companies that are commonly associated with by divested from nintendo like the Pokémon company, which made another 1.9 billion on top of that last year. And unlike many western AAA developers their development costs appear to be far more controlled, with estimates of 20-30 million per game vs something like Spider-Man 2 for the ps5, which was over 10x that at 315 million. According to the leaks the first Spider-Man game cost over 100 million to make and made 827 million back.
The cost ceiling for AAA games has increased, but no I’d say considering advancements in game engines and the power of personal computers the floor has never been cheaper (1 person can make a game in their free time for $0, even 3D).
If any were to embrace the lower-end(/minimalism, proven older techniques) you’d think it’d be this company, but now their releases are “only” 10-20GiB.
There’s no reason the market has to do that. We’ve all collectively decided that every generation should have MORE, but the best games I’ve played in recent years are done by small teams looking to provide a good experience in a somewhat limited package.
Edit: Some salty commenters here. This isn’t my graph, just one I grabbed. Notes aren’t mine.
I’m a huge proponent for inflation adjusted livable minimum wage- which should be close to $30 an hour these days. Also hugely worried about our housing cost trends.
I’m only pointing out that expecting games to cost 40-60 for life is a little silly- yall still paying $.10 for a loaf of bread? I remember when games inched from $40 to $60 and everyone lost their minds- no one complains about it anymore. Don’t wanna pay retail? Wait for sales, bundles, used copies.
To your edit: Exactly! The only problematic trend I see is that physical copies are getting more scrace.
Okay, but now do housing and groceries and you’ll see why people don’t have extra money laying around for another Nintendo and its Mario kart.
Economics is significantly more complicated than a bar graph of inflation-adjusted video game price tags lol. Hell, even just value of each game in their respective release time period is more complicated than that. I doubt there’s anything unique to this new game (other racing games have done the open world thing several times starting like 15 years ago), but the kart racer genre itself was new back in the 90s.
In fairness here, it’s not Nintendo’s fault we let landlords gobble up all our spare money.
Maybe they need to send Luigi to have a word.
This is a valuable way of seeing how prices have changed in different ways for different categories, just since 2000.
Why are TV’s listed as “100% cheaper”? I’m a little confused about that number.
Looking up the source, they state: “At the turn of the century, a flat screen TV would cost around 17% of the median income of the time ($42,148). In the early aughts though, prices began to fall quickly. Today, a new TV will cost less than 1% of the U.S. median income ($54,132).”
So a Flat screen TV used to cost around $7165, and does now cost around $541, which is about 7.5% of the original value. That means a deflation by 92.5%.
Okay. So, they won’t buy one then.
Yeah, people don’t make enough money, I agree.
Housing and groceries are part of the inflation…
Edit: seems the previous line might not apply to the US because insanity.
The real issue is that inflation only accounts hire much more things cost, but not the trend on salaries. If salaries and costs follow the same slope, you’re “even”. The problem is when costs increase at a faster rate than income.
Groceries (and energy costs) were excluded from inflation in the 1970s as politicians decided that they were “too volatile”.
My bad, I tried to use a logical definition of inflation in a logical country. They are definitely considered in my country.
If the biggest costs of living are not considered in the metric for cost of living increase, WTF.
I’ll update my comment
Yeah, it’s fuckery all the way down here in America.
Edit: these notes have been addressed in OP’s post
You know what else has outpaced inflation? The cost of living. Purchasing power for middle and lower class people is far less than what it used to be. “Inflation” doesn’t account for that.
Nintendo games never go on sale. And if somebody buys a Switch game, dumps the ROM, and sells it to you, your Nintendo account gets banned because the ID in the header matches the one being distributed over the Internet.
this argument is so fucking dumb
Volume of video game sales has changed monstrously over the years as it moved from a niche hobby to mainstream
SNES Mario kart - 8.76 million copies sold worldwide Switch Mario kart 8 - 67.34 million copies sold world wide.
SNES mario kart (inflation adjusted) earnings - 1,095,000,000 Switch Mario kart earnings - 5,252,520,000
Game dev budgets have obviously exploded in that time and nintendo doesn’t disclose their budgets but on average its estimated snes titles got about 1-2 million and switch/wii u titles got 30ish million. That’s a sizable increase in development that wildly outpaces inflation, for sure, but their earnings obviously did too.
Also, people tend not to account for manufacturing drops. Cost to produce dropped dramatically when things moved from cartridges to optical formats. Dropped somewhat in the move to digital distribution, though not as much as you might think.
Removing significant printed instruction manuals helped, too. Printing has gotten really expensive over the last 30 years. Falcon 4.0 came with a spiral bound book written by an actual F-16 pilot, and it was basically an F-16 flight manual. Nobody expects that to ever happen again. Not with a base game, anyway. That game was about $53 at launch (going by the “Chips and Bits” ad toward the back of this old CGW magazine).
There’s a good $20-30 in reduced production costs that were never directly passed on to customers.
Snes carts were $20-60 not including license fees without the game. They also had a 100% markup at retail. Small 8GB switch carts are about $10 with $12, including licensing, and have a 40% markup. The take home for a publisher was $2-5 for snes and should be $18 for a switch game on the small cart on $60 at retail. Digital take home is $40. Comparing the take home price for the consumer is disingenuous. It is especially bad when we are not comparing to Gameboy and includes optical media when it is essentially free with the box.
The publishers are getting a minimum 9x more take home now on the expensive switch carts and licensing. Thr wiiu and ps4 were more like 11-12x with the ps5 and digital switch games even more. Those far outback inflation and even outback the increase in dev costs most of the time.
Because they… sold more copies?
yes obviously
your pricing is higher when volume of sales is lower because you have to cover overheads and still make a profit.
When volume is significantly higher the pricing can be lower. You can still cover your overheads because even though you make less money per unit, you overall still can make the same amount (or in this case, 5x as much) because of the increased sales volume
The “need to increase prices” is motivated by several factors like a weak yen and remaining fear from the commercial failure of the Wii U but it’s primarily greed and hostility to consumers. Mario kart is the most successful nintendo game so it is not fair to use it solely as the metric but it is also not as if their other games all suffer and that they don’t make shitloads of cash; 11 billion last year and 12 billion the year before.
And those numbers don’t include companies that are commonly associated with by divested from nintendo like the Pokémon company, which made another 1.9 billion on top of that last year. And unlike many western AAA developers their development costs appear to be far more controlled, with estimates of 20-30 million per game vs something like Spider-Man 2 for the ps5, which was over 10x that at 315 million. According to the leaks the first Spider-Man game cost over 100 million to make and made 827 million back.
Games are also much easier to distribute now than they ever where, saving cost.
True- but they cost like 1000x more to develop too.
Maybe not 1000x more, but that’s fair too.
The cost ceiling for AAA games has increased, but no I’d say considering advancements in game engines and the power of personal computers the floor has never been cheaper (1 person can make a game in their free time for $0, even 3D).
If any were to embrace the lower-end(/minimalism, proven older techniques) you’d think it’d be this company, but now their releases are “only” 10-20GiB.
There’s no reason the market has to do that. We’ve all collectively decided that every generation should have MORE, but the best games I’ve played in recent years are done by small teams looking to provide a good experience in a somewhat limited package.
But isn’t it easier if I just ignore the nuance of economics and just place all the blame for my unhappiness on corporate greed?
I think it’d also be interesting to see the total production cost of each Mario Kart, and a total sales/revenue generated by each game.
I don’t see Diddy Kong Racing on there which is really the only one you need anyway.
Diddy Kong Racing is the GOAT