Why Games Were Stuck at $60 | Design Club

All right, now now YouTube stream begins with the the thing. That's it. 100% Uh okay. Yep. All right, great. I'm going to need to figure out how Oh, that's so annoying. I thought I just changed it globally. It's fine. It's fine. Since I don't know what you're talking about, I don't actually know it's it's totally fine. Um the uh the problem is that the default stream latency setting in YouTube keeps defaulting to normal when we would really like it to be low or ultra low. And I it keeps resetting itself to normal despite what I've set. So, very upset about that. Yes, uh Janet, sorry, and Brad, sorry, we are late. Um I uh went to set up the stream. Opened OBS, and OBS said, "You don't have a camera." And I said, "No, I'm I'm pretty sure I have a camera, OBS." And OBS went, "Nah, you don't have a camera." And I went,

"What?" And then I I did the I did the most frightening thing, which I was telling Jeff about. I opened up the camera control app, and I was like, "Hey, camera control app, what's what's the problem?" And it goes, "Oh, you don't You know your camera card, the one that controls your camera that you need to do your job every day? Yeah, the firmware update is 0000000, and your device ID is "Huh?" So, it's fixed now, but I had a little panic. So, that's why we're a little bit late. the thing where you like No. No, no, no. I I I do not engage in percussive maintenance. I understand the desire to. I do not. I am a professional. If I'm going to whack my computer, it's going to be with a brick because it's developed sentience. Um we call it the emergency brick for a reason. Um So, yeah, uh it's super great. Yeah, Odnir. Um devices and Windows updates get along like

Boiling water? Fire and gasoline. Um Horses and honeybees? Sure. Do you know by the way Will that my very very first car I ever had Okay. had a spot with radio AM FM because this was before I could afford well, before CDs were common in cars. Yes. Um the radio would just go out sometimes. Sure. Because I got a used car because I was 16 and lucky enough to get anything with wheels. Yeah. And I found that there was a spot on the dashboard that if you hit it just right the radio would always come back on. Yeah. Because there was a loose wire or something. So you get to Fonz it every time? I completely did. Like I never like took it apart to fix it because it was way way more fun to be driving and have it go out with friends in the car and just be like bam. Yeah. And have it just come back on. Yeah. Like I would have actually paid money extra money for something that did that. Yeah. Uh, by the way uh, Find is completely correct. OBS is

indeed weird. I have both seen the video where OBS crashed and then forgot that that should make it not work so it just kept working. And I've also had that happen. We've done that during a live stream. I just didn't tell you about it cuz I don't have a display capture set up cuz I don't like display captures. They tend to be messy. Um so all of my I didn't have a easy way to capture it but it totally crashed. It was like hey, I'm going to crash now and I just left it alone and didn't click okay and the stream kept going because OBS had no confirmation that it was allowed to crash. Correct. OBS is kind of like OG Pokémon which is you will get an absurd amount of aberrant behavior before it crashes. You can make it crash. But the amount of weird missing no style behavior that will happen before OBS crashes is significant. Like it'll just start playing every eighth frame if it doesn't have the resources to do the thing. It will keep chugging rather than

crash unless you find a way to make it crash and then it'll crash. So it's like some of the old robust Soviet era machinery. Yes. It may break down, but it's going to keep working while it breaks down in a variety of ways. is correct. Yes. This is the we do airplane maintenance with a sledgehammer style technology. Yeah, that that's correct. That's right. The backbone of the tech you love is held together with positive thoughts in the dark arts. Yeah, obviously. I There's a new dead chicken inside my PC. I just sacrificed that thing and blood everywhere. It was great. It was awesome. Um Oh, so that's why it's airtight so it won't smell foul. That's correct. So well, I think we should do a plug-in for OBS that just will re- will record will um the old Queen Flash Gordon song and instead of Flash we'll say crash and it just plays it as it's going down instead of the beep.

I love this idea and hate this idea and also am required to tell you that it's a useless idea because almost everyone I know who uses OBS mutes all their system sounds because otherwise they show up in OBS. So I I haven't heard a Windows sound in that was from my PC in years. Because the first thing I did when I built a new PC was muted all of the system sounds forever. Because I don't need them. if it was a plug-in we could actually mess with some of those settings. No, don't no. No, Compsci, stop it. Stop it. Um Yeah. Uh okay, so today we're going to do a thing. We're going to do a thing. We've already played the opening once. I played it before you got here, so that's okay. Today we are doing We we could hire Brian Blessed for um For a soundboard? Yes. Yeah. That's right. Where is that message? Why can I not click on it? This one?

Oh, there it is. Ha. Okay. I got it. Um For those of you unfamiliar, Brian Blessed is a legendary Shakespearean actor Yeah. who has also done parts in some movies, including a Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Yeah. He is the He is Robin Hood's father who's on screen for like 5 seconds. Yeah. But you see him ride out into a ring of masked figures drawing his sword and yelling something like for King Henry and God and King Henry. For God and Saint George, right? Maybe. It's been a long time since I've seen that movie. and England and Saint George. Yeah. It It's It's the um It's the Morgan Freeman uh Kevin Costner Robin Hood, which is not as bad as you remember it. Though Kevin Costner's accent is worse than you remember it because the breadth that it wanders is significant. But the supporting actors, Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater as um Yes. Christian

um the the Alan Rickman Yeah, Alan Rickman. Yeah, like the whole cast is great. Oh, yeah. It just It's unfortunate that Kevin Costner's in it. For God and King Richard or what? in the Flash Gordon one they somehow get him to play the King of the Hawkmen. Sure. And he just owns it. Yeah. He comes in in campy 70s gear holding a big mace with big prosthetic wings and just is like, "Well, you know what? I'm committing. Yeah. I am going for it and it's so over the top and so having fun Yeah. that just Uh Also, as Comstock points out, when typed, his name is always in all caps. Brian Blessed. All right, anyway, now that the tech is fixed and we're set up, we're going to do a show. We're going to do a show on So, this is kind of weird. I think we're going to we're going to set some guardrails when we start. There are sort of two sides to this discussion. And when I talked with

Twitch chat about it yesterday, we got immediately off onto the second track and ignored the first. So, there are two sides of this. One of is what has happened to video game prices for the past 20 years that have made them stay $60 in an environment where very little has stayed a fixed price. And that's sort of a big complicated question that we want to dive into because a lot of that topic gets ignored in favor of should video games cost $60? And we'll talk some about that at the second part, but I think the first part is necessary to understand the second part. And the first part often gets a lighted in oh, obviously, this is what it was. Um and I think that that's sort of an important thing. Does that make sense, chat? Jeff, is that like We'll have to say that again once we I'm just I'm just preparing chat for guardrails because chat needs some prep to be guardrailed.

And we could get to Or and if we don't, we could make that a full other episode. Yeah, what good games cost. Mhm. Somebody was doing a I saw a short video on like video game cost based on utility, like how much people use it. Mhm. And he was saying that there were definitely some 60 and 70 and 80 dollar games that should be 20. But he's like, in that same breath, you should then be paying like $3,000 for Slay the Spire. Right, or or for Minecraft, or for um Stardew Valley, right? Or for yeah, there's a bunch of stuff that's um or for Binding of Isaac or any yeah, it's a very interesting poison. Right, and it's very Hold on. Hold on. That's a good topic. Let's save that until we get into the thing. So, um Chat, we're going to go to black real quick. We're going to play a sting. We're going to come back. We're going to introduce ourselves for the folks over on Nebula. Then we're going to do a show. Hang on to your butts. I hope you're ready. I might be. Who knows?

