Curiosity Crunched the Numbers

May 16th, 2006 by ironsoap

Over on Curmudgeon Gamer they have a graph showing the relative prices of consoles for the last thirty years, adjusted for inflation.

A couple of things are interesting here. For one, there are a lot of consoles represented here that were commerical failures or trivial in terms of market/mind share. Vectrex? CD-i? Please. But if you go with what I would consider to be the prime examples of the console wars (starting with the Sega Master System and including primarily Sega, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft entries) you can see that up to the current/next generation the average price point has been about $305.80. Compare that to the current or forthcoming systems (which woefully doesn’t include the Wii since it hasn’t announced a pricepoint) which has launched up to $454.03 (and that’s if you generously include the nerfed systems like the XBox 360 Core). If you factor in the expected price for the Wii (expectations coming from wild speculation and wishful thinking, respectively) which is said to be around $250, you still get $413.23 average price.

The other interesting thing is that if you exclude only the Neo Geo and 3DO from the equation going back to 1986, the average price for any system is $369.84. That means that the non-nerfed PlayStation 3 is, on average, the most expensive system in relative terms by almost 40% in the last twenty years. Even if you factor in the stupidly overpriced 3DO and Neo Geo systems, the PS3 is still overpriced by roughly 30%. You can even average that with the nerfed PS3 (overpriced by 12%) and figure that generally speaking Sony is asking its customers to spend 20% more for the privilege of owning their console this time ’round.