jmarsh wrote on Today, 14:37:
Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-07-04, 16:51:
The ever dropping price of games
Hold up, the what now? Big name games are more expensive now than ever before. In AU pricing, 007 First Light was $100. Resident Evil 9 was $108. Death Stranding 2 was a whopping $125.
Sorry to hear about the AU pricing of games. Looks like the conversion rate for USD to AU is 0.69 to 1, so a $70 game in the US (what most AAA games are now) would be around $100 AU just with the conversion rate alone. I won't attempt to explain the difference beyond that.
In the US the price of high-profile PC games hasn't really changed all that much in 30 years, so accounting for inflation the price has actually gone down (outside of ludicrously priced collectors editions, of course). Most high profile PC games from the early to mid 90s were $49.99 US, which is the equivalent of over $110 US now. Depending on where you bought things some games could be $70+ even back in the 90s. If we look at console games they were even worse. Nintendo 64 games could be $60-$80 from 1995 to 1998. There were even some ridiculously high priced SNES and Sega Genesis games back in the day. Phantasy Star IV was $99 US at release in ~1995 due to the complexity of the cartridge, which would be over $200 today. The normal price for big name PC games started hitting $60 around 20 years ago and it has only gone up around $10 here since then, if at all.
But, to be honest, I wasn't talking about high profile games. I can't even think of the last big-name AAA game I purchased... maybe No Man's Sky from 2016 would count, though I bought that for $24 on sale in 2017 after lots of updates. Subnautica 2 is pretty easily at AAA level of popularity but is nowhere near AAA retail price. It is currently in early access, but it's only $29.99 US (equivalent to $14 US in 1996...).
I have been buying mostly game bundles for the past 15 years, with an average price per-game that I'll actually play (not even counting the games in the bundle I have no intention of playing) somewhere in the $1-$4 range most of the time. If I buy a game on Steam or GoG it is very rarely over $20, and I get a lot of excellent games... including new games from smaller studios.
This wasn't even possible 25-30 years ago. So, on average, PC games are unquestionably cheaper than they used to be. The way we do things now would have been like going to Electronics Boutique back in the late 90s, filling a shopping cart with highly-rated games, dropping a $10 bill on the counter to pay for them and coming back every month and doing the same thing with totally new (but still great) games. Completely unheard of back then.
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.