Always wondered...

[esteban]

If you want to go by inflation calculators, which use consumer-price-indexes, and exchange rates, 89,000 yen in 1993 would be like $1400 today. The Japanese Duo, in 1991, was about $950 today.

That's with a bit of rounding, of course.

You have to keep in mind, however, that exchange rates aren't really fair - they're not based on domestic buying power to anywhere near the degree that they're based on import/export activity and speculation in financial markets, along with other global-political factors.

Similarly, CPI inflation calculators don't give a totally cut-and-dry picture of a currency's domestic strength just because the prices of different goods fluctuate in different ways.

If you really want to know what 89,000 yen was like for a Japanese person in 1993, you have to look at what wages were like, what living expenses and disposable incomes were like, and what perceptions about the economy were like i.e. whether people expected to be making more money next year.

I don't know exactly what 89,000 yen was like back then...but it was a lot. For a young single person outside of the densest urban areas, it was two month's rent. On the other hand, the high from the 80s bubble hadn't totally worn off yet, and wages for full time workers were actually higher than now. Domestic manufacturing was still very strong, and there was more optimism.

It's a big dumb messy can of worms. I think the only important thing to take away from the numbers is that there was a big price barrier to getting involved in PCE-CD games and buying the bells-and-whistles, even if the software itself wasn't more expensive than the competition.

Thank you

I was frustrated by my inability to find any context that would have been helpful: what was the cost of a train ride? A can of soda? A coffee? A beer?

Also: who was buying all of the expensive stuff? What were the demographics? Was there an overlap between people who bought expensive electronics/computers and video games?

Or was the console video game market its own unique demographic (successfully drawing in people from all economic classes)?

MORE IMPORTANTLY: What are your views on the ability of NEC to keep the price of the CoreGrafx models constant for so long? I would have expected gradual price reductions, but NEC held firm (I think it was a strategy for maintaining a "premium" brand that was worth spending $$$ on).

Of course, we need context...and I haven't checked to see what the prices of FamiCom, MegaDrive, SFC, etc. were between 1987-1993....I should make a price chart, or something. It would help put everything into perspective.

[Necromancer]

Does your historical calculator only go back to '93?  The combined original MSRPs were a bit less than 89,000 yen (82,600 yen), but that was 5 years earlier; by '93 you could get a Duo-R for less than half that.  Compared to the various online inflation calculators that I checked, $1400 would be high even for '88, but the exact dollar amount doesn't really matter, I guess.  The CD was unarguably expensive when it launched (as were all other CD devices at the time), but thankfully the price dropped fast.  Also, I'm sure many early adopters already had a PCE and were comparing the add-on's cost to buying another system or a stand alone audio player, making the cost much more palatable than thinking "holy shit, it's gonna cost me $1500 to play Fighting Street!"

[Black Tiger]

I bought my CDX at launch for the same price as a decent discman.

The PS2 and PS3 launched for prices comparable to a higher end dvd player and equal to or less than most bluray players.

[elmer]

You've definitely got to understand that the computer world was a totally different place back in the late 1980's and early 1990's.

I was shopping for a CD player in the late 1980s, when it was the transition from the 14-bit players to the first of the 16-bit players ... and the cost was hundreds of dollars (or pounds in my case).

Take a look at the price/capability of IBM PCs ...

IBM announced four PS/2 models during its April 1987 launch: the Model 30, 50, 60, and 80. They ranged dramatically in power and price; on the low end, the Model 30 (roughly equivalent to a PC XT) contained an 8MHz 8086 CPU, 640KB of RAM, and a 20MB hard drive, and retailed for $2295 (about $4642 in 2012 dollars when adjusted for inflation).

The most powerful configuration of the Model 80 came equipped with a 20MHz 386 CPU, 2MB of RAM, and a 115MB hard drive for a total cost of $10,995 (about $22,243 today). Neither configuration included an OS--you had to buy PC-DOS 3.3 for an extra $120 ($242 today).

Set against that, the Sharp X68000 ACE's 399,800Y price in 1998 for the model with 1MB RAM and a 20MB hard drive doesn't sound quite so bad for a "professional-level" graphics workstation!

In my young(ish) bachelor days in the early 1990s, I remember paying nearly $1000 for 64MB of RAM, and another $450 a 250MB hard drive.

*****************

Early computer CD-ROM players were incredibly expensive, just take a look at this familiar drive's $798 price in June 1990 ...






The PC Engine + CDROM2 was pretty cheap back in its day as far as CD-ROM hardware goes.

Now ... that doesn't mean that it was affordable to game players, or that kids could justify it to their parents, particularly in comparison to cheaper cartridge-only consoles.

From my POV, the PC Engine was always a "premium" product at the high end of the price range, with cutting-edge features, and a price tag to match.

IMHO, that was the same kind of market that the Neo Geo home system was aiming at when it came out.

