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Looking at ten years worth of video games, I am simply astounded at how quickly graphics and storage have advanced. It's truly amazing how small the game catridges can get or how much we can store on discs in our age. I have no doubt that our capabilities will continue to go up. Unfortunately, a tradeoff for our amazing capabilities will be an increased price in the future game systems to come.

The three gaming consoles, Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii, are currently at the respective prices of $300, $400, and $250 each. At those prices, it's starting to hit the prices of new computers. Even though the Wii is the cheapest at $250, the truth is it's not that much cheaper than those small notebooks that pc companies have recently been airing to buy. The PS3 and Xbox are hitting the prices desktop computers. It has gotten to the point where both Xbox and PS3 try to jusitify their cost by doing more than playing games. Both are capable of storing and playing video, songs, and pictures. All three consoles can access the internet. In a way, they're becoming closer to acting like the computer. Thankfully they haven't started kicking in word processing or other programs that can be found on computers.

The console is pretty expensive already, but what about the additional features that you need? Suppose you want to have more people playing with you. The Xbox 360 controller cost about $50 dollars each, so if you want a max of four people, that's $150 more that you have to pay. The PS3 controller is at $55 each and the Wii controllers cost $40-$60 each depending on the game. The game is from $40-$60 depending on the age. If you are getting into playing online, you'll have to pay online fees. The Xbox also requires you to pay for an account for so many months. So in reality, a new gaming console is really a $400+ new toy to play.

The other part of video game consoles are repairs. The latest systems do break quite easily and it's not cheap to fix. The handheld, Nintendo DS, is notorious for being rather easy to break. It ranges from a cracked screen to a broken hinge. To have Nintendo repair the unit is about $70 dollars. The DS is selling for $130 and so the repair is little more than half of it's cost. So what do you do at that point? Do you pay the repair bill or do you just cough up the remaining $60 and buy a new system?

As a fan of video games, it makes me wonder what will be the breaking point for systems. As parents spend money on their children to get these systems, it makes me wonder when will they stop because it's not a simple $100 they're dropping. When people say they have all three current systems, it denotes a sense of wealth because that's a value well into the thousands. So unless designers start coming out with cheaper parts, the prices of consoles continue to go up. How far, I don't know.

Learn more about this author, James Shimoda.
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