We'll find out in a second. Good time zone internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club, the only game design show on the internet that is cursing Windows update with every fiber of its being. I am as always your humble host Will, joined again as always by my pal Jeff. Say hi to the people, Jeff. Hi to the people, Jeff. Hey everybody, I am Jeffrey Zekken, the studio director of Extra Credits and long, long time game designer here with here, here with my good buddy Will. Over on this side, I will remember we're married. Yeah. I'm pointing to my wall instead of Will. I'm coming at you from the West Coast. Will is from the East Coast. So, this is our virtual coffee shop studio and today Yeah. Will. Yes. We have a topic that I have loved talking about for over 20 years. Which is weird because 20 years is a

very relevant period of time to our discussion. Actually, it is today. It is actually. So, uh In the news recently, there's been quite a lot of stir, a lot of commotion, a lot of fuss over About what? What Will is the commotion and fuss about? the Switch 2 prices specifically which is kind of interesting. Now, in the same period of time between when we're recording this live on Twitch and YouTube. And say hi, Brad. Say hi, Janet. Um Which is uh what is it? May May 22nd. We are May 22nd. currently coming from May 22nd, 2025. Correct. So, we uh we had the Switch announcement and people were upset over the price of the games and the price of the console, neither of which changed in response to tariffs immediately. The pre-order prices that were originally listed will be honored. The price of the accessories went up, but the core console price and the price of the games remained the same. In the intervening time, rather surprising, but we'll set that

aside for the moment. Yeah, we're going to set that aside. That's a that's a whole other thing. In the intervening time, Xbox also announced that they would be increasing the price of their hardware and their games and that, at least in my circles, and maybe my circles are following this a little less keenly, sort of just sure, fine, whatever. Like it was it was not a big commotion. But the big commotion was largely focused on the Mhm. on the Switch 2, its prices, its launch price for the console. say big commotion, Will, like what do you mean by big commotion? So, here's a great example. So, uh Nintendo did a whole bunch of um live streams to announce the new console, to show off footage from the new games, because they're releasing uh multiple brand new games, a new Donkey Kong game, a new Mario Kart game, and they were trying to show them off. And the chat was an unusable wall of people spamming lower the price constantly for the entire length of the treehouse

stream, probably an hour or two. Just completely unusable. The comments on all of these Nintendo announcement videos have been off, but the general response to Switch 2, at least for its initial release period, was that the price is too high, lower the price. Mhm. And this actually permeated pop culture enough. I was, shortly after that, having dinner with my sister and my nephew Mhm. and my niece. And I was was my nephew and niece, "Hey, did you hear about the new Switch thing?" And my sister went, "Oh, is that the new expensive one?" Like she is not somebody who follows games, but it had somehow permeated its way all the way up to mom of teenagers who doesn't follow games. She still had heard that a new Switch was coming out, and it was expensive. Like that was all she knew. Right. And so, um we wanted to talk a little bit about that, because as we began to talk about the price of

video games, we realized and this is, you know, I'm showing the gray in my beard, right? And Jeff's showing his his designer scars here. Um Ooh, there's a there's a good one. Yeah, there's a good a good designer scar right there. Yeah. Um the games have been $60 for 20 years. Almost to the almost exactly 20. Yeah. So Why? an unusual thing. And the reason I know this is in 2005 and 2000 Well, 2005. Well, let's peg it there. There were a trio of consoles that were coming out. The Wii, the Xbox 360 and the PS3. The Wii game prices were set at $49.99, 50 bucks. But the Xbox 360 and the PS3, that was when universally games got moved for consoles

to $59.99 or 60 bucks, and Steam followed suit. That became the price of video games. That was if you went to the store, that was what you were going to pay. And importantly, at that point, the iPhone App Store did not exist. Yeah. This was pre-99 cent games. This was pre free-to-play games being anything large in significant numbers permeating the internet. Right. So, if you and this was arcades had kind of died down. So, really from that time if you were going to go buy a game you were and you were looking for kind of a regular style game, your Halos, your Call of Duty's, your Grand Theft Auto's $60. So, act- actually we dug up an artifact for this and I feel like it's it's a helpful element. So, we found and this is I I dug this up from Reddit. This is I'm going to credit this

properly cuz they they they did me a solid. This is from Reddit user uh I believe it's Reddit user Yu-Gi-Oh! - King of Games. Amazing username. This is a launch ad from Circuit City. Y'all remember Circuit City? For the Xbox the Xbox 360 and it's accompanying launch title games. And it's Will, is there a way to zoom in on pieces of that? Not terribly easily. That was that was among the things call out what we're seeing here? Will, can you walk us through this ad? Sure. So, up at the top we have the the the the Xbox 360 like standard edition. There's a core edition which is less expensive, but the the the version they want to sell you is the $400 Xbox 360. Mhm. And that comes with the hard drive, the headset, the ethernet cable, the HD AV

cable, all of that. And actually, let me tell you for a second how revolutionary this was. Will, do you see that Xbox there? Yeah. This is the first generation of consoles that came out with built-in hard drives. Yep. Not like little memory cards you were sticking in. Right. This is the first generation of consoles that came with built-in internet compatibility. You could plug your ethernet cable in. Although before this, you needed extra hardware. Yep. With that. So, this is the first generation set up to be online consoles because they wanted you to download things like games, hence the need for a built-in hard drive and built-in internet. Yep. No consoles generation before this. This is by the way the seventh generation of consoles, which is the 360, the PS3, and the Wii. Every generation before this lacked all of those as regular features. Yep. Okay, so I want to I want to highlight a couple of things just because they're a little

chuckle to me. Number one, that hard drive, 20 GB. It's a 20 GB hard drive that was marketed as a great value because in 2005, it was. Remember when we were like, "How many gigabytes of space could you need on a game console?" And now we're like, "Is a terabyte going to be enough?" Anyway, um so that's part of it. The other part of it, and I I a second, real quick. So, consoles before this had access to internet, but you needed to buy extra hardware to get to it. Yeah. There was a There was an external modem that was an add-on for both the PlayStation 2 and the Cube, but neither of them achieved wide adoption. One exception, one exception, the PlayStation 2 version of Final Fantasy XI is the reason that the modem did so well in Japan. Because Final Fantasy XI was much bigger in Japan than it ever was in the West until much later. So, yeah, Dreamcast could Yeah. Um

okay, so speaking of internet, one of the other things that I want to point out is that that wireless network adapter. There's a little dongle there in the middle next to the Linksys router, which probably looks a lot like a Linksys router that you could buy right now for a similar price, which is also amusing to me, was $100. Mhm. So, for $500, you could get a console with wireless. Which is now standard. Right. And as time, everybody was plugging in cables cuz wireless was not as um ubiquitous. Absolutely correct. I remember when my uh when we I helped install all of the Wi-Fi on my college campus while I was a student there. In in the Actually, funny story, Will. Before we had smartphones that were permeated everywhere and smart tablets, Wi-Fi was a lot less um necessary. Yeah. Absolutely. Cuz if you couldn't be moving your computer or what or your portable computing device, Yeah. if it wasn't portable,

it was perfectly fine to have a computer you would set up your TV wherever the Ethernet cables came in. Right. And same with that, was the corner of your room, you'd set up your desk for your computer. And and the reason Anyway. And the reason it was such a big deal deal college residential areas was that everyone had laptops. Mhm. Right. So, other than the tech specs for the console, though, Mhm. the prices look much like prices today would look. Yeah. That's a $400 console Right. for the regular version. Hey, Will, can you read me off the game prices? Uh yeah. all $60. They're all $60. That's correct. Tony Hawk's uh Underground, Tiger Woods PGA Tour, Madden 05. Did you hear Madden's getting a movie? Anyway, NBA Live 05, Call of Duty 2, Dead or Alive, Cameo. Oh, remember when they thought Cameo was going to be a thing? And $70 for a year of Xbox Live. Which is more or less equivalent to what those

prices are today. Yeah. Console's about $400, give or take. Right? People are throwing an absolute tizzy over the new Switch costing $450. Absolute tizzy. And these are $2,005. Right? Mhm. And so, this is where we've been for 20 years. Almost exactly. Not like with little increases for inflation or supply chain rattling or as formats have changed, right? We've gone in a lot of cases from these came with um DVDs to Blu-rays later on. Games have come on Blu-rays or more compact forms of data storage. So, these have been largely the same for 20 years. And And And here's the important part. kind of crazy, actually. Yeah. Chat Chat has been Chat has been talking about whether or

not games should cost $60. That's not the point yet. We'll get there in a little bit, right? We're talking about That is a very good secondary like whole other discussion. But for the moment, look at this. 20 years ago. Yeah. This is weird. This is really weird that this is sort of like the land lost to time as far as prices go that uh there are a bunch of market effects and uh specific companies that have sort of just time locked pricing for console gaming, certainly. PC gaming is a little bit different because some parts are much more expensive than they used to be and some parts are much cheaper than they used to be. Mhm. Um graphics cards are now an arm and a leg, your firstborn, and a kidney. Um and games are now a dollar, two dollars, the three dollar bullet headed thing. So, this is largely consoles and big AAA games. I acknowledge that PC gaming has done more things, right? So, yeah. The I I I like this. This is

exactly right. An entire industry that managed to remain just as consistent as the Costco hot dog. Yes, that's weird, right? This is bizarre, right? Especially when we consider other luxuries. So, importantly, nobody needs video games to live. Insert wave of comments about needing video games to live. Yes, I'm sure. In the same way that no one, strictly speaking, needs, capital N, needs Starbucks to live. They're both Okay. They're both luxuries. They're They're both luxuries. You could make instant coffee at home, right? You could bring a lunch from home. You don't need Starbucks. You don't need video games. You could read books from your public library instead, right? There are plenty of ways to get the entertainment and art that video games provide you. You don't, capital N, need them. They're great. They're wonderful. I think more people should have access to them, but they are, by definition, a luxury.

