Back in the day, video games only cost about $30. Well those days are long gone, and high prices are here to stay.Steep video game prices are what consumers must deal with for owning more expensive and more powerful gaming consoles like Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii.For average student gamers like Jonathan White, political science junior, this is an uphill battle that is pretty hard to win.”I don’t like that game prices are so high, but I guess it’s understandable,” White said. “The better games and consoles get, the more we will be charged for them.”On average, video games debut around $50 to $60.U.S. video game sales rose 28 percent in July compared to a year ago, according to Reuters.com. Software sales grew 41 percent despite the cost.But for White and students like him, there is only so much punishment a wallet can take.”Companies are selling video games for such high prices because they can,” he said. “People are still buying them, so there’s no reason for them to drop prices. Besides, they have to make a profit to be able to continue making games. Typically it costs a lot more to produce a console than the price they sell it for. They have to make up that difference by selling games at high prices.”Robert Perkins, University alumnus and director of creative development for GameVortex in Baton Rouge, echoed Bosley’s statements.”A large part of prices being so high has to do with licensing,” Perkins said. “Only a small portion of the money from game sales goes back to the actual developer. The revenue from sales is divided between those the product is licensed to, including advertisers and the console manufacturer.”Take Sony’s PS3 for example. The PS3 cost more than $800 to produce, while at launch Sony charged only $599 for the more expensive 60 GB model, according to Gizmodo.com.Sony actually lost money by selling PS3s, so high game prices help gaming companies alleviate the losses incurred.But just because high prices are here to stay does not mean students have to suffer through them. There are options.Sometimes new games can be purchased cheaply on Web sites like eBay.com or Half.com. Sometimes it is best to simply buy an older cheaper game. Sometimes it is best to wait for the price to drop.”But waiting for the price to drop can be difficult. It can sometimes take two years or more for that to happen. Your friends will probably already have bought the game, and you don’t want to feel left out. Good old peer pressure still creating problems,” Bosley joked.But not as big a problem as the more spartan alternative: purchasing few video games, if any.”Personally, I just don’t buy many video games,” White said. “I only buy a few a year. That’s how I keep costs down. But I guess high prices do deter me from buying games more often.”If high prices continue to deter potential customers from purchasing a game, the gaming industry could soon be in bad shape.But Perkins mentioned a game developing concept that could potentially lead to lower prices.”I think as prices get higher, we will see much more episodic content in games,” Perkins said. “This means developers make a shorter, less epic game. Then they release it by episode. You buy the first episode, and play it, and if you like it, you buy the following episodes. This way, you’re getting less game, but you’re also paying for less game too.”Bosley said right now, unless there is a breakthrough in gaming technology that would somehow make producing consoles cheaper and therefore make games cheaper, that is probably not going to happen.The current trend is that each time a new console is released, prices tend to jump, so prices are likely to continue rising as manufacturers make better consoles. Manufacturers probably will not downgrade and start building weaker consoles.So as long as consumers are willing to shell out the money to buy expensive games, companies will keep selling them.”You would think that prices would eventually get so high that people would stop buying them,” Bosley said. “But we all know that’s not going to happen. They’re too much fun.”–—Contact Abraham Felix at [email protected]