I am hopelessly out of date

I've just realised that 90% of readers of my "Spaminator!" post will probably interpret "word virus" as "a virus transmitted in a Word file", which completely destroys the point of the post. Oh well, at least my old mates vret and rodneyorpheus will get the reference.

The High Cost of Gaming

I've just read an article in the Guardian about why the latest console games cost so much. I was mildly curious since the ludicrous cost of console games is one reason I've never bought a games console (the other reason being that I have enough things distracting me from my job and my marriage already, thank you). The article was not terribly convincing, but some of the comments provided food for thought. Few people bought the author's claim about the cost of developing new games leading to higher prices. After all, it's hard to see why it should be so much harder to develop a game for the Xbox than for a PC. Even if we leave out the PC/console disparity, I'm not entirely convinced by the argument that games are harder to develop than they were in the 1980s, when, we are told, they were all designed by pairs of spotty teenagers who were saving up for a new haircut. It is partially true, in that now we have hardware that can do half-way decent renderings of artwork, it's a good idea to hire some real artists to produce the artwork (not to mention people with decent voices to do the voices, and so on). However, I doubt very much if the actual coding is any more difficult than it was back in 1980 when people were writing 1KB (yes, that's kilobytes, not gigabytes) programs for the Sinclair ZX81. I wrote a game for the ZX81, and believe me, fitting it into 1KB was bloody difficult. (It was also a crappy game.) In those days, you coded what happened to individual pixels.

Then there's the argument that game prices have to be high because manufacturers need to factor in the hidden cost of resale. Even in the strange world of business ethics, the idea that you should charge more for a product because someone might sell it to someone else is suspect, simply because it applies to any product (except for things like food and toilet paper). Versace charge ludicrous prices for their clothes, but I don't see them saying, "We have to charge so much because our buyers might donate their Versace jackets to Oxfam, where someone else could pick them up for a tenner."

Then there's the piracy argument. Naughty, naughty people have this naughty idea that if they buy something, it belongs to them and they can do anything they want with it, including making copies of it available for other naughty people. Sarcasm aside, let's assume that the games industry (along with the music and film industries) give up any pretense that they are selling a product and declare that they are leasing it. They can then claim that unfortunately, they need to pass on the cost of piracy to legitimate consumers. This is just about tenable, though it does raise the possibility that if someone has paid the piracy pemium, they should then be allowed to indulge in piracy. But how does this explain why a PS3 game should cost more than a PC game, given that it is as, if not more, easy to download illegal PC games?

Let's cut the crap. Games cost more than they did in the 1980s because people will pay more for them. Console games cost more than PC games because console gamers will pay more for games than PC gamers. This is capitalism, folks, so stop whining about ethics and use bittorrent pay up.