this is stupid but I genuinely worry that kids ARE being priced out of video games like. totk is heavily sanitized to maintain a particular rating that often works against itself but like, I struggle to imagine the kid who’s approaching their parents like “one hundred dollars for a video game please” my biggest gaming triumph was in high school when my parents bought us an xbox 360 and one game. we got the wii as it was going out of style and played primarily gamecube games on it, and even back then to buy a new gamecube game or a DS game was a twenty dollar endeavour. what kind of slideshow does a ten year old have to present in order to convince their parents to drop a hundie on legend of zelda.
I’m gonna say something as an OLD person, but video games being expensive and yet aimed at kids isn’t new.
When I was a kid, my mom gave me a Super Nintendo, but she wouldn’t buy me any games bc they were too expensive.
Back then, NES, SNES, Genesis and the like games were regularly priced at what would be, today, with inflation, well over $100.
So while I don’t disagree, this really isn’t a new phenomenon. Until the recent age of DLC and such adding an additional $30+ to games initial price tag, video games have actually been far *cheaper* in the last…. ~10-20 years than they once were.
Nevertheless, I do have to agree that it’s a hard sell to a parent to spend $300 on a console and $100+ on a single game.
when i was a kid, video game console and game rental was a thing, a big thing. and like, i would do it. there were stores a lot like blockbuster, where you would rent a game by the day, and then return it.
it was actually a good deal, like renting a game would be just a few dollars a day. you could binge the game and beat it and then return it, for a much cheaper price than buying the game.
most people owned a console and some games, and then would rent games, but some people rented consoles too. it wasn’t just about price, some parents didn’t want their kids to own consoles and play video games all the time, so they just did rentals as a special treat or a way to keep kids occupied over a time period like a vacation week without many activities scheduled.
a lot of people would only buy games that had really high replay values, stuff like the original Legend of Zelda, or for NES, Super Metroid, or really long games like ones from the Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior series. A lot of quicker games like the Mega Man series, great games, but you could usually rent them for 48 hours and beat them over a weekend and then feel accomplished, go back a few months later and rent the sequel.
so yeah, that’s some added context for gaming in the late 80’s and early 90’s
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