| greenmedic88 said: "So according to you inflation is responsable for consoles going from $200-$300 to $400-$600 in just five years. Great, I'd love to see some evidence for that. I guess that's why a typical family car in the $18,000 range five years ago now costs $36,000? LOL!!! I'm afraid this inflation you speak must only affect gaming as I don't see it anywhere else in the form of prices literally doubling in half a decade." The Saturn debuted at $399 back in 1995. That was supposed to be a mainstream console. It was only when Sony announced $299 for the PS1 at E3 that Sega went into a furor claiming Sony was product dumping at that price. As for that $600 initial price for the PS3, I don't see how anyone realistically expected them to fly off retailer's shelves at that price, even if it had been accompanied by a stellar initial game catalog. But no, inflation hasn't been the source of generally higher console prices; the increasing complexity, cost of manufacturing and R&D budgets have been. Everyone knows the U.S. dollar has become the new peso as of late, but it's nowhere near so bad that it's effecting consumer A/V electronics. Yet. |
$600 was definitely one of the highest launch prices. I am referring to the current $400 price for PS3 and $350 for 360 (I think those are the most purchased). Anyway, we've had threads about this before and a graph was posted that listed the inflation-adjusted launch prices. Wii was the cheapest, 360 was about average, and PS3 was one of the highest. The rapid drop from $600 to $400 (60GB and now 40Gb being the most purchased) got the PS3 price down to about average at this point using inflation-adjusted numbers. Inflaton-adjusting is necessary if you are going to compare Box Office numbers for movies as well. Check out www.the-numbers.com for charts of both the top-20 grossing all-time and the inflaton-adjusted one. Anyway, Onimusha12: I actually wanted to know what you meant by the "integrity" of a console. I was interested. I know we are arguiing in other threads but there's no need to do it here. I was merely asking if you meant that the console had to be lowly priced for you to consider it.
