[tastysandwich]

I know this isn't exactly on topic. I haven't played video games since I was a teenager, but I'm struck by how cheap consoles are now!

I remember the Xbox and Playstation being prohibitively expensive. I just looked it up, the Playstation was $749 AUD [1] and the Xbox was $649 AUD [2]. I had to wait yeeeears for the price to fall so I could get an Xbox.

Today, I can get a Playstation 5 Digital Edition for $649 AUD on the Sony website, or $794 AUD for the "normal" edition from Amazon.

The Xbox series X is similarly priced, at $749 AUD.

Given inflation since then, these are prices many teenagers could realistically save up for now.

[1] https://www.arnnet.com.au/article/82336/ps2_debut_november_3... [2] https://news.microsoft.com/2002/03/14/xbox-goes-global-with-...

[erinnh]

Seems like a uniquely Australian thing.

The PS1 cost 299$ at launch.

Nintendo64 cost 199$.

Here is an article comparing it:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/every-game-console-pric...

[louhike]

Inflation ajusted, the prices are similar to now. But the games do cost less now when you take inflation into account.

[theropost]

I don't recall having to spend $5 to 15 a month extra on my PS1, or N64 though. Inflation adjusted amounts tend to leave out a lot of externalized factors

[tiahura]

$5 to 15 a month extra on my PS1, or N64

Did a lot of online gaming on the PS1 and N64?

[frankfrankfrank]

It’s not personal, because basically everyone does it, but I love how people just say “inflation adjusted” as if we aren’t talking about fraud, they, plunder by a parasitic ruling class that used to live off the “inflation” delta between their assets and profits increasing, and the income of regular people increasing less. What’s gotten even worse now though is that they’ve gotten so greedy and there have been no consequences, that mere inflation is insufficient, they commit open theft and fraud through things like the COVID relief con job where $800 billion dollars go missing or are known to have been stolen.

Inflation is simply a manipulative way of covering up fraud, but those vomiting the fraud.

[garbagecoder]

(Mild) inflation benefits debtors. The people who benefit from constant prices are the rent-seeking class, who never have to take on any risk to keep income. You have this backwards just as the people you claim to dislike want.

Your #1 debt is likely to be a fixed rate mortgage. That payment gets less in real terms every time there’s inflation. And even if it’s not yours it’s still most people’s. So most people are helped by this.

Student loans also have fixed rates.

[oblio]

This is an extreme way to look at inflation, and as far as I know, it's not backed up by studies.

[wincy]

They’re so cheap for what you get! I walked into a Walmart and for ~$600 USD including tax I got a AAA game (God of War Ragnarok) and a console ready to play it.

As someone who built a high end gaming PC and skipped the PS3/360 and PS4/Xbox One generations, the value proposition of the PS5 is just too good compared to buying a fully specced out PC! Which sure, it can be argued a midrange PC is the actual competitor, but if I decided to start PC gaming again I’d 100% drop $2000 on a 4090, definitely a personal problem), but I had an ultra high end rig with a 2080ti and games were still stuttering in 4K, then the crypto mining boom happened and I sold my GPU for more than I originally paid for it, and bought a PS5.

To do real 4K gaming these days is something like $3500! That’s not even including if you want to use a good monitor instead of a TV to push all those pixels to. I almost convinced myself “well I might use it for ML”, but even then I’m better off renting off of Runpod for a few dollars an hour. It’d take years to break even and by then a new better GPU will be out.

Alternatively, playing on PS5 has been a dream. The Demons Souls remake is a shockingly beautiful game, one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen, and God of War Ragnarok and Final Fantasy 16 are games that just work. If I want to play them away from my couch (one of my favorite features of the Switch), my Steam Deck streams them flawlessly using Chiaki4Deck (after a little bit of admittedly annoying config and adding a wired connection to the PS5, it’s a totally seamless, lag free experience. Played for 5 hours yesterday without a single drop.)

