Um.... Why would you take something from 2007, right before the world economy took a shit, and base it on current economics?

Yeah, of course things were really good in 2007. We were world-wide living on a bubble. Since then, that bubble's burst. We now have unemployment agencies that come after people like collection agencies because of mistakes they themselves have made. Minimum wage has gone up less than 75 cents in my home state since I was 18, which was close to 20 years ago. For people on foodstamps, they keep getting their assistance cut unless they pop out kids, which in the end makes the problem worse.

Tell me again how things are better now than they've ever been before. You're either batshit insane or you're a politico. And if you're one of the top 1%, maybe you should take some of that wealth and buy some common sense, because the other 99% of us aren't doing so hot.

This is the thing.

My guess is that - regardless of what happens with trends in personal income - this will be the trend with game pricing for a good while. The recent proliferation of free tools that allow the average schmo with an idea and some basic inkling of how a game "works" further means that inexpensive titles will be the norm right alongside the traditional studio games. The short attention span (or greater strain on personal time) of the buying public encourages the same.

I'd be curious to know how that figure measure up if you cutoff the top 10 percentile and then recompute the average.

I bet the variance is very high.

EDIT:

Nevermind, just realized it's what the graph does.

The last thing to do to make this figure actually objective (as opposed to something someone could have pulled out of their ass one evening) would be to know the metric they used to determine networth.

If they didn't include household debt or inflation for example, the claim made by the graph is dubious at best.

I'm guessing batshit insane. I envy him, honestly. It would be like being the Pyro from Team Fortress 2.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUhOnX8qt3I

Instead of squinting at the chart you may want to actually delve into the data a bit (it's on the Wikipedia page that chart is from). The upper 50th percentile do see some gains, but the lower 50th percentile see minimal gains (and some losses, depending on what percentile you're looking at). There are also some notable difference between median and mean net worth, with median net worth seeing even lower gains in most cases (median is less prone to being skewed by outliers than the mean is).

But to get a clearer picture we need to look at some additional data, as just a quick look at the data there should quickly reveal two key points. First, the data only goes up to 2007, and if you recall there was a rather significant economic event that happened right around 2008. Second, that set of net worth data includes home equity; this is important because as you also may recall there was quite a bubble in home prices occurring between 2004 and 2007. To get a clearer picture you may want to look through this data (pdf warning), straight from the census bureau. Pay particular attention to Figure 1. What you can see is that there was a large spike in net worth from 2004 to 2008, corresponding almost perfectly to the rise in housing prices during that time. The Wikipedia table captures the upward swing of that spike, but not the downward swing (due to the dates it captures). Additionally, you can see that when home equity is excluded from net worth it actually remains quite flat, with a small decrease between 2000 and 2011. Unfortunately I haven't been able to dig up much decent data from 2011 to the present, so any trends over the last few years are left to speculation. Note that this data is also just for the US, so there may be different trends in other countries (including your own).

The saying "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics" came about for a reason; always be careful when looking at limited data sets, as they can offer very deceptive pictures and not fully capture important considerations. (My job involves analyzing much more complex and murkier data sets than this, so I say this from plenty of experience).

Yeah, foods tamps used to be $200 a month and even then that was peanuts due to food being so damn expensive nowadays. I think now it is $180 a month or around that number. In time, the number will keep getting smaller.

Then in time(probably like 10 years from now) every time you leave your house or apartment, in an American city, you will probably see something like this http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N57yvkoyjIs/UGPEgRX2DbI/AAAAAAAAAR4/JI6wWe1M2DA/s1600/jjjaaja.jpg.

Not really, it keep things affordable for everyone.

If there is a demand for higher prices, it drives up the prices.

I'm ardently for games under 20$. If not upon release, then a few years later.

That's how I spend my money.

No matter how much money I have, I won't pay over 30$ for a game on principle and it gotta be the heck of a game for me to pay more than 20$.

As far as I'm concerned, the onus is on the gaming studios to operate within people's budget. If they can't, they should step down and make room for others who will. Unfortunately, cars are a necessity outside of large urban hubs as they don't have a reliable public transit system.

Air conditioning your entire house can be frivolous, but it's reasonable to air condition a room if the weather is crazy hot where you live. That's what I do when it gets crazy hot in the summer. I move my desk in my room, turn the air conditioning on and work there.

Hairdressers are a necessity for those who don't have access to someone who can cut their hair for free. I addressed that problem by growing my air long in a ponytail (I trust my gf to have enough proficiency to cut my hair even when my ponytail gets too long, but I wouldn't trust her to do something that looks good if my hair were shorter). Saves crazy amount of money on hairdresser bills.

The jet is excessive, but most people don't have that.

Most of those things you mentioned are infinitely more practical than a 60$ game.

