Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Thats a conspiracy theory.

In 21st century America?

in 1997, new video games were priced at 50 dollars for the N64/Playstation

with inflation that's 99 dollars today.
Makes the 80 dollar switch 2 game price not seem so hefty.

When you skew the value, it always sounds good.

In 1997 a $50 only had a 20 hour play time, mariokart you can play for a thousand years! $80 is a steal! You're losing money doing anything other than buying it! Going out driving around on $4 a gallon gas when you can drive endlessly on mariokart. Limitless value.

See how easy that is.

$80 is $80 there's no math that exists that can make you go $7.25 is STILL minimumwage but a game is worth more cause inflation says it should be $110.

You are correct. those 50 dollar n64 games like goldeneye gave 20 hrs max, and people put them down and never touched them again.

Very good point, bringing up value and a specific game's objective qualities in a general situation. Not at all irrelevant.

Also missing from the calculation is you could resell a game in 1997.

You can't resell digital mariokart.

You buy (game) for $50, you beat it, you sell it, you put $30 toward your next $50 game.

You pay $80 for a digital game, you lit that $80 on fire.

minimum wage isn't average wage though, median household wage in 1995 was $34,076 and median household wage in 2023 is $80,610

for anyone who isn't familiar with their math, the rich don't skew median at all

so wages have actually outpaced inflation over that time period, and game price increased by less than both

things suck all around for minimum wage workers. don't be one.

That is a good point, but not as good as you think.

One could just buy the 90 dollar physical version and resell that, plus still be cheaper than the inflation based same game in 1997 with a lot more content included.

Everything would be lovely if the mimimum wage workers could just not be mimimum wage workers. It's not a thing you do by choice. You do it by lack of choices.

(Yes, bad choices got you to the point where you now have no choices, there's no do overs)

Video games are barely even video games anymore, they are interactive movies designed to be beaten in a specific time frame. Surely not worth what we paid for them when they were an enthusiast hobby and made to give value for money

Plus they sucks.

I would pay $80 for Elden Ring or Stellar Blade, not most western crap.

kinda funny that people who have invested hundreds if not thousands of dollars into a subscription MMO balk at an $80 price tag.

Just so we're clear, that's incredibly stupid, too

That's always my stance.

Valuewise 12.95 for a whole 30 days is great blahblahblah. Instead of a coffee blahblahblah.

Hey you're the one proud enough of that choice to showcase it in an avatar not us lol

My subscription(s) to XI are $0

If I pay $80 for a western AAA game I play it for <10 hours and it's over.

If I pay $80 for Elden Ring I might get 30-40 hours out of it.

If I pay a sub for XI of $12, I get hundreds of hours of entertainment from it in that month. Plus the time and money are continued, so if I pay $12 the next month it's not a new game started from scratch but the same one and the time I put into it last month is carried over.

When I'm not paying XI I pay way more money out, on new games.

An AAA game is like watching a movie, and an mmorpg is like watching breaking bad.

Not really what I was going for, there hasn't been a time in history where working for minimum wage got you an amazing lifestyle. It was actually $3.80 in 1990, so even by minimum-wage-adjusted dollars games were cheaper then.

Everyone has a choice to better themselves, though. Not everyone can earn 6 figures or whatever arbitrary benchmark you want to set, but everyone has the potential to earn more than minimum.

breaking out of the minimum wage tier job market into something that pays better isn't always easy, though. can be hard to get education/experience on your own

Ultimately it doesn't matter if it's the same in real terms or not, the number is big and so there will be huge resistance against it.

Even if normies do accept it, they will start buying less games overall and that could lead to a market crash, where people stop buying so freely and only buy good stuff.

Well yeah of course, every society will have certain percentage of "losers" in the competition, this number will never be zero.

However, at least in the US, according to Google AI, the amount of Americans work at $7.25 or below is 1.3%.

I am not sure why is it a big deal that 1.3% of people are poor in a society. If 40% of people are poor, that's a big problem. But 1.3% isn't a huge number nor I think 98.7% of the population should worry about that. They should worry about something else more important instead.

If 98.7% of people worry about 1.3% of population being poor all the time and hinder themselves for it, I think a nation will stagnant in terms of growth.

There are more important things to do for a society to improve, and that thing isn't lower poor population from 1.3% to 0. The ROI to pursue this kind of ideal is too low due to diminishing returns IMO.

That new anime by Shinichiro Watanabe that's coming out looks slick.

Lazarus I think it's called. Comes out tomorrow.

Adult Swim for airing but then on HBO Max... Phew. I hope my wife still has access to her family's Max account. I haven't had satellite or cable in years.

same, just a handful of streaming services and last year set up my own Jellyfin and ripped every dvd/bluray I own.

Jellyfin has been great, I went and bought all the favorite crime shows built a playlist and now I can just hit go and it plays the episodes in a shuffle so nice and easy for some great background noise.

really wish streaming services had a way to set up playlist and shuffle them, especially now that I have a tiny human and I would much rather watch the shows he likes on shuffle than the same show episode after episode.

I knew DragonBall Z was old, but I did not it was so old as to come in out in the 1980's, damn lol

The original Dragonball manga started in 1984..

oh you didnt know? yeah it had that feel to it so I assumed people knew the original show was that old.

It was probably the North america remixing of theme songs that gave the later show such a late 90's vibe.

Real manga fans read dragonball while still in the womb.

I need to stop being lazy and get Jellyfin set up, already

been on plex forever (and paid for lifetime), but they're getting way too commercial

hate to swap to an inferior product, but it's definitely the type of thing where open source is a huge selling point

yeah my uses are narrow, I just want to stream my tv shows for myself. And also for my 31 days of halloween and 26 days of christmas (where my husband and I watch a movie each night until the holiday) I want all those movies in 1 place not strung across all the platforms trying to find which one has what which seems to change every year.

Could not watch little vampire last year and that was the final straw that made me get a nas and set up jellyfin.

I always recommend Kodi for TV via nas. Not used the jellyfin tv app before but kodi is great and has apps for remotes.