When news broke last year that Microsoft would be selling Quantum Break in South Africa for almost R1,200, it raised concerns that this signalled a general price increase on games.
Fears that the price of games would skyrocket have been realised, with big new PC releases selling for between R600 and R1,000.
New PlayStation 4 and Xbox One titles sell for between R800 and R1,100.
Although most games have not reached the high price of Quantum Break, the pre-order prices for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare are worryingly high.
To see whether the sudden increase in the price of games in South Africa is reasonable, we wanted to compare them to the exchange rate and inflation.
However, even among big-name titles which release in the same month, prices now vary wildly.
Call of Duty prices vs. Inflation
For a fair comparison, we would need a game series that is published and distributed by the same companies on a regular schedule — like Call of Duty.
Activision has released a Call of Duty sequel in November every year like clockwork since 2006, making it an excellent candidate for such a comparison.
The graph below shows how the PC and console prices of Call of Duty games have changed compared to inflation.
Click to enlarge
ZAR-USD exchange rate: October 2003 to June 2016
The graph above shows that between 2010 and 2014, the price of a new Call of Duty game actually tracked below inflation for awhile.
As the rand steadily weakened, and then suddenly dropped to new lows last year, the price of new games also spiked.
This means that even if your salary increased at the same rate as inflation every year, you are still paying relatively more for a new game than you were before.
More on the price of games in South Africa
Are expensive console subscriptions worth it in South Africa?
Game prices in South Africa: PC vs PlayStation 4 vs Xbox One
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All of this is going to have one major effect on the gaming community of this country, and that is rampant piracy, and I don’t blame them. Or the deathknell of consoles and PC’s as gaming tools.
Most games are now being processed from a small input by humans to lay out a new story board, but the core graphics engines and maps are in place and simply upgraded from a previous version of their game/s published. The rest of the assembly of the work is done by computers running without human intervention. So where do they justify these high costs, even if one takes out the exchange rate, now the richest sector in the world exceeding the other parts of the entertainment industry. There is a global decline in consoles and their software sales and the biggest complaint is the base costs of the equipment, then the ever escalating price of media. Does that not raise a red flag, even as the PC is on the rise, so they now turn back to the PC software, after years of ignoring and neglecting it, and start bumping up the prices.
I see pure greed, get rich quick and copyrighting to death that is behind all of this. WE NEED big time more Indy games. And many games are now pure commercial crap to drive money, not the real incentive, having fun. Much like the majority of music and movies today. There is an easy solution to this, but the majority of us, the worlds gamers will not stick together in this, and that is stop buying the product, and bitch and moan big time. And if need be to get the message accross, pirate the product/s to death. EA did this years back when they were losing sales and they slashed their pricing. We had good titles for cheap ownership. And they are still here today.