Okay. So, Starbucks. So, let's Let's look at Starbucks real quick. Cuz Starbucks uh So, this is not 20 years, by the way. This was a 10 years. 10 year, I think, thing I found. Yeah, we couldn't find 2005 Starbucks prices in any kind of format that was good. Um So, even over the past 10 years, right? Even over the past 10 years, Starbucks, another luxury good that people consume daily as part of their daily lives, has gone up rather significantly. The cake pop doubled. Granted, cake pops are sort of one of their probably highest profit items because cake pops are they initially came in as like loss leaders or something. Like Yeah. the little thing, extra thing. You Actually, sorry, we don't need to get into Yeah. pricing strategy on consumer-facing food, but right. Um the uh So, So, Starbucks, another luxury good, has experienced cost increase over the past 10 years and we can assume that

this is also extrapolated back a bit for the past 20 years. Right? So, luxury goods in general not immune from this time lock. Right? Cars have gotten more expensive, luxury cars specifically have gotten more expensive, uh, luxury clothing more expensive. Lots of things are more expensive than they were 20 years ago in the luxury goods category. Games Workshop has gotten more expensive, Magic has gotten more expensive. We can talk about whether or not they should, again, that's a different conversation, but they have. And games haven't. Right? Video games specifically have not. So, let's talk a little bit about the psychology behind this cuz I think this is a this is a absolutely fascinating, uh, discussion that we can have about why it seems to us that the video game industry is immune to these forces. Right? Or and one thing here, Will. Do me a favor. Yeah. Actually, go back to the Starbucks thing real quick. I want to point something out that is going to become relevant fairly soon.

Mhm. Can you pick a couple of items for me because my eyes are having a hard time seeing them? Yeah. Tell me what the item is and read the old price and the new price. Sure. A cake pop is now $2.95 and used to be $1.50. Okay. A Venti Chai Tea is now $5.15 and used to be $3.95. Mhm. And a Grande Caffe Mocha is $4.95 and used to be $4.15. So, we've got a 97% increase, a 30% increase, and a 19% increase. So, let's go back to Read me that, um, what was the middle one again? The Venti Chai Tea. $5.15 and is now, uh, and used to be $3.95. So, really quickly, just and this I promise this will be relevant. $3.95 is an excellent consumer psychology price. Yes. It is a thing that is under $4, but scraping in really close to it. Yeah. They could have made it $3.99, but for

this kind of thing $3.95 actually feels better. Those 4 cents, like they could have been making four more cents, but they are they're getting better consumer sentiment out of the $3.95. My guess is this is over the past decade probably had somewhere around four price hikes on it. The first one was the hardest because as soon as they raised it it went over $4. Right. And there's a lot of anchoring, which we'll get to in a couple minutes, on the this is a under $4 thing. Yes. But if you look at where it is now, they probably went to something like $4.25 and then $4.45 and then probably $4.75 and then one more to probably $4.95. And if these numbers sound familiar to you, nobody is going to make their drink $4.63. Right. They're not doing a exact percentage multiple, you're like, "We need to raise

this 10%." They're finding these break points in your mind where it sounds like an okay or it sounds like a price you are used to recognizing. Things get rounded. The only time we ever see a non-five or zero number is when it's a nine. You never see 431, you'll see 435, 439 or 450. Like there are very certain numbers that is just we have been trained with our minds. These are the numbers we recognize. Right. And I I would argue that we have been trained right? How many of you in the audience got into gaming sometime in the GameCube Xbox 360 era, the GameCube Wii Xbox Xbox 360 era. I'm willing to bet it's a reasonable number of you, right? This is for many gamers, right? Many gamers. If you started at

like eight The only price The only price for games you've ever known has been $60. Which means that it's deeply anchored. Now, some of you are uh v- venerable elders of the hobby, and I will fully bow to the fact that there are plenty of people for whom this has not always historically been true. in some cases they used to be more expensive. Correct. $60 was actually a lowering of prices for games Yeah. in some cases. Yeah. Around like, yeah, just saying. For sure. It's a weird thing that games actually in some cases used to be more expensive than $60 and got brought down to be a uniform price. Correct. And this is we we intentionally are skipping the entire era of N64 prices because N64 prices were the wild west. Uh N64 game prices by all accounts were like, uh we threw three darts at a board and that's the price. Have fun. Right? Um so, we're intentionally eliding that period in time. Um

So, uh let's let's talk about this anchoring idea, right? So, Jeff, real quick, Mhm. what is the psychological concept of anchoring? Um Yeah. There we go. Sorry, Matt was asking a production question. So, Matt has now answered. Haha. Look at me multitasking. Good job. So, anchoring is a psychological is a psychological concept. It comes up in a lot of places. A lot a lot of places. It comes up in review scores. It comes up in the way you recommend games to your friends. it comes up in um your opinions of your your value judgments, non-monetary value, but value judgments of a great many things. Anchoring is a big psychological concept. Today, specifically, we're talking about price anchoring. Mhm. So, anchoring is actually one of those hacks that your brain does,

Mhm. leftover from a long, long time ago, where it needed to be able to process information quickly. And basically, it's a cognitive bias, where you rely more heavily than you should on kind of the first piece of information you've gotten and internalized when when making a decision, when looking at something. Yeah. And this was really good for a long time, actually, and still is in a lot of cases. You know, if you're walking through the desert and you hear a little rattle, rattle, rattle, you're thinking, "Ah, rattlesnake." And you back up. You're not thinking, "Maybe it's a baby. Maybe it's a like Right. You're going for that first piece of information you know, which is rattle in the desert equals danger. GTFO. Yeah. Or people were like, and that's kind of going back to like some of the survival Yeah. things, where it's dangerous out in the dark. You learn this like, there's a whole bunch of stuff. And this comes even into basic

things. Like, how much should a cup of coffee cost? Right. And this is the weird thing is, this is relative. In other words, you can walk in and be like, "I expect a cup of my cup of coffee at Starbucks." We're just We're going to keep going with Starbucks. To cost $4.95. You walk in there and your brain says, "This is what I think my cup of coffee's going to my or my fancy latte's going to cost." If you walk in there and it's $2.95, your brain's going to flip out. You're going to be like, "Wow, they're having a huge sale on That's almost 50% off. That's amazing. If you walk in there and it's instead of $4.95, it's $6.95, your brain is also going to freak out and be like, "Wow, why is this cup of coffee so radically expensive? It's almost 50% more than I'm used to paying for it." Right. Notice here we're talking about a $2 swing.

Right. If you go in to buy a TV and it's $4.95 for a nice big screen TV, $495 for a big screen TV, and you go through and you pick it and you chat with your spouse and they're like, "Hey, I found that same TV across town and it's $4.85." You're going to be like, "Nah, I'm here." Like, you're already used to this price and that $10 less because it's so little in value difference, even though it's $10 versus that $2 on coffee we were just freaking out about. It's not worth your time to drive across town for that. And they've actually done studies on this literally that exact scenario. TVs mean cheaper um for something like that. But because your brain came in, saw that price, you thought it was a good price, you're not enthusiastic about this. And we actually did a study back when I used to run EEDAR, which was the video game market research firm,

where we went to a college campus. And this is one of the favorite studies I think we ever ran. It was usually we were doing other kinds of things, but I liked the anchoring effect. Mhm. I got to go talk on G4TV about this one. Where we went on a college campus and we grabbed kids and we sat them down playing um Plants vs. Zombies. The prerequisite was at the time you hadn't seen it. And before they played it, they were waiting in a little waiting room and they got to see a sheet showing the review score of the game. And we had three sheets planted. One that showed the actual review scores, which were high. Another one which showed them that were even higher. And another one that showed them that were very medium. So, they saw this and then they went down and sat sat and played the game. And they were told they were going to get paid, I think it was like 10 or 15 dollars for doing this study. And then after they'd played the game for half an hour, they were offered the money that we promised them or to take a copy of the game. So, this is real money. This isn't oh, I

say I'm going to do this. This is would you like to walk out with cash or a copy of the game? Yeah. The people who saw the highest review scores, the ones who were anchored that it was going to be really good, disproportionately at like a 2x version took a copy of the game instead of the money versus the people who saw the low review scores who were anchored to it being low. So, just this one initial perception followed by them playing the game for half an hour where they could they could make up their own their own mind was enough to 2x the number of people who took the game versus took the money. Right. So, that shows excellent example of anchoring Mhm. like in the real world. Your first impression of a thing that sets your mind to it is almost impossible to overcome in a lot of ways. Yeah. Uh and I think that that's that's a really a really fascinating example, right? That we have this Oh, um to answer in chat, the cop the

game basically cost as much as we were going to be offering Yeah. um them. It was a roughly equal trade. Yeah. So, So, that's anchoring. Your mind is really interesting in a lot of ways. And the anchoring effect plays into a lot of the way people perceive things Mhm. and is known by a lot of people who are in the industry who use it as a tool. Right. So, this is also saying people know about this and are using this as they're designing the world for you, both real world and game worlds. So it's also handy to know about this thing. Yeah, absolutely. So there's there's a really great Dima works has hit the nail on the head, right? Because the sale price is the real price. The higher price the rest of the time is just there so you can get it when it's on sale. Yeah. That's another really great example, right? And Steam is one of the reasons why PC gaming is so interesting, right? And and that is in fact an argument that

