Are Games Too Expensive?

Nov. 11 11:49 PM by Lynxara

I remember when the Wii was new, and my husband and I were eyeballing the system and titles. To my casual gaming husband, the Wii's motion-control input was a thousand times more enticing than basically anything else I'd ever owned. (And he's played more games on this system with me than any other, by which I mean Wii Sports and Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles.) He was getting all excited about the prospect of playing games on the Wii, especially as I described Dragon Quest Swords's concept to him, until his eyes lit on one of the pricetags splashed across the games we were looking at. "49.99?" he asked. "Why are they so expensive?" I remember sort of blinking at him, confused by the question. "Expensive? That's not bad. Most games are more like $60." "That's too expensive," he said, with a Buddha-like certainty. "When it's more like $30, I'll be interested." This attitude coming from my husband has always baffled me a little, since he's a comic book geek (of all things), and has happily shelled out $75 or more for the oversized hardback Absolute editions of his favorite DC comics... that he already owned in floppy and trade format. That's more my idea of too expensive, but what do I know? Then again, as a non-gamer, his attitude seems to be more typical than my own, which is still primarily informed by the $75 price tag attached to the copy of Final Fantasy II that came along with my $200 Super Nintendo. I tend to wander around stores going "Wow! Games are so cheap now!", and spending far too much money as a result. Anyway, this rambling anecdote is mostly a lead-in to me linking to this interesting Nintendo World Report editorial about game prices by the site's very own director, Steven Rodriguez. I think it's interesting in light of the cult of Nintendo, which advocates cheaper hardware... but still sells games that are, more or less, as expensive as everything else on the market.