Recent searches
Search options
In case you ever wondered why entertainment of any kind is so expensive and how that's sustainable: the top 10% of households account for more than half of all consumer spending in the United States
the markets know you're broke and they aren't after your business: they're sustaining themselves by targeting the wealthiest person out of 10
https://retailwire.com/discussion/wealthiest-us-households-spending/
$70 Zelda games is brought to you by income inequality, not scarcity
@pleaseclap In fairness the price has gone up ten dollars in over twenty years, and only doubled over the past forty.
So as scarcity has fallen they've basically reduced the price vs. inflation, while also delivering a **vastly** expanded amount of embodied human labor in each title - a team of half a dozen, to dozens, to hundreds, to thousands of fulltimers.
I don't mind paying artists, esp. knowing in low scarcity used copies are available.
It's the impact on *necessities* that worries me.
@pleaseclap And when functional necessities are still considered consumer spending (eg. you do not need a car to breathe, but you do need one to get to work over most of the country; ditto all other accoutrements of "professional" aka non-disposable-human presentation, not least of which *dental care,* which is regarded as optional luxury and not medicine, or when the ONLY options for housing are competing on a consumer market for profitability) ... that rapidly eats even the most frugal lunch.
@cwicseolfor I mean first of all, I wouldn't frame buying major label games or going to Disneyland or Beyonce as "paying artists"
Secondly, my comments about entertainment spending were not about downplaying the cost of necessities. My intent was to apply the same logic equally, because they are the same problem with the same drivers, even though people tend to blame themselves for not being able to afford a game or concert tickets.
Stuff is priced at what people will pay and if they make 10x as much as everyone else they can pay 10x as much as everyone else. Since you can produce a lot less and make the same amount of money or more when you sell at 10x the price, the market is doing exactly that
@pleaseclap I wouldn't claim that there's much scarcity in play with, say, games - certainly not the same way as there is with big headliner concert tickets - the market is fairly saturated once you hit 32 million copies of Breath of the Wild sold, for instance. I don't want to pay for Beyoncé tickets or Disneyland at most prices, but I'll gladly shell out $70 for a seat for a smaller band. There's still a "degraded" version of almost every pure-consumer experience I want to have, either used …
@pleaseclap …or via a lower "tier" of service, e.g. I don't need every streaming platform or highest tier of whichever one I'm using at a time. There are already more consumer goods/ experiences out there than we could use up in a lifetime, so in short I can't mind paying the people who invent new ones…
…BECAUSE most of them, too, are struggling to afford necessities as "low tier" options vanish, from starter homes to basic durable clothes or appliances, and never universal transit or care.
@pleaseclap (But when it comes to major labels from studios with any ethics - Nintendo generally at least scores high there, Larian also comes to mind - there is a pretty direct line between "this game sold well" and "we will pay thousands of people to work on the next one as fulltime employment." The fact that it's thousands of people in an indirect fashion doesn't elide that causality. There are of course corps which almost exist to collapse studios once they turn their profit, so mixed bag.)
@cwicseolfor I don't have a source available but my understanding is that a lot of career game developers have watched their share of the profits (and the number of employees on their team) decline in proportion to revenue over the years. When you buy a game you're paying the studio and its owners. The studio begrudgingly, incidentally employs some developers, more developers than it wants to. By definition most studios are not in the business of keeping their developers employed
@cwicseolfor And to be clear, my point is not "suppliers suck": the consumer market is responding rationally to the reality that the price points that make suppliers the most money just happens to also exclude most people
The problem is not that this dynamic exists: the problem is that the gap between who can and can't participate in the consumer economy is broader than ever before, because income inequality is so extreme and encouraged by policy
It's a policy problem not a behavior problem
@cwicseolfor My video game example was meant to illustrate exactly that: that for most consumer products you could think of, the price has very little to do with scarcity (especially in a market that consists in large part of digital licensing and not physical products). The point being that pricing for these things is not dependent on covering costs ("paying artists"): it's the price that will produce the most revenue. The suppliers will price you out if makes them more money
The wealthiest 10% of U.S. households now represent nearly half of all consumer spending.
That's obscene!
@pleaseclap This fact is blowing my mind a bit