a lot of people in chat and people historically have made in favor of it is that PC gaming is cheaper because things go on sale. Right? Now it's not to say that you're wrong, but the reason that you perceive sales as such a good value is that if I show you two things, one of them is $50 and the other one is $100 50% off to $50. You're almost certainly going to regard the thing that's 50% off as a better deal even if it's the same product at the same final price. Okay. I see. And let me tell you, having set the price of video games, you know, having run a studio, we absolutely, like when putting our last couple games up on Steam, one of the things we said was we are going to be discounting this often because we know people buy on sale. If we want to actually be making X for our game, what is the standard price that we're setting? Why? Because the X

price is the price that we're happy to get. And that's the one we're going to be discounting to on Steam sale. So if we wanted to be getting say $19.99 for a game, Right. we would probably be pricing it at $25 or even $29 just so that when we mark it down to to which is the price we're actually hoping to get, we can have that big percent number of how much the discount is right there that people will look at and be like, "Oh, wow. This is great." Right. And everybody does this. This isn't us being evil. This is just It's an industry price things in the modern industry. Right. So, there's um there's sort of two facets to this as well. One of them is prestige pricing, which is its own whole psychological concept I will sum up in short. One of the things that often, but not always, occurs, and this occurs more in in places that you are not uh an expert

is more expensive is better. Loosely. If given a choice between A and B if I tell you that something is more expensive, there's generally a perception that in some material or ephemeral way that thing is better, unless and there's a huge unless cuz a bunch of people are about to start start griping in chat, and I'm going to cut off all the comments. You know a lot about that thing. Right? If you know enough about that thing, you can undo that prestige pricing sort of impact, right? The the flashbang effect. And the second one is left my brain while I was talking about prestige pricing. And actually part of the prestige pricing, like I have done research and studies around this. Again, I've been running a video game market research firm for a while. Sometimes a discounted price hurts the game. Mhm. Like if you're looking at if you're selling your game on the Xbox 360 at the time and Call of Duty is $60, and Grand Theft Auto is $60. You know, if you see all

these coming in, and then you see a game that's coming in at $50 part of your brain is thinking "Wow, this team must have thought it wasn't as good as those games. They're therefore marking it down to make it more appealing to me." Yes. But because for a lot of and this would work in some cases except because people don't have unlimited gaming time. Yeah. They are often willing to say I will spend a little more for the better experience because I'm going to be playing this for 50 or 100 or 200 hours. Like saving $10 to play a crappy game is not as good as paying 10 more dollars to play a really good game for a long time. Yes. I And so the price is just kind of all stay uniform because lowering them actually makes it look like you're trying to cover for something in certain circumstances. Yeah. I remember the thing that I forgot. Um the other really important thing is if you've ever heard me estimate total uh

profits for a game when we're talking about the ludicrous amounts of money that particular games have made, you'll often hear me talk about the number of copies sold at the lowest price it's ever been on sale. That both covers a bunch of assumptions that I have to make in order to do that math with the available data, but the other one is the price they expect to get for it. Most of the time, right? Is that lowest sale price. So that lowest sale price um lets me do a whole bunch of uh shorthand uh for that reason. So let's talk about this real quick. So we've talked about prestige pricing and the problems of going on sale. We've talked about all these things. Um But let's let's back up. thing you can be anchored to as well. You could be anchored to game should always be at a reduced price. Like Steam has very well taught us along with a couple of other places but particularly Steam you do not buy things when they don't have a little slash through them with a lower number next to it. It's why often uh games will often go on um sale, especially like mid-tier indie games in the 20 $30 range, will go on a

10% sale when they launch. That's that's an example, right? Is that they will expect to do that. And and that and that is carried through excellently. Thank you uh to Noblefire over in Twitch chat for being a silent participant in this uh little discussion. Um they've run a poll. How How many games have you bought on sale and never played? Oh, man. None, one to five, six to 15, 16 to 30, or 31 plus. And 31 cuz I didn't see it. I would've been in that 31 plus. 31 plus is winning in a landslide because people perceive it as a value to own the thing that they got on sale even if you never use it. Which is kind of interesting, right? That that people will say, "Oh, I'll get to it eventually." and spend money on something that they never use. At any amount, right? Even if it's like $10, right? It's $10 that I might play this game from 20 years ago.

Right? That the we are so heavily anchored to the idea that sales are a good value and that acquiring things on sale is good actually. That we're willing to do that even if we never actually use them. Right? Um so I I think that that is That's That's part of it, right? laughing at chat saying, "Don't forget the Humble Bundles are bulking this up." Sure. Yeah, totally. That's the same concept, chat. You're just continuing to make that point. So, let's go back. Quick question out of chat, Will. Um Yeah. I don't know this cuz I'm not as big of a Nintendo person. Mhm. But So, Nintendo very very rarely does limited sales. Mhm. Overall, their strategy is that they do not. They are also the only one of the console manufacturers who is said and we don't know that this is true for the Switch 2,

but we're kind of assuming who has said that they are not loss leading with the Switch 2. I can explain that in a minute. Yeah, yeah. Well But um one of the things though that's important about Nintendo not running sales is because Nintendo never runs sales, you know, with limited exceptions. Never. People aren't sitting there waiting to buy the game hoping that in 2 months it will go on sale like it does on Steam. That's correct. Um and so Sorry, I've been attacked by spring so I keep That's Okay, that is totally fair. It's It's spring here too and it's gross. Yeah, so at the end of our poll, we have 42% of respondents have said that they have purchased 31 or more games on sale that they've never played. I am easily in the larger end of that. Definitely probably in the 60-plus range, but I also purchase, play, and review video games professionally so that's like a whole

other factor, right? So I'm removing myself from the data, but like I'm right there with you. Like the Um so quick industry fact, since we just mentioned it one of the things that has been done by most consoles for a long time. So Will, did you know that a console is basically just a PC optimized for gaming? Yeah, I did. But it's like most people kind of know that, but it's a different way to think of it. Yeah. Like you can go buy a $1,000 PC or you can go buy a $3,000 PC and if you're buying a gaming PC they will tend to be at the higher range because they're going for Yeah. Faster stuff and graphics card. Only $3,000. Yes. Okay. Or more. Anyway, go on. But so when you think about it going and buying an Xbox, especially when it just comes out like they are usually comparable to fairly high-end gaming PCs when they come out. Yes. And at this point they're selling for five or six hundred dollars

but you're comparatively getting a $3,000 plus gaming console. Right. Excuse me, gaming PC. They've removed of a lot of other PC stuff, but it is a piece of hardware that can run games similar to your $3,000 plus PC because of the way it's extremely optimized for doing that one particular purpose. Right. Well, it's architecture, it's graphics, or just the whole thing. Sadly, for a lot of these companies, they can't actually make it cost. They can't make a $3,000 gaming machine for the five or six hundred dollars that they're going to sell it to for, especially when you remember that there's a markup price in there because they're not selling it to the retailer for that. You know, if they're selling a batch of these to go sell in Costco, and they want to charge 600 for it to Costco, they're selling it to Costco for like three or four hundred. Right. Like there's there's extra bits of markup. So, almost every console manufacturer out there for the as long back as we can think of,

sells the consoles at a loss, meaning that they lose money for every console they sell, because they make money on every game they sell. Because Xbox games are proper proprietary to them, and you know, the encoding and everything else to run it, Microsoft gets a cut of every Xbox game that gets sold. Mhm. And over time, if the console lasts for, you know, say eight years on the console life cycle, the cost of the components slowly come down over time as manufacturing gets more efficient. So, maybe it used to cost them $900 to make each console. Four years in, it might be costing them 500. Three years after that, it might be down to say 400. Right. They keep dropping in price. A- And there's the other additional um design costs, right? There's the one-time cost of building a new product. Uh and you know, designing it and designing the logo and designing the box and all of that that goes into it initially and eventually they'll recoup those costs

and the the per unit percentage that goes into profit is higher after you've recouped that cost. But yeah, just getting going off that. So, that's one of the things that console manufacturers just do. They put out a better piece of hardware than you could actually buy for that price, usually by a long amount, and they just slowly make it up as you buy games and other things. Right. Nintendo famously doesn't do that. And that's one of the reasons that their consoles come in less powerful than say the com- you know, the Wii when it came out or the Wii U when they came out were both significantly less powerful than a comparable Xbox or PlayStation. Yeah. But they also didn't have the pressure of need to push games as hard because they weren't actually losing money by selling the hardware. Right. So, let's let's bundle all of this together into like this big this big thing. So, we've talked about prestige pricing. We've talked about um

