@sod I was talking to my husband about this (specifically people on Reddit saying complaining about prices didn’t make sense and offering inflation-adjusted prices for the original Mario Kart and others) and he pointed out that saying it’s reasonable to raise games to those prices assumes that wages have kept up with inflation, which in the US certainly haven’t.
@KimberlyHirsh Yeah, it’s really hard to compare historic prices and purchasing power to today’s, especially across countries. In Sweden, real wage growth for that period (1993–2024) was 57.3%.
And just to be clear, I want video games to be cheap and accessible to as many people as possible. 😊 (While making sure designers, developers, and everyone involved get paid fairly.)
@sod That’s the tricky thing, isn’t it, making sure both that video game workers get paid fairly and that people can afford to buy them?
@sod Looks like in the US cumulative wage growth from 1979 - 2023 (the best data I could find quickly) ranges depending on income bracket from 17% (lowest wage) to 46.2% (highest wage) while cumulative inflation in the same period is 319.7%. Woof.
@pratik Sure. I don’t I’ll say that, while it’s clearly not the way things are going, it’d be cool if more people working in America could afford things that aren’t cheap. And the dream would then be for workers in any country to be paid a living wage. While I’m wishing for things.