Games cost more to make these days? Bigger devs teams, more tech involved and so on?

Actually, the exchange rate was the reverse in the late '90s (high not low) but the price of games has stablised because of legislation. Did you forget in your dotage that the federal government is monitoring the prices because early on the price of a game was quadruple of what it should have been.

Actually, I think you'll find that the AU collapsed in the late 90s before reaching an all-time nadir in 2001.

http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/7227/capturehs.png
http://www.indexmundi.com/xrates/graph.aspx?c1=USD&c2=AUD&days=3650&lastday=20060220

protip: always check the f***ing data before making smartarse remarks.

Games cost more to make these days? Bigger devs teams, more tech involved and so on?

Games have a much bigger audience now days? Bigger consumer base, more consoles in the market place and so on?

don't forget it's the pirates that are forcing the prices up... or is that the other way around?
at least in Australia we get a sometimes censored region locked version that's filled with anti piracy messages for our extra money, this makes games awesome and not worth downloading at all. I'm disgusted in what my pixels do when i load up a gory game like "2010 winter Olympics!" i think the government should be doing more like filtering my internet and taxing me in 4 different ways for using my car on the roads, taking 1/4 of my weekly income to build infrastructure that i need to pay to use anyway.

I can understand if prices are a little more than the US due to shipping distances. but if i can buy a brand new item and ship it to Australia for less than half the price of a second hand item in Australia then where the hell is my money going?

I can understand if prices are a little more than the US due to shipping distances. but if i can buy a brand new item and ship it to Australia for less than half the price of a second hand item in Australia then where the hell is my money going?

Wouldn't the game media be manufactured in Asia?

Depends on the game i would imagine?

In 1987 defender of the crown was released on commodore 64 on disk. I bought it from kmart for $40 the week it was released

it was probably the biggest budget game at the time and was on cheap disk not cart or tape. Plug that in to your spreadsheet

Plug that in to your spreadsheet

This has just become my new catch phrase at the office.

old man complaining about the price of fuel today because I can remember when it was 59.9 cents per litre

Old? f*** man I remember when fuel was 30c/L Get off my lawn.

I remember when LPG was like 14c a litre.

Also, I seem to remember games being about $100 since about the mid 90's.

Its BS we pay $100 for games, some are even $110 at release, who are they f***ing kidding. $60 should be the tops for a new release and should come down pretty quickly to about $40, then about $20-30 after a year or 2. You would have a f***load more people buying games.

No-one is going to be paying $80-90 for a year old game, yet thats what you see in the shops.

I've bought more games since I started using steam than ever before.

Some games never come down in price, which is even more stupid.

Modern Warfare is 3 f***ing cents cheaper than MW2 at EB, I f***ing lol'd.

While you suckers with the SNES and the Megadrive were paying chump tax on cartridges, us Amiga owners were getting games for the cost of a few DD 3.5s. (Admittedly half of them were half arsed conversions of console games.)

It's ok to talk about piracy on qgl that occurred 20 years ago yeah?

Piracy didn't happen before torrents.

I don't have the spreadsheet or I'd happily plug it like ur mum.

I'm imagining though that 40 bucks in '87 might break 80 bucks? It would miss the two biggest years of inflation (which is probably why it was so much to start with).

While I kinda agree with you, I think your facts are a little incorrect, and you've overlooked a few important factors.

Firstly, around the early 90s, most Game Boy games were $30, with PC games being $40. IN 1992/1993 SuperNES games such as SSFIIT were $90 on release, but most others were $80. By 1994 top PC releases were $60-70.

My point is your scale of inflation is a bit out - the gap isn't as big as you're claiming, based on inflation.

The other important factor is the size of design teams. 4-8 people wasn't uncommon for GameBoy games. Games like Zelda LttP might have had 70 people work on them, but these days games like Zelda TP had almost 400. Metroid is a simpilar story - Super Metroid with a design team of just under 60 from memory ballooned out to well over 200 for Prime, and 30 just for Fusion.

The actual development itself is a lot more involved. Simple glyphs of sprites now become large libraries of 3D models, the work on textures alone is far greater than what was done on glyphs. What used to be a reusable library for similar types of games is now a massive framework on top of each individual game engines framework, potentially millions of lines of code whereas games were previously lucky to reach 100k. You're talking 4GB releases where 4mbit-4mbyte releases used to be common.

While I do still think $100 is a reasonable cap, and that I'd prefer to see PC games at an $80 cap, the evidence supporting your argument certainly could do with a lot of work.

Personally, I rarely buy games anymore. Since Quake 3, I've bought maybe one PC game per year on average. If the prices were lower that number would certainly be higher. Console games, even though they get less play time and cost more, I've tended to buy a lot more of.

my theory is that the price went up when the dollar was s*** and they never bothered to bring the price down... in saying that, HN, EB (back when they were electronic boutique), Dick Smiths have been over charging gamers for years....

No shock here, buy overseas and you get the right price, buy in Aus you get f***ed in the ass. I would never spend over $100 on a game, no matter what. f*** I'm hard pressed to top $60.

I'm a little s***ty about the state of pricing between Australia and US for many things. One of which I found with Logitech, a brand we've recently stopped distributing at work for this reason..... Please take note of the RRP's.


US Site...
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/remotes/universal_remotes/devices/5874&cl=us,en

AU Site...
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/remotes/universal_remotes/devices/5874&cl=au,en


Now tell me, what part of logistics, distribution or retailing makes their price so significantly different to ours? I know we're a smaller market, but it's not like they're manufacturing the product any different for us here. It's all the same thing! The only major difference is power adapter... *shrug*

I'm not good at linkypoos..

Yeah we get ripped on so many things because of the best beaches tax. We have the most awesome beaches and all other countries are so jealous they make us pay more :(

The problem is, stupid vendors in Australia (IT Hardware Distribution wise) don't realise this just drives people to parallel import the product instead. Apple is facing this already, with quite a number of retailers importing from OS instead, because Apple gives a maximum of 10% margin here to their Resellers, from their wholesale cost to apple's web-store retail price.

I wonder how much this is happening in the gaming sector too? if prices on games from offshore are significantly cheaper, what's stopping any retailer bringing it overseas in large numbers? All Interactive Distribution (one of the distributors for selected brand console and PC games, and sub-distributor for many) only really allows a 8% markup from Wholesale to RRP. This is really a pathetic figure in terms of retail profit margins.

The vendors of this product really have some explaining to do :S

Sorry but I dont have time to read every post in this thread.

I wanted to add my argument against those saying that piracy puts up the price of games. I don't beleive that for a second.

The five games i've purchased in the last year were ALL purchased because they were (for me) afforadble. Here they are.

1 - Left for dead (4 pack - worked out to be like $20 each)
2 - Left for dead 2 (special weekend - something like $40)
3 - GTA 4 - (Special weekend - about $30 or less)
4 - Borderlands (4 pack - about $30 each)
5 - Battlefield bad company (4 pack - $40 each i think)

Those purchases were made possible by the price being withing range. Otherwise, I simple cannoy spend that much on (sometimes) a game that wont have any replayability past the first completion of the game.

Harmony® One Advanced Universal Remote
USD 249.99
AUD 499.95

Harmony® 700 Advanced Universal Remote
USD 149.99
AUD 299.95

Wow, the awesome beach tax has been hiked a fair bit.
It shouldn't even cost that much if there each one of these remotes was gold plated and came individually gift wrapped with a big bow of red ribbon.