things being too deeply discounted, right? We've talked about a bunch of stuff. So, let's go back to that $60 $60 for a game, $400 for a console thing, right? The consoles have varied. The games have been 60 bucks. At some point for for part of this, right? And and chat brought this up before and forgive me I I did not see who. Part of this was nobody wanted to be the first one to flinch. No one wanted to be the first one to raise the prices on their games because they depend on selling those games to make back the money that they lost selling the console. Right? They depend on those game sales to actually generate a profit. So, it really matters if they accidentally mess up and um severely hurt sales of a new game that they're really relying on selling a bunch of copies of to help recoup their cost for the console, right? Like a launch title. So, no one wanted to be the first one to flinch. And then no one also a price

weird price sensitivity on that like if you're going to be the ones biting the bullet to raise your price, how much do you raise it to? Unlike Starbucks, which went $3.95 for a drink to you know, $4.25 to $4.49. Like raising a $60 game to $62 is a really weird look. Yeah. Like they'd get a whole bunch And so, there wasn't really a good price up until maybe you were going to say, "Okay, $60 games are now 65." But like there isn't kind of these small prices that you can do with say like a coffee shop. You're looking at larger price jumps if you're going to bite the bullet of getting the consumer backlash. Yes. And so, one of the other reasons is we did see some kind of in that $65-ish dollar tier, but they were very uncommon. Like you literally saw a price going from $60 to $70 as people were considering this because of the weird way our minds anchor on prices in between that there wasn't a

lot of good It wasn't going to be like, "Cool, this is now 65.23." Right. I actually went and looked and Nintendo has released a bunch of and I am excluding bundles here. There's a bunch of Nintendo bundles in the $100, $90, $80 range. There is one singular title at $70. That's Tears of the Kingdom. We'll come back to Tears of the Kingdom. And then a bunch of stuff in like the weird $60 range and then every in like the 60-plus dollar range and then everything else is 60 flat or below in some cases where it's like a retro game or a remake or whatever. Right? Um it is very interesting to see. Now, let's also address this. It really matters that this is Nintendo. Right? It really really matters that the reason that people are getting upset over crossing into $70 territory right now is that it's Nintendo. Mhm. Actually, Will, can I bring up one thing before we hit that?

Sure. The other thing that's really changed since 2005, 20 years ago, is remember I made a bunch of caveats when I was talking about game prices? Like, there were no mobile games. There was no free-to-play. Arcades were kind of on the way out. In the 20 years since then, we've had a couple of things happen. These are one of them. Yeah. Smartphones, and the fact that you can play games on them. And we'll talk about maybe we'll talk about pricing on games later, but you know, it started as $0.99 because Apple, strangely enough, when we were start first started putting out games on mobile, they had a policy where they wanted everything to cost $0.99. A song was $0.99. Like, and so they pressured the game industry really hard to make things cost $0.99. And that's a very low price for a game. And a lot of game companies pushed back, and they're like, we need to sell it for more. But remember that anchoring effect? Let's say you come in

and you're like, my game is $4.99. Because everybody's used to paying $0.99 for something at that time on a smartphone, the everybody's brain screamed. It was like, that's five times as much as something should be costing on this platform. And that's one of the reasons you saw a huge shift into free-to-play on mobile is that it became it was just easier to say, get the game for free, we'll charge you later, than to try and convince people to pay like five bucks for a game or 10 bucks for a game. And that's one of the reasons free-to-play and microtransactions came in is that $0.99 thing. Right. But So anyway, games came in at low cost and free. Free to play became a thing. Mhm. And Steam, which was a small thing in 2005, has grown to be a juggernaut now. Steam is very, very happy to let people, because it's digital delivery, price things at whatever they want and to do frequent sales. Like, they kind of broke that $60 price

point and with the range of mid-tier games coming in. And the indie movement. The indie movement also wasn't a thing really back in 2005. People were okay coming in and saying, "My game isn't a prestige Call of Duty. It's still a good game, but you know, this is Journey. This is um Binding of Isaac. This is like a whole bunch of things where they're just like, "Hey, this isn't $60. This is a smaller team. We're okay to sell this for $20 or $30 or 15." And they were, let's just say, appropriately priced. Well, for a moment, let's make that argument. And so, what we've had in the in terms since that 20 years, is we've had free to play come in, low-cost mobile, and the rise of the indie movement, and pricing of games in a price point other than $60 on things like PC. And remember I said these consoles were the first ones that had the hard drives on them? They were already selling games at less than 60 as download only.

You know, here's an old PS2 game that you can buy for $30. And especially as their catalogs have expanded, you can now buy literally thousands of games on the Wii, in sorry, in the Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony ecosystems on their respective consoles for much less money because they're happy to have you buying a 10-year-old game Yeah. for $20 at that point. So, we've also seen, in addition to this, that there's suddenly a whole bunch of other alternatives of pricing for non-new for non-brand new console games. And so, I think that's also part of what's working against Nintendo as we get to our next part is there are now actual alternatives of lower prices that people are used to. Correct. So uh there's a really Mark in YouTube chat has really has a really great thing that I want to bring up. Digital manufacturer scarcity makes no sense when you could just sell more copies at a lower price. There is

scarcity, it's just on the other side. There are a limited number of people who play video games. All right, there is a limited market appeal for something like Call of Duty, right? Someone's going to buy a copy of Call of Duty or they're not. It's very difficult to convince someone to pick up gaming as a lifestyle. Like no very few single games are going to do that. One of the biggest exceptions, biggest exceptions, was Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing during the pandemic was like one of our one of the very few like really break out of the gaming ecosphere thing. There is a scarcity and it's how many like what's the install base for that console, right? That's that's a known number, right? If I have a limited number of Xboxes and I only sell on the Xbox, what's the install base for that? Right? Yep. Um and what what's the theoretical maximum size of my target audience? How many people are willing to play an MMO daily?

That number is small is both larger and smaller than you probably think it is. There's also one more big thing which I'll just bring up now. There is more there are more things competing in what we call the attention economy. Yeah. In 2005 it was a different landscape. I don't think Instagram existed or Facebook. Discord didn't. Uh Twitch didn't. Um YouTube didn't in any meaningful way. You didn't have constant app or you didn't have the smartphones with all of your social media on them, the ability to watch YouTube. There's a whole bunch of things now competing for our attention. We didn't have awesome Netflix programming. I mean, there or the prestige Apple stuff. Like, there is a whole bunch of cool stuff to do. There is more cool stuff to do than anybody has time for. Straight up. And all of it competes with each other. Video games aren't just competing against other video games. You playing a game is also you could have

been reading a book, watching a show, looking at YouTube, watching Twitch. Like, all of these other things you could be doing all also compete with games. And so, one of the things on pricing is people do very sophisticated models on this. They're like, okay, what if my $60 game was $30? Could we sell twice as many copies Yes. of that? And sometimes the answer, actually often the answer is no. That people who were willing to pay 60, there's a certain amount of people who might buy it at, you know, 50, 40, or 30, but you're losing all of the people who would have paid 60 for that Yes. because it was worth it to them on the time. Yes. And there's some weird calculus that you weigh trying to figure out pricing on all of these things. But this is a weird one where you would think lower price, sell more copies. And that's often true, but it isn't as true as you would think on digital entertainment. Right. So.

It'd be nice if it was, Right. but it isn't. Right. And Nintendo's got this pretty drilled in, right? As a company specifically, right? Novo was bringing up earlier during um the discussion about Nintendo sales that Nintendo has um built a brand on the idea that if you buy a Nintendo game, you will play the whole Nintendo game and enjoy it. Whether or not that's true is a different story, but Nintendo games pride themselves on being these sort of prestige priced high quality entries, right? First-party Nintendo games specifically. Third-party Nintendo games run the gamut. I remember the Wii shovelware era pretty well. Oh, yes. Like, we're fully there on that, but the gamut. Do you know, by the way, Will? I did I once did a graph of review scores over time by console. The Wii was the lowest-rated average game. All right, the lowest-rated average games by I think it was like eight or nine points on a 100-point scale. Yeah. Because of the shovelware. Yeah.