Even with a top of the line GPU gaming on a PC with AAA titles like Borderlands 3 and Monster Hunter World felt fiddly and janky, HDR setup was always confusing, and I’d have to identify why things were causing microstuttering which took me MONTHS to figure out. I also learned that games just sort of add experimental bells and whistles that a $1200 video card couldn’t actually run so I’d have to spend hours tweaking the settings for each game no matter how much hardware I threw at it. It just got tedious.

[ivandenysov]

One explanation that I heard is that the hardware is often sold at a loss. Online store purchases (subscriptions/games) are the real money maker.

[beardedscotsman]

The consoles used to be sold at a loss, that was back a long time ago, Xbox 360, PS3 I believe were the last generation to be sold at a loss. The next gen Xbox at the time was sold for a 20% markup on cogs or there about at the time.

Games sold on the consoles have around a 15 usd flat royalty for big titles, not sure how that affected low cost games at the time. The 360 needed 5 games to brake even, but I believe they had an attach rate of around 3 at launch and that was unreal and unexpected at the time.

[nindalf]

3 was unexpectedly high or unexpectedly low?

[tialaramex]

Unexpectedly low. Conventionally you're selling this product to Gamers™ who will have at least one annual franchise they buy, (e.g. a sports game) and then pick up a few titles at the start plus one or two big titles. So you hit your desired attach rate and then it's profit. But if people buy your console, plus one game, and then are happy, with that model you are screwed.

It's actually doubtful whether they were really selling at a loss per se even then, most likely the notional loss represented amortizable R&D. Which is a loss on your annual balance sheet but - if you understand your business, can finance the R&D cost affordably and have a steady nerve so as to stick with the plan - this can be profitable eventually. The era of straight up dumping (exporting products for less than their BOM price, which may be illegal in some international trade rules) was last century. In the Sega era it really was possible you'd spend $100 on the actual product, sell it for $80 and figure you'll make up for it on royalties.

[beardedscotsman]

No, a 3 attach rate was huge, I said in a previous reply other consoles at the time were around 1.25. Over the lifetime older consoles needed around 5 games per console to break even and Xbox 360 hit that super fast compared to the competition.

This needs to be noted that it’s average as in 5 games per unit sold. So two consoles and 10 games sold to one person. The attach rate is a term related to games sold with the console at time of console purchase.

360 for sure was selling for a loss on cogs, that was rectified with the Xbox one that I believe was 400 cogs for 500 retail. It frustrated a ton of folk because 360 was 300 retail, but this was a clear change to make the console profitable without sales since they were worried people were buying it as a media device, hence the media focus of the Xbox one.

Just to be clear they managed to reduce the cogs with the Xbox 360 small and sold them at a profit without license sales.

[tialaramex]

I've never seen this idea of attach rate as "related to games sold with the console at time of console purchase". I've seen people say attach rate is %of platform which took the game (so e.g. some First Party Nintendo titles score very highly because if you own a Nintendo Wii U, you are very likely to take the Wii-U specific franchise titles) and use tie rate for games per console unit. But never the description you've used.

[beardedscotsman]

Three was huge at the time. Before Xbox 360 the attach rate was estimated at 1.25 for previous consoles. Often due to low games at launch or including a game with the console. Xbox 360 broke this at the time with a huge launch portfolio and a whole set of HD games, it was really exciting and beating PS3 to launch was a big bonus. Shame the Xbox One had disastrous leadership that turned the console into a media device and forgot that people bought it for games primarily. This is a whole different conversation though.

[nichcat]

Microsoft are going to put the price of the console up in August (in addition to their game pass) in Australia, among other places. Not sure by how much.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/microsoft-to-raise-prices-o...

[louhike]

It will be 30 australians dollars

[dageshi]

They've moved to more standard PC like hardware over the past few generations so they've got far more economy of scale on their hardware bills than they did in earlier generations.

[veave]

The original Xbox was practically an off the shelf PC...

[rvba]

If they are cheap will you buy one and send it to me for free?

Maybe it's not the consoles whoch are cheap. It's just you sitting on that 300k per year FAANG salary.