[SignOfZeta]

Trying to figure out inflation versus tech is pointless since tech drops like a rock constantly. My first computer's RAM upgrade was $1000 and it was only 1MB.

Also, the yen was exploding in value overall in the 80s making comparisons to dollars equally pointless. Tracking from 1991 or so wouldn't be so bad but going back to 1983 or whether (Famcom debut) it's going to get weird because a dollar bought well over 200yen.

And if you think the PCE stuff was expensive it's probably because you haven't looked at anything else. Grab a 25 year old issue of Newtype and check out otaku pricing.  The $6000 Laserdisc players, the $800 portable MD recorders, the anime box sets that cost thousands of dollars. That's just the way it was there back then and to a lesser extent things are still sorta like that. The customers aren't as obedient, they don't have as much money to spend, but they also don't like to have kids anymore which equates to tons of spare change.

[esteban]

Well, just to go down memory lane, I found the cheapest, semi-decent CD player in 1985...it was $300. That was for a basic Sony model.

I was so happy to get that CD player.

I had no CDs to play (couldn't afford any).

But I looked at the glowing display and the remote control would close the empty CD tray from across the room.

[Zero_Gamer]

Well, just to go down memory lane, I found the cheapest, semi-decent CD player in 1985...it was $300. That was for a basic Sony model.

I was so happy to get that CD player.

I had no CDs to play (couldn't afford any).

But I looked at the glowing display and the remote control would close the empty CD tray from across the room.

CDs were ridiculous even in the late eighties. Most ranged $20-40. I remember the first CD I bought was Dokken Beast From the East in '91 for my turbo cd, and it was $25. But boy did it sound sooooo much better than the cassette.

[SignOfZeta]

My first CD player was a Sony D-66, a Discman. In 1991 It was about $200 and with that you got zero seconds of skip buffer and a NiCad battery that would last, maybe, 2 hours. It was the best portable player at that price that I could find.

Now you can buy one with a minute of buffer that runs for days on a single charge. It will however be a total POS compared to the D-66, which wasn't even a premium product in its day.

[SamIAm]

I think you have to keep in mind that until maybe the PS1 generation, and probably not really until the generation after that, gaming was mostly a kid's hobby. Yes, there were some gamers who bought games in the late 80s/early 90s using their own income, but they're not the ones who got the Famicom to 61 million units sold worldwide, or 30 million Mega Drives. That was kids. Kids who all went through that dreaded moment where they negotiated with Mom and/or Dad, and in most cases literally had to beg because what they wanted was both truly expensive and completely frivolous entertainment. Whatever the price of the PCE-CD hardware really was, it was FAR beyond what was acceptable in this situation. I mean, in my case, I wouldn't have even bothered asking my parents for such an expensive toy. They would have laughed in my face, or worse.

In Japan, the situation was slightly better, but not much.

(As an aside, one of the often overlooked reasons why Japanese gaming doesn't kick as much butt as it used to is that they lost the small "adult-advantage" that they used to have. Nowadays, it's much more acceptable to be an adult gamer in America than it is in Japan.)

Does your historical calculator only go back to '93?  The combined original MSRPs were a bit less than 89,000 yen (82,600 yen), but that was 5 years earlier; by '93 you could get a Duo-R for less than half that.  Compared to the various online inflation calculators that I checked, $1400 would be high even for '88, but the exact dollar amount doesn't really matter, I guess.

The 89,000 yen figure was just for the specialty Bose speakers esteban linked to.

[SamIAm]

Minimum wage in the US was $3.35/hr through pretty much all the 80s, finally jumping to $4.25/hr in 1992.

In Japan, though it varies by region, mimimum wage in 1981 was 397 yen/hr, which climbed to 572/hr by 1991.

Sorry to double post. 

[SignOfZeta]

The CDROM2 systems were expensive, sure, but the base PCE was pretty close in price to other cart systems. As they moved more towards the high end they lost the kids and gained otaku dorks who proceeded to turn the PCE into a "multi media" machine filled with pervy ota junk and weird sims.

None of this is a new observation of course...this is why Bomberman games usually came out on HuCARDs.

[seieienbu]

For comparison, does anyone have numbers for how much a SNES, Megadrive, and Neo Geo cost back then?

[SignOfZeta]

Neo Geo (1990) ¥58,000 (what you actually got with a Neo changed here and there over the years but I think at launch you got a controller...and that's it)

SFC (1990) ¥25,000 (I think you got two pads but no AV cable, IIRC)

Megadrive (1988) ¥21,000 (I think one pad)

None of these came with games, btw, which alone makes them seem expensive compared to the low prices Americans enjoy. Add ¥5,800 for most MD games, ¥7,800-9,800 for most SFC games and ¥21,000 for most Neo games...although they would be twice that before the system died.