Today’s game consoles are historically overpriced. Ars analysis shows missing price cuts are costing console consumers hundreds of dollars.
Posted by Sine_Fine_Belli
Today’s game consoles are historically overpriced. Ars analysis shows missing price cuts are costing console consumers hundreds of dollars.
Posted by Sine_Fine_Belli
8 Comments
r/PCmasterrace
Gamers are *truly* the most oppressed minority.
Eh, I know this isn’t a deep analysis or anything but it’s too shallow for me to be interested.
It does mention the fact that Moore’s Law has been slowing down, so it has acknowledged the fact that the cost of producing the consoles hasn’t been decreasing as fast as it once did.
But it also doesn’t look at the gaming market at all. How much did it expand between the first and eight generation of consoles? How has customer behavior evolved? What about the impact of Steam and computer gaming in general?
I just don’t find that looking at price trendlines for most of the article and briefly considering the structural issues makes for a worthwhile read.
I’ve always heard that consoles are subsidized and that most of the money is made off online matchmaking subscriptions + the 30% cut on store purchases. Is that no longer true?
i weep
Back in the day, a fab making chips from 5 year old tech would have a lot less demand than one making the shiniest things, so making that fab keep running meant you could ask for significant discounts. You could even upgrade to a more efficient version of the chip and get a smaller form factor and a lower price at the same time.
Today very little of that is true anymore, so producing a switch-compatible isn’t much cheaper for Nintendo than it was when it launched.
Also look at power consumption charts for video cards: They have been going up and to the right, yet people aren’t exactly enthusiastic about how much better games look. We are deep in an area of diminishing returns. Most modern upgrades come from algorithmic trickery, not massive improvements in hardware capacity with the same price.
You can also look at the price of memory: After decades of prices in freefall, prices are far more stable, and sometimes they even go up. If you bought some DDR5 sticks in 2023 and look at prices now, it’s not as if they are 1/3rd of the old price like it used to be.
As someone who mostly plays on console, shame, but this is the reason why a lot of people play nowadays on computer more
I wonder how much of this is gaming becoming “mainstream,” although it’s not like [console sales are really booming or anything](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles). There were about 272 million sales between Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3. Add up Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X, and we’re at…. 261 million.
So I expect this is going to be a very boring reason, where it’s simply far more profitable to **not** eat the cost of hardware in hopes of expanding market share, and that was simply the opposite (or believed to be the opposite) in decades past. My understanding is the current Xbox line is quite profitable despite miserable overall console sales, so…. it does seem to be working.
Kind of a shame overall, the high console prices are a huge barrier for a few games I’d be interested in playing otherwise. Oh well, long live Steam, I ain’t paying MSRP for this hobby.