If you want to poke at excesses, criticize those who change cell phones or PC or TV or other electronic appliance every couple of years not because the last one broken down or is hopelessly obselete, but because they must have the latest model.

Also point at the insane amount of food that get wasted, from the supermarket all the way down the people's fridges.

Just read your post. Thanks for sharing your expertise with us.

Prices go up, wagers stay the same.

trollonomics

Most of us, meaning the rest of the world. Truth be told, 50 dollars is fairly expensive in most countries. Most people cannot afford to buy a 50 dollar game (Developers are thereby restricting its audience).

The pricing model must be in consonance with the PPP of a specific country.

I think digital distribution reduced game prices dramatically. I used to think $20 was a good price for a good game. I would buy 1 PSX Greatest Hits game per month and thought that i got a good deal. Before i discovered Steam, GOG, Amazon, Gamersgate, i bought Fallout 3 GotY and Oblivion GotY for $20 each and thought that i got a great deal. Nowadays, i never spend more than $5 for a game. I just wait for holiday sales and get AAA titles for that price. This past Xmas is a perfect example:

Fallout New Vegas Ultimate = $5
Dungeon Siege Trilogy Collection = $5
Command and Conquer Ultimate = $5
Aliens Colonial Marines = $2
LA Noire and Max Payne 3 = $3

Before digital distribution, all the titles above would have been $20 and now they are $5 or less during sales.

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Pretty much but even more so than just desperately needing to hang onto the cash - there is also a huge moral dilemma processing through the consumers' mind when considering spending on leisure.

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We're basing things on what we're seeing with our own eyes - Neighbors, friends, folks about town having to pinch pennies now more than ever.

You can tell when people are hurting because there are more petty complaints about tax spending appearing on talk forums.

Or when you're kicked out of the short list for running the counter at KFC because a few doctors have also applied for the job.
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Lol.

That's not necessarily a good thing. The plunge in game prices in digital distribution is attributable to a number of factors, none of them particularly positive.

Firstly, there's competing shovelware - digital distribution has massively lowered market entry barriers, which has caused a in-storm of poor-quality crap that abuses the term "indie". It makes it difficult to compete while remaining profitable.

Then there's the Steam-sale mentality - When Steam was trying to establish itself, it offered sales at ridiculously low prices to try and tempt people away from physical media. Such sales are starting to disappear - most Steam sales of triple-A titles are usually at parity with retail anyway - but it hasn't stopped the mentality of "oh, I'll wait for a Steam sale".

And when games don't sell well for more than $10-15, developers and publishers will adapt their business models and product quality accordingly. We're now seeing games with poorer production values, shorter play times, in-app purchases, countless amounts of DLC and so on, and so forth.

The PC is just about holding its head above water, but if you want an example of a fundamentally broken economy, look at Android and iOS, where selling a game at $1 is usually setting the bar too high.

Spot-on analysis in both of your posts. Supply does indeed meet or exceed demand in the gaming community, hence the popularity of bundles where one can grab a pack of good games for a song. Here in the States we are approaching a similar glut of television shows, with cable channels and direct streamers all producing their own content (though their payment model differs from that of most games).

More choice is good for the consumer, but I think over time it will exert more and more pressure on the various studios to produce the superior product at the optimal price, with a winnowing out of the rest. There will always be cottage game devs, as well as cottage film/television makers, bringing low-cost/high-value products to market. It is up to the other players to remain viable in that space as best they can. Previously they could rely on media saturation to ensure the market penetration of their product, but the media landscape too is changing drastically from what it once was.

For what it's worth, my game-spending budget hadn't really changed in the first 15+ years I'd been playing games. Previously, I might buy a single major release per month, back when they were $40 and the choices were fewer. ("Backlog?" What's that?) Figure an average of $400 to $600 per year. It went on that way, give or take as my hardware changed, until 2002 or so. At that point my buying dropped a lot, to maybe a couple high-end titles a year. With the new pricing these days, I'm spending a bit less and picking up a lot more games. Granted, these are almost exclusively gOgs, with their big price drop on the classics right out of the gate. Over that 25+ years, with one or two temporary exceptions, income has generally increased.

Anecdotally, I'm not fitting the model: more income should equal a willingness to have a larger game budget. Life gets in the way of that, as do changing tastes and other details. That, plus my DRM-free stance puts a big damper on what shows up in my collection as there is a limited number of higher-dollar new releases that meet this criteria.

What I'm saying, then, is that it's not so black-and-white as "people have less money". There are a bunch of reasons: some on the industry side, some on the consumer side, some on the general marketplace side (what DarrkPhoenix explained), and then all adjusted by the individual consumer's own factors.

This is the main reason that I've largely stopped buying games, I already have more than I can play, so whatever they do with the price I'm unlikely to play. A Joe Schmo that releases a coffee break game on Android is much more likely to see me playing. Price has little to do with it, time is the bigger factor.