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You used to be able to buy the best video games on the market for twenty dollars, but those days are long gone. Most games now cost sixty dollars with more money if you want the premium version, but is that a change in price due to inflation, improvement, increased costs or is there some other factor entirely which should be taken into account when comparing these games to other forms of entertainment such as movies, food and television.

Inflation is the simplest to knock down as a possibility. Twenty dollars may not be what it was but the days of the Atari but little else has tripled in price since the 1980s and so it is fair to say that video games should not have either, assuming that the product that we are buying are the same as those games.

No one would truly say that the games we buy now are the same as those games then. I have played many hours of asteroids and Pacman and had a great deal of fun, but there is simply no comparison in complexity of the modern game to those. We now have games such as Grand Theft Auto with numerous mini-games which are every bit as complex as the complete games two decades ago.

And that complexity of video games doesn't come without a cost to video game programmers. A game for the Atari could be programmed by a single person in his garage, often in weeks and rarely stretching out to months. Modern video games on the other hand are more on par with the cost of major motion pictures costing tens of millions of dollars, dozens of programmers and often well over a year to create. There is no doubt that the cost for the production of these games has went up.

But none of that really matters if you can't afford the games so what criteria is there to decide how to spend your hard earned entertainment money then? The only real answer is to consider the cost spread out over the lifespan of the product. A meal, that costs only 10 dollars may last for an hour meaning you are paying 10 dollars per hour of entertainment, a movie that costs 15 can last for two hours, or 7.50 per hour, buying a movie for twenty dollars that you watch 4 times may be only 2.5 dollars per hour of entertainment, and a good video game at sixty dollars with 60 hours of game play will cost you only 1 dollar per hour of entertainment and if you buy a truly excellent video game those hours of game play can sore allowing the cost per hour of entertainment to be a far better deal than many other types of entertainment.

With all of these factors we can still complain about the cost of video games, wishing that they would have left the price at fifty dollars and knowing that the next generation of games will likely be even more expensive but instead I believe it is more profitable to search out the games that have a great deal of replay value, and leave those other games with only a few hours of true enjoyment on the shelves because they truly are to expensive.

Learn more about this author, Elton Gahr.
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