Crossed the Line

Well my friend Matthew just did it. He had to say the free market did not work because he personally would like to force everyone to cater to his specific needs. Poor baby. Fine if you talk about how abortions are murder or any other socon view, I do not expect Conservatives to all share my social views, but I thought we could at least all share capitalist views! I will now explain why Matthew is wrong, let the blog war begin! I am not going to spend pages explaining why capitalism is good, that should be obvious and I would like to go to bed tonight. I am going to just target where Matthew is wrong, on video games only. His claim is that the video game industry was better back when there was no real competition for Nintendo (apparently he thinks Sega never existed, but it was clearly inferior and it also isn't the point).

The first fallacy to combat is that gamers have less access to games now since you have to purchase more than one system to play all the games. Well think about this for a second, why do you have to purchase more than one? Because there are more games now! Each system has a unique (to a degree) set of games, so your only problem is that you see another person playing a game that looks like fun and you get jealous. Back in NES days, if it wasn't on NES, you didn't see it, and you didn't feel envy.

Not only are there more games, games are much cheaper! The nominal price of games have decreased drastically, and this is actually understated once you consider the inflation over the past 15 years. Yes, you may have to buy more than one system making the initial outlay higher, but the decreased price in games make you financially better off if you like to buy a lot of games. I've seen the amount of games you own Matthew, if you bought another system you would still be better off comparatively, in financial terms, than I was when I (read: my parents) bought my Nintendo in 1989! For someone that purchases very few games, they will likely be satisfied with any of the current systems that are out now, and if you purchase a lot of games then just bit the initial bullet because games are cheap! As with any high volume corporation, they would be better off paying a slightly higher fixed cost to reduce their variable costs.

So more games and it costs you less, can it get any better? Oh it does! Video games are much better than they were before. This can be a subjective measure, but I will argue it nonetheless. I understand technology advances allow for this, but if you can somehow create a "game inflation index" that calculates the total enjoyment value out of a basket of games in each year, I would say there is real growth adjusted for the inflation index. Matthew said, "Quality was also protected since developers would compete with each other for gamers' cash." Not so, Nintendo signed exclusive agreements with certain companies to make certain types of games. So once that deal was in place, there was no direct competition in the duration of the contract and that would hinder the need for game improvement. This does not happen in the current environment as there are many console companies that can sign parallel agreements with any number of game companies. So there is always current competition, not just the threat of competition that encourages continuous improvement.

I had a couple other arguments in the queue (ie. total benefit to the economy) that really don't need to be said since I already wrote way too much on something way too trivial. I am not sure what else you want out of this deal Matthew. Yes with Nintendo you always had the choice of all the best games, but that was only because nothing else was there to be better. You have more choice of better games for a lower price. Stop complaining and start playing!