Like Yeah. That is a huge like almost unbelievable dip. Yeah. Sorry, anyway, just factoid. No, I I I think it's it's totally reasonable, right? So, Nintendo products don't go on sale because they think that they're that they are like these prestige things, and I think that that's part of why there's the backlash is that in the same way that we've slowly become anchored to the $60 game as the as the price that games should huge air quotes be, right? We've also slowly been acclimatized and anchored to the idea that games go on sale. We buy them on sale. The I can play games for free on my phone. You got games on your phone, right? That there are entire ecosystems of free games. Looking at Riot or Blizzard, right? There are whole ecosystems of free games that I can trade my time for rather than trading money for, right? Those are also things that we have cuz like those are the things that I'm hearing from chat, that there are Yes, games are $60, but there are other games

that don't cost $60 or I can buy them on sale or whatever, and I feel like that's what's really free-ish games. Um that that the um the anchoring effect is working on the audience in multiple directions, right? That $60 is the price that games could cost, but there are plenty of things that cost less. So, if the $60 moves for any reason, then I'm just going to go with indie titles, free-to-play games, old games, backlog, etc., etc., etc. This Or yeah, keep playing the game you love. Yeah, keep playing the game you love. This is also where I'm going to remind people something, and Jeff and I are both probably need this, too. When we think about buying games, we are nowhere near the average consumer. We're not even close. Yeah, most of you in chat probably are also not the average consumer. willing to bet that you in chat are not

the average gamer, right? You are here on a channel about game design, talking about the psychological impact of of game prices across 20 years. You're already so bought into this like idea that you're well outside the bounds of what the average gamer is interested in, right? So, like that is another big part portion of this is that when you when we're talking about our gut check experiences or the games that we want to play or all of those things, our we are extremely biased, right? Compared to the general public, which is another thing that we need to keep in mind, right? Um Yeah, there are a lot of game devs in chat. There are a bunch of people with a bunch of deeply held opinions because That's true. Hey game devs in chat, good to see you. Right. Yeah, exactly. So, does that make Does it seem right that we've covered like the majority of the reasons that that they're like stuck? There's this competition, right? They need to sell a

number of copies in order to break even on their consoles. Yeah. Let's get to that. Um there's one other thing we should talk about. You don't get to change prices often. Correct. Every price change that has gone up has always happened when it's the new shiny thing. Yes. Hey guys and girls and everybody else out there, there is a new console. Right. It's shiny. It's about to come out. We are allowed to raise the price at this point without people throwing a fit as much. Like if you were if 3 years ago they were like, "Hey, Switch, I know you've been used to paying X for it, but now it's X plus 20%." People would be like, "Wait, why are you raising the price of the Switch now?" Right. Or if Nintendo was suddenly like, "Hey, you know games have been $60." This 3 years ago. "We're now just going to say they're all 70." People would be

furious. You don't raise games in the middle of a console cycle. It's just not done. Yeah. Almost ever. You might raise an individual price of a game that you think can sell a whole bunch. But um I Yeah. Am I Oh, sorry. No, you're you're you're you're good. I I'm having I'm having a weird tech problem with chat. It's okay. Keep going. Don't Just keep going. But anyway, so when like every price change of significance has always happened at the beginning of a console cycle. And like Nintendo Sony and I put actually particular Microsoft and Sony like when games for them went from 60 to 70, they did it at the same time. Yeah. Like everybody tries to do it at the same time because they know there's going to be backlash. But if somebody else does it, that's when they're like, "Oh, thank god, we can now raise our games and do this." So, the same with like console pricing. Like when the new consoles come out, they're kind of setting their high water

mark for what they're going to be. Right. Like there was the weird one we just had where the Xbox price went up, but that's more that's tariff based. Yeah. Well, and so A, they get to point at tariffs and be like, this is a terrible thing. And B, Xbox doesn't seem to be like, I'm not sure how much of it is them pointing at tariffs and how much of people expecting sale prices to save them from raised overall prices for Xboxes. I don't know what the math on that Excuse me. literally might have been like, we're going to raise our prices, but they're also going to run like six more sales before the end of their console cycle. And yeah, like and just so people like, oh, it's on sale. I'm going to pick it up. Correct. And then just wanted to say the console cycle start Yeah. is a key that is why it happened now. Correct. Like Nintendo, like every other console group knows this is when we can do it with the least amount of friction. Correct. Because and and this is also very true, I think. All of the people who were in

treehouse streams chanting drop the price, drop the price in chat were I'm going to say 90% of them going to pre-order it anyway. They just wanted to spend less on it. I don't actually think I I do not actually think that the the difference in price for games or for the console is large enough that as many people will get off this ride as claim they will. Right? I think that is another thing to keep in mind. Now, Nintendo Now, Nintendo does have a thing that's working against them a bit. Um and this is heavily biased incoming, okay? This is a lot of my bias incoming, okay? Hit me. Nintendo tried the $70 thing once already with Tears of the Kingdom. And Tears of the Kingdom was not worth $70. Tears of the Kingdom is fine. It's not $70. It didn't have the impact that Breath did. It has some cool It has a bunch of

cool tech to it, but it's fine. And so Nintendo only gets to shoot that shot on our first $70 title on the switch once. Like and by the way, again, that solo title or more successful, I think we would have seen a steady follow-up happen. Racked. But the reason that it's the only one is um the it is cuz it was fine. Mhm. Right? So, I I think that that is that that is a thing that the audience is acutely aware of, right? If I ask people what their favorite Zelda game is, I don't think a overly large section of the audience would say Tears of the Kingdom. I think more of them would say Breath than Tears. And I think that that's a big deal, right? Because they fumbled this other number would say Smash or would say Kart or like there's a whole bunch of Sure. great Nintendo games. Sure. And and and I think that they could have um I think there are other

games that they could have done this for, right? I think if they'd done it just I think they'd be getting less pushback if they were doing it for the first time properly on the new generation. And I really do personally think that the attempting to make Tears of the Kingdom a $70 success is severely hampering their current efforts because people have an example of a $70 title they can point at and say, "This wasn't it. Why should I believe you now that this might be it, right?" Um There's also a really interesting other point around this that almost nobody in this discussion is talking about. Yeah. So, my sister with her two teenage kids, they're not going to be the ones paying for most of their Nintendo games. You know, at some point they're going to be like, "Hey, we get a switch new one of those new switches for our birthday or for Christmas." And you know, uncle here is going to go buy once the console is there, I'm going to

buy a Christmas Like my nephew, I bought a game on the Switch for his past like five birthdays and five Christmases. Yeah. This last one I actually there was a There was a virtual sale going on, so I bought him a store credit and like here are the four games you need to go download. Because I I picked out four games I wanted him to play. But there is a lot of gifting from moms, dads, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. with Nintendo hardware and Nintendo games. Because it is aimed at a target demographic, a lot of whom don't make a majority of their own purchases, there's also a bit more price elasticity because you know, when Johnny's whining at their mommy that they want the new Mario Kart, two months in, it doesn't matter if that game is $60 or $70. Mom's going to buy Johnny that thing just to shut Johnny up. Right. And Johnny's going to go play it. So and then there's another There's

another element which I think is hurting Nintendo specifically here. Mario Kart World is $80. But DK Bonanza, Donkey Kong Bonanza is $70. And that's not helping this at all. Say that to me again. My brain just You said it again. Kart World Okay. a physical copy, we're talking about physical copies only, we can talk about digital later, is $80. Ooh, okay. Donkey Kong Bonanza, Mhm. another first-party launch title from Nintendo, is $70. So now we also have them um Interesting. Right. They're having this big problem where they're competing with themselves. In a weird way, right? Because like because that So there's already this anchoring idea, right? Games should cost $60. And now, when we look at two games,

one of which costs $70 and one of which costs $80, while we might grumble about the $70 game, it's a bargain compared to the $80 game, and now they're competing with themselves, which is increasing grumbling. Because of the two, I'm very willing to bet more people are interested in Mario Kart World than they are in Donkey Kong Bonanza. I I Nintendo actually has a small history of pricing like that, where they're just like, "We know you're going to buy it." You know, actually, I'm going to be curious to see what the next Grand Theft Auto costs. I think Rockstar is very appropriately going to be able to say, "We can charge a lot more than most people are happy with us charging, but they will buy it anyway." Yeah, especially given I I saw I saw the the number of millions of units that GTA V still moves per year. Yep. That is it. I think the number I think the number I saw was that GTA V still moves close to 5 million units a year.

Still. Right? still sell? They can do Rockstar Right, right. So So there are exception companies, right? Rockstar can charge whatever they want for the next Grand Theft Auto game. Almost literally. be shocked if it is not at least 80. Yeah, correct. And I would be shocked if there's not some sort of bundle that puts it at 100. Sure. Or package prestige something. Yeah. So okay, so that's that's the that's the why, right? We We've gone through the the the why is it, right? Why are Why is it locked to 60? Why are we moving to 80 now? Chad has been chomping at the bit for the second part of this discussion, which is Ooh, wait, there's a second part? What do we got? Well, this is much more opinion-based. Mhm. So, chat, take off your analysis hats and be prepared to have good faith conversation about your opinion.

second hat sitting here. Right, yeah, I know, right? Man. Which is good. Triple-A games cost more than $60. And we're going to say more than $60 because there's a bunch of Yeah, okay, that's your discussion hat. Um Yeah. See, they don't have my There's a bunch of um There's a bunch of room in that, right? Um there's, you know, $70, $80, $100. Some people are being hyperbolic with it and saying, you know, all games will cost $100. I don't think we're there yet, but you do you. Um So, Okay, this is distracting. Yeah, you're telling me. Um It's distracting. Right. So, should they? And that's a difficult question, right? Because I think there's a lot of One of the arguments that I hear, right? And I'm going to sort of do a as much interpreting as I can of the general vibe of chat here rather than giving too much of my own opinion.

