In my previous article I talked about the price changes so far in 2007 by Genre. RPG's declined in price the least and sports games declined in price the most. A reader commented that with only a 7% drop in price for the average RPG, there are probably some RPG's where the price increased. I decided to look into this and see how many games's prices actually increased in 2007 by Genre.
I looked at the same major genres; Action, Sports, RPG, Fighting, and Racing and plotted the distribution of the price changes from down 50 percent to up 50 percent. The charts below show the number of games for each genre and how much they dropped in price from January 1st 2007 to August 16th 2007.
Most genre's have the largest percentage of their games with price drops 50 percent or larger, with sports games showing almost a third of the games dropping more than 50 percent. Then there is a steady drop in the distribution until only 1.8% of games from all genres show a price increase of more than 50%.
In my last article I showed that RPG and Fighting games showed the smallest drop in prices overall during 2007. Their graphs above show why this is. RPG and Fighting have their peak distributions at higher points than a 50 percent drop. RPG's are more normally distributed than the other genres, with the peak at no price change. 31 percent of RPG's actually increased in price during 2007, while 52% dropped. For all games, only 16 percent increased in price while 74 percent dropped. So RPG's were two times as likely as all other games to increase in price.
See the graph below for a comparison of RPG price changes vs all genres.
Below is the table with actual distribution percentages for all genres.
It is interesting to me that all genre's have some games with price increases of 50 percent or more. And that the percentage is roughly the same for all genres, between 1-3 percent. If you were to randomly buy a video game, it wouldn't matter what genre it was; you would have pretty much the same chance of hitting a home run and the price shooting up more than 50 percent.
The biggest difference is on the up side at the 10 and 20 percent ranges. 11 percent and 7 percent of RPG's increase 10 percent and 20 percent respectively, while all other genres show 6 and 4 percent chances of rising the same percentages.
How can you use this data? If you decide to collect some video games you should probably focus on RPG's because they have the best chance of increasing in price, but be sure to choose selectively. Most RPG's still drop in price, you just have a better chance of not getting burnt.
Video game price data provided by VideoGamePriceCharts.com
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4 comments:
Not that the developer probably really cares (since it may not relate to high sales) but I bet it's satisfying to see your game price increase over time. It must mean you did something right.
I bet the developers probably get some sense of pride from the higher resale values for the reasons you said. But I bet the publishers are not very happy, it means they probably didn't make enough of that game.
Very cool. I didn't expect to see that all genres had games with 50% price increases. I like the histograms and the final summary table. Very informative.
jj, one of the comparisons I would like to see is by country of origin. Specifically, I'm interested to see distribution histograms that compare JRPGs with American-made RPGs.
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