A little something to think about

"You can tell a Finn but you can't tell him much" (youcantellafinn) 12/04/2014 at 11:28 • Filed to: gamelopnik

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When the original PlayStation debuted 20 years ago it was $300. The Sega Saturn that it competed against was $400. That kind of puts the price of the !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! bundles in a new perspective. Twenty years of progress following !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! means that the newest consoles are approximately 2^10 times as powerful as the original PS for the same price. Take inflation into account and the new consoles are a bargain.

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When the system hit store shelves 20 years ago in Japan (it wouldn't launch in North America for another nine months), gamers liked that the $300 system was $100 cheaper than the competing Sega Saturn. !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!!

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Party-vi > You can tell a Finn but you can't tell him much 12/04/2014 at 11:31

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I very much so would like the 20th Anniversary PS4.

Ntovorni > You can tell a Finn but you can't tell him much 12/04/2014 at 11:38

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Woah. I still have a Sega Saturn. Ton of games too. I need to find that bad boy when I go home for the holidays. Get some virtra fighter action going.

titsinmymitts > Party-vi 12/04/2014 at 11:39

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Agreed, that is a pretty console.

Nibbles > Party-vi 12/04/2014 at 11:42

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I'd definitely take it if they made it look like the PSX, not just give it a palette swap

Racescort666 > You can tell a Finn but you can't tell him much 12/04/2014 at 11:43

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I kind of laugh when people complain about the cost of gamingr systems. The price hasn't really changed in 20 years. That's fucking mind boggling.

swansong, rockin' the wagons > You can tell a Finn but you can't tell him much 12/04/2014 at 11:49

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Adjusted for inflation , the $300 PS1 in 1994 would cost $480.63 today.

Wow.

TheOnelectronic > You can tell a Finn but you can't tell him much 12/04/2014 at 11:49

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Moore's law hasn't held for quite a number of years. Just a minor complaint.

jariten1781 > You can tell a Finn but you can't tell him much 12/04/2014 at 11:59

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Yup, additionally the 3DO was 699$ and ostensibly competed for the same market. Hell, the NES was 199$ at launch in 85 which is 439$ inflation adjusted.

Money goes a lot further in the video game industry today fo sho. That said, no games have really stood out for me so far that I haven't been forced to pick up a PS4 or Xbone yet. Too much backlog of PS3/XB360 stuff that I bought and haven't played yet...and now that I hooked up a tower to my main TV I've just been mainly playing indy-ish PC games.

ACESandEIGHTS > jariten1781 12/04/2014 at 12:05

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The 3DO was a crime against economics, but the Neo Geo took offensive prices to the next level, with its $400 to $650 introductory price... in 1990. Amazes me that ridiculous period in gaming when economical systems were trying to bridge the gap from cart to disc and others were just trying to pull off a train robbery. Neo Geo. Wow.

You can tell a Finn but you can't tell him much > jariten1781 12/04/2014 at 12:06

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Watch Dogs. It is incredible. I've played it on both PS4 and Xbone and it is phenomenal regardless of platform. I'm not sure how it is on 360/PS3 hardware or if it has a smaller map size, but it is available on the old systems.

The game catalogs are pretty sparse right now and I've still been mostly playing 360 myself. They are both starting to get a lot more games right now though, so there should be a lot more next gen specific stuff coming out in the next year or so.

ACESandEIGHTS > You can tell a Finn but you can't tell him much 12/04/2014 at 12:15

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Yeah, the $350 XBone rig (admittedly only a promotion) seemed very palatable to me considering that it was 9 years ago that I was more than willing to drop $450 on an underpowered XBox 360 that had infamous hardware defects and piss-poor software development (at the time, I mean).

I'm really really surprised, btw, that Sony didn't jump into the fray and compete in the November/December price drop arena. I be not at all surprised if MS does this twice a year and absolutely kills the sales numbers during those periods. Or maybe not—they've certainly made XBoneheaded decisions in the past.

I'll agree with Racescort here: these things have never been overly expensive. Consider over time the cost of a somewhat advanced PC capable of gaming and how it has always, always been more expensive than a comparable console and with the added disadvantage of not being optimized to play games nor have software optimized for its exact specifications.

I read a book on gaming once and the author, quite PC-centric, talked more than once of "expensive gaming consoles." Shoot. In the lifespan of a single PS3 or 360 (8-9 years, admittedly long, so cut the time in half if you'd like), how many times and at what cost would you need to upgrade/replace components on your gaming rig, never mind the initial expense of the rig itself? Most people I know who are serious about PC gaming have video cards, or stacks of video cards, which individually cost more than my console.

jariten1781 > ACESandEIGHTS 12/04/2014 at 12:15

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Yeah, I thought about mentioning the NeoGeo, but it falls so far outside of the normal distribution of sanity I just stuck with the 3DO. I did have a NeoGeo CD back in the day...most frustrating system ever...luckily they didn't really depreciate on the secondary market (at least into the early 2000s) so I didn't really lose any money on that POS.

Stapleface-Now Hyphenated! > jariten1781 12/04/2014 at 12:26

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I think the big issue with the xbone, at least initially was the fact that it was $100 more than the PS4. Now they're trying to play catch up.

I remember getting my PlayStation on launch day. It was $300 well spent I thought. Even though there was probably like 6 launch titles. It was leaps and bounds ahead of the SNES and Genesis.

As for the lack of inflation in game systems, I think that some still view them as too expensive. The last gen of consoles lasted for a LONG time in my opinion. As such we as consumers got used to a $200 console, and anything more than that is sticker shock.

You can tell a Finn but you can't tell him much > Stapleface-Now Hyphenated! 12/04/2014 at 13:20

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Bigger than the price was the fact that prior to launch it was being billed as requiring full time internet connectivity to play games and that the Kinect was going to be required and always on. I didn't have enough internet bandwidth at the time to consider something requiring a connection to game and the thought of a camera and microphone being always on in my house creeped me out.

Prior to launch MS at least relaxed it to once/24 hr internet connectivity before finally saying internet connectivity wasn't required at all with the exception of needing a day 1 patch to the OS to remove the connectivity requirement. At that point it still required Kinect to be installed and always on. Once they dropped the Kinect requirement and dropped the price accordingly it looked a lot more palatable to a lot more people.

I actually traded in my PS4 on an Xbone about a month ago and don't regret it one bit. Coming from the 360 the Sony interface didn't feel as natural to me and using the console for bluray and Netflix meant the lack of a useful media remote on the PS4 was a PITA. For what I use it for the Xbone is a lot more user friendly. They are both great systems and I don't regret buying the PS4 at all as I still got a good bit of cash for trading it in after a year of use.

You can tell a Finn but you can't tell him much > TheOnelectronic 12/04/2014 at 13:22

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I've seen it argued that Moore's Law still holds or doesn't hold or will hold through 2015-2020 depending on the estimate. It's safe to say that it probably held for at least some of the last 20 years.