Um One of the One of the comments that I've heard is that Triple-A games have um in many people's opinions decreased in overall quality relative to the offerings which are available at lower price points in the in the space, in the industry. So, what we're saying is that the delta, in other words, if Triple-A quality, let's just say remained constant at here, but other games lower priced have raised their quality up to be closer to the Triple-A mark, and they are charging significantly less, say a 20 or a 30, but the delta, the difference between them has gotten closer. Yes. Okay. Just making sure I'm understanding what we're saying. Yeah, and I think that that is And some people would argue, and I I that there is less cold analytical consideration to back up the idea that AAA games are just bad now. That that's a hyperbolic take that I often hear that AAA games are bad actually.

Um and I think that that that argument usually comes from a deeply enfranchised part of the games uh consumer group, right? Gamers, capital G. Um who have very high standards and who are often um very biased against the industry because they're aware of the a lot of the other shortcomings from the gaming industry that aren't necessarily reflected in the quality of the product. If that makes sense. Like there's a big complicated package of ideas there that often sums up in I don't like AAA games anymore and they're bad. It's fine to say I don't like AAA. Yeah. I would unequivocally say that people are saying and they're bad are wrong. I I agree. Have you played the latest couple Spider-Man games? The latest Madden? Yeah. Like the la- I mean, there are any number of amazing AAA games. And these are games that, you know, have hundred to 300 to 500 person teams that

work years on them to put them out. Yeah. The level of sophistication, spectacle, and gameplay on AAA has arguably never been as good as it is now. Like if you but that doesn't necessarily mean people want to play them. Right. There are separate those are separate issues. I agree. Because as um Mark your calendar like there's also been a lot of good games that have come out. Like the back catalog of games is strong and that's one of the other things that everything's competing against now, not just lower price games, but hey Will, when my kid turns old enough Right. You you Like, they're not right now. Right. Look, I'm going to introduce them to um Halo 3. Right. To Dragon Age franchise. Right. Mass Effect franchise. Right. To BioShock. Like, I'm just I'm sticking trip pure triple I mean, there are so you know, to KOTOR.

Um to Portal. I mean there is so many good games that have come out that I love. Um Yeah. Homeworld if it still I mean, there I sorry, I don't want to just keep naming games like No, but but you have a point. thing that we're also competing against is when my son gets to the right age I won't neces- I could I will introduce him to games that had came out that year, but there's also going to be 30 to 40 years worth of, you know, me cherry-picking some of the absolute best games Right. to him to be like, "Check these out. Oh, by the way, they're all in dad's Steam account already." Right. So, I also think there's a bunch of really good comments in chat. You've got some very Chat has been on fire with some very good comments. Yeah, so um uh Cash for now has a really great point. Inflation says it should be higher, but minimum wage wage says it should stay the same. That's a great point. The minimum wage in the United States and in

other places, but we're mostly focused on the US cuz we're both in the US has remained stagnant, right? At a federal level. Some states are higher, some states are lower, some states do different things because we're 50 countries and we don't get along trench coat. So, there is that additional problem, right? That is that a lot that drives a lot of people's feelings about this, right? It drives their opinion. They feel like their wages are not keeping up with their ability to purchase it and I think a lot of people power is not keeping up with the increase in prices. Correct. And I think one of the things that drives this conversation from the consumer side is the fear that they will be priced out of a hobby that they love. Right? That is and I that's an understandable and very reasonable fear to have about this conversation, right? That totally makes sense. That's what I'm reading a lot when people say I don't think they should, I don't make more money, I want to be able to participate. Totally valid, completely valid and nowhere are we attempting to say anything otherwise, right? But that

is a thing that like there's sort of a bigger problem at work here. There's a bigger problem at work outside of the industry which is the current state of late stage capitalism in the United States, which is not the topic of this talk, so we're not going to get too deep into it, but that is a thing that we're aware of that exists around this, right? And in some cases you might price the game industry. Coffee's gone up, all of these other prices have gone up, Netflix has gone up, you know, console games for a long time didn't. Yeah. Like they were one of the as we just examined, they were one of few things that didn't actually go up. Right. For a super long time. And so people is going to be the price jump. Yep. I would bet you we will not see another price jump off of this for the next decade. Right. So Like this is the reframing of what prices are, but they're not going to be like, "Cool. Now it's $82 or whatever." Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's definitely it. And I also think that um I think I don't think that people are going to leave gaming over it, right? I think a lot of people will be upset and that makes sense and that's totally valid, but I don't actually think a large number of people are going to check out of gaming entirely. I think they're are to be more selective with which games they buy, but that's already true. More games come out every year than the year before. And then we can play. Significantly. There's also less because of the 30 sorry, 20 years ago or 19 when Halo 3 came out, everybody I knew was playing it. Mhm. I can't think of a game that everybody I know is playing anymore.

Because gaming has expanded so widely. Mhm. And in some cases that means, you know, if Well, what's the 33 game you're playing right now? Expedition 33. If I play that 5 years from now, I'm still going to enjoy it. You will still love it. Yeah, it's still a masterpiece. It's still going to be a great game. Mhm. There is less of the I must go buy immediately and because people also know game prices come down over time in back catalog. It's kind of a double hit. Mhm. You might say, "Wow, Expedition 33 sounds amazing. At some point I will buy it and add it to my back catalog of games to eventually get to." Yeah. So, like there's a whole bunch of like even if a game starts high, we're not even necessarily saying we're pricing people out because people also know at some point because that game can be bought on Steam, even if it's $60 now, it's going to be 50 and then 40 and eventually 30. Right. And they'll pick it up 4 years from now and because there isn't this huge rush to do it,

like there's a whole bunch of weird factors at work here. Yeah. And I think so so I'm going to I'm going to pick a very specific comment that I think is really great. I'm going to pick Cross Donut here, right? So, for Cross Donut, how can they justify $80 for Mario Kart when there's many games that go on sale constantly that provide so many hours worth. Persona 5 and 3 can put 100 hours easily and they're like $25 each on sale. Mhm. And that's true for you. Right? And I think that this is this is the other big thing. Each person is going to have a different relationship to this change in game valuation, and I think a lot of people want their view that games should be less expensive to be more broadly adopted because I agree that games should be accessible, right? But, there are people for whom Mario Kart World is absolutely worth it at $80, right? Um Matt's one. I'll throw Matt right under that Mario Kart, right? Matt is a Mario Kart fiend. Matt's

favorite pastime is uh hustling people at Mario Kart at parties. Like, Matt is Matt loves Mario Kart. For him, it is worth it at that price. And I agree that it might be worth it at 200. Right. But, I'm not saying that I'm not saying that So, around it is different on a per person basis. Utility meaning how much value you get out of it. Sure. Sure, sure, sure. The um And I think that the math has been done on the corporate side of this that they expect to sell fewer units and overall make more money. They expect you to not They expect there to be fewer people who will buy that game. I think it is a smaller number of uh it's a smaller reduction than I think a lot of people believe. Mhm. But, they do expect to sell fewer games. And that should be noted, right? Um It's Yeah, I'm I'm curious because I

haven't done this in a while, how much executives are not counting on like back catalog sales, and like game is over X, you know, a year old, but still selling. Like, Rockstar obviously is doing a brisk business with that. Yep. So, let's I got a I got another really great one. Janet's on fire today. $60 isn't actually the price though. Look at the seven different versions of every Ubisoft game to pre-order. There's also DLC. Mhm. Yes, {comma} but. A, remember when we were talking about hard drives on consoles 20 years ago? Map packs were a thing on Call of Duty 2. Map packs were a thing on a lot of things, right? There were There were microtransactions. There weren't as many, right? But we're also choosing a an era of console to anchor this against that did have access to DLC. So, that is in the picture. But, Not just DLC, horse armor. Horse armor, woo. Comes in the Comes in the deluxe edition of the new Oblivion

remaster. Please look forward to it. Really? Yeah. That's funny. So, um the How do I put this? There was always going to be a price to enter, right? And I am 100% in favor of studios releasing complete games for the list price. I think This might be radical. When we're talking about this, I'm obviously going to continue to games that release unfinished or that demand the DLC to tell the complete story or whatever, right? I think that a game when released should be a complete whole that does more for an optional purchase, right? I think DLC is fine. If you want to spend more time in that world rather than making a new game, release a DLC for it. That's great. That's awesome. Borderlands 2 DLC, great example. Borderlands 2 is a complete story, tells the whole story. You can play all of Borderlands 2. And you can get some DLC that tells some pretty wacky side stories including Tiny Tina's, which is

Tiny Tina, boom. arguably one of the best DLCs ever, right? So, I think that that is um I think that that's like a big part of this, right? I think there's a lot of criticism of DLC and of games that release with intentional DLC, right? But I also want to say that we can criticize that and also look at the selection of games that does release feature complete without intending to do DLC as a complete whole when we're talking about this conversation, right? Because I think it's very easy to muddy the water and try and have two conversations at once, right? One about the number of add-ons and one about the core price to buy a game, which is really what we're talking about here, right? Those are related conversations, but I do think that they're two conversations. Let me throw a monkey wrench at Will. Sure. Like games should be complete, right? The whole story. Yeah. Like the Final Fantasy remake. Each of the legs of the Final Fantasy remake is a complete game. Also, I'm super excited that they debuted the new

version of Safer Sephiroth on a Magic card. I'm Now, granted, if it were any other franchise and any other card game, I'd be super upset and I don't blame anyone for being super upset that they did that. It's totally Emperor Palpatine has a message for you and you can only listen to it in Fortnite. But, since I like both of those properties, I'm going to sit in my joy. Um and I know it's a problem and uh I'm still happy. So. Um I know I Sorry, I just like I I completely agree with you. It's just funny you said that and my mind was like, "Wait, I played a game a couple years ago that Sure. didn't go as far as I thought it was going to." Yeah. So. Jeff, I think this has been a really good conversation. I think this is probably a good place for us to sort of sort of wrap it up, but I think this is really interesting. So, let's So, to recap real quick. Games have been stuck at $60 for a variety of market force reasons and psychological reasons. For 20 20 years. For 20 years. Anchoring to the price

that's games should cost $60 has been a big part of it. No one wanting to flinch first has been a big part of it. Um and uh only wanting to really change game prices when possible at generational transitions in consoles has been another big part of it. And the the reason that Nintendo is the one that's getting all of the flak here is that Nintendo has sort of stayed out of a lot of the processes that other companies use to sell games, like sales and loss leading on consoles, and are now saying this is the new price, and I think a lot of people are getting very upset about that. And then there's sort of this Also the fact that people are anchored to Nintendo being the low-cost alternative to the PlayStation and the Xbox. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Um and I think that this is a very big topic, which we could have infinite conversations about, but I think that this is a good start. What do you think?

I could go for another couple hours on this, but Yeah, yeah. you're right. Yeah, all right, cool. Well All right, cuz I'm also looking behind me at that espresso machine, and I'm like, I could go get another espresso. Go go get an espresso, absolutely. Um So, that is going to do it for our episode of Design Club today. Thank you all so very much for joining us. Thank you to Brad and to Janet, our Twitch and YouTube chats for chiming in. You all were fantastic good faith interlocutors for this. As always. I really want to call out that it's very easy to to tilt out and just absolutely go off the handle on this, and both of you both chats have been constructive with well-reasoned arguments why people feel the way they do. That's really great. If you have comments about this, leave them in the YouTube comments below. Hit us up on Blue Sky, do whatever. Let us know how you're feeling about this. Does it make sense why we've been stuck for so long? What What What do you think is next? Is it going to be $100 games? Is it going to be $80 games, and that's the end of it? Are games going to Stay tuned for Grand Theft Auto to find out. Right, exactly. Exactly.

Um As always, that's been Jeff. Uh I've been Will. Thank you ever so much for spending some time with us and we will see you all next time. Say bye to the people, Jeff. Bye to the people, Jeff. Time for the post stream or post cut stream. Post show, there we go. Yeah. I think that was good. I felt like we wrapped up on a good point. I felt like we could have gone like another hour and a half. Oh, yeah. Um but this is this is a good point. Um yeah, for real for real, I see a lot of people uh in both chats who have been engaging in good faith with this. It is like I said, it is so easy to tilt out on this, Oh, yeah. because this is a thing that a lot of people feel very deeply about because a lot of us here have lives that are deeply intertwined with gaming, right?

Like I I I chose to wear this for a reason, right? I'm decked out in Monster Hunter Final Fantasy XIV. I've got a Hollow Knight crest under like 100%, right? It's yeah, it's it's a very easy thing to get just absolutely tilted out by and I I really think that one of the important pieces of work that we are trying to do here and if you're watching this in the comments later, for you as well, is to pick this apart and to talk about it, to like actually have a good conversation that doesn't just devolve into well, of course games should cost less because the industry pay. Industry pay, by the way, I I I sort of skirted that. I think that is another adjacent but separate conversation, right? The way that companies spend their money is a valid conversation that we should be having, but that is a different topic than this and it would be very easy to get very mired down in that. Um for For record, I am 100% pro pay

developers more to work less to make fewer games for more money and I'm serious about it. Uh and pro union and all of that, right? I think that there's a there's a huge like there are so many adjoining conversations that I was trying to like gently navigate us around. So, like if you were talking about that, I see you, I hear you, you're right, but not a topic for today. Um and I think I think the ball has a really great point, right? That um uh that they're not worried about what the price increase means to them, they're worried about what it does to the overall gaming ecosystem. I think I understand your fear and I share it to some extent, but I do think that gaming is more resilient as a as a hobby and a pastime than I think a lot of people think. Because again, we've talked about the breadth of gaming um as being much larger than a lot of

people see, right? If we focus only on our communities and on people who talk about games like us or play games to the extent that we do or develop games like we do, then we can get a little myopic on how how the state of the industry is as a whole, right? But I believe the data, Jeff, please correct me if I'm wrong here, is that more people are identifying as people who play video games recreationally every year and that there is some amount of as long as we're taking into account things like mobile gaming, hidden eye games, console gamers who play one game, right? All of those topics. I I do think gaming is more resilient um than it than it may seem. I share that fear, but I do want to point out that I I think we're more resilient. Um Yeah. It's It's funny, the game industry is always myopic. Like yeah. Oh, absolutely. industry and players in it because whatever you're playing is the game

industry and whatever you're making is the game industry. Yes. Absolutely. Just and it's a weird thing to say but like if you are constantly playing League of Legends and Fortnite Right. like your experience of the game industry is radically different than Will who's playing a different rogue every week. Right. I'm playing I'm playing at deep dives into like hey, let's go play Roguetech again, the mod of Paradox's Battletech. Right. And like or you know, the person who only plays farming games on their phone Right. between picking up their kids. Like all of those people have a very different view and hundreds more different like and the same with developers. Like I've talked to people developing mobile who are like I didn't believe anybody still making console games. I'm like well they're still making billion dollar plus console games. Or you know, people who are like I can't believe mobile is still a thing. It's

like well like all of these kinds of things. Right. Exactly. And people wonder how Magic surviving when they're raising their costs and Magic is doing just fine. Final Fantasy is the best selling set ever despite costing more than normal, right? Like there there is a huge amount of there is more than it is possible for two people to cover in a reasonable amount of time that's going on in the industry that It it's so multifaceted now. It is really absolutely massive because of all of the entertainment forms, games often slip most seamlessly into people's lives. Right? You play games while you're waiting for the bus, on the way to work, at your lunch break. You tune into Twitch, you watch a YouTube video, you do whatever. The Of all of the forms of entertainment, I would argue that music and games are sort of the two that just sort of permeate your deeply into your life in a way that the others um can, surely, but often don't.

Right? Um Yeah, no, absolutely. You guys got it. You guys 100% got it. Elden Ring and Balatro being in the same industry is kind of weird when you think about it. Yes, that's it. That's the synthetic idea. Those are both in the same industry. Elden Ring And add a third. Elden Ring, Balatro, and FarmVille. Yeah, are all the same industry. Mhm. Right? But some of those feel like TV games and some of those feel like indie arthouse movies and some of them feel like Game of Thrones. Or Avengers: Endgame or whatever, right? And so it is really weird that those are all gaming, right? When we talk about that. So I do think it is bigger into the ubiquitous Yeah, right. ubiquitous term. Exactly. Exactly. Um Yeah. So uh chat, thank you all so very much. Uh Janet, we are done over on YouTube for today. Thank you all so very much for joining us. If you're watching this on the VOD, thank you for being

here. Um uh we will see you all Monday for breakfast. Oh, Monday for breakfast, that's right. And then next Thursday for a topic that Will and I are still locking down, but Yes. Uh and so the way it's going to work on YouTube, just so Janet knows, I will put up the uh the there will be a show notification. I'll pre-schedule the show after Jeff and I have a topic. So on Tuesday night, you can expect the notification of what the next Design Club is going to be about. We're going to put that out on Tuesday nights so I can tell you what the topic is for Thursday, um rather than doing it on Sunday night like I was when I do the schedule for the week. Um so please look forward to that. Uh so uh I will see uh I will see all of you on Monday, Janet. Uh have a good