ARE GAMES EXPENSIVE TODAY?
THE COMPARISON YOUR 12-YEAR-OLD SELF DIDN'T WANT TO SEE

There's a conversation people of our generation have in pubs every now and then that always ends up in the same place: "games used to be cheaper back then." And that's where I was left the last time it came up, pint in hand and mouth hanging open, because the sentence sounded very reasonable, very common-sense, very much one of us... and yet something about it didn't quite sit right.

So I went to look up the actual numbers. The real ones. The ones from official statistics, the prices printed on game boxes. And what I found left me with a mix of laughter, second-hand embarrassment and a very particular brand of nostalgia: the kind that comes from realising your twelve-year-old self was, economically speaking, an absolute disaster.

But before getting into it, there's one important thing to establish. Because this debate has an enormous trap that almost everyone ignores: back then, games were bought by children. And children didn't have salaries. They had piggy banks.

Let me set the scene. It's 1988. You're between ten and fourteen years old. You have a Commodore 64 at home — or a Spectrum, or an Amstrad, it doesn't matter for our purposes — and you've spotted a game in the Erbe catalogue or in the pages of Micromanía that you want with an intensity you now reserve for more serious things, like car insurance or not having the rent go up.

A standard game costs 875 pesetas. The pricier ones, with big boxes and lots of colourful plastic, reach 1,200 pesetas. Some particularly ambitious titles could push close to 2,000.

And what did you have? Your weekend allowance. Which in late-eighties Spain ranged, depending on the family and parental generosity, between 100 and 500 pesetas a week. The luckiest kids in the class might get 100 pesetas every Saturday. Those of us living in statistical normality got a bit less.

Fair enough — maybe the problem was just that we were children with no money, and that the adults of 1988 could actually afford games without any drama. Let's look at the numbers.

In 1988, according to INE data, the average wage in Spain was around 161,781 pesetas gross per month. The minimum wage (SMI) was set that year at 44,040 pesetas per month. So someone on the minimum — and in '88 there were a lot of people in that situation — took home something like 35,000 pesetas after deductions.

And how much was a game? We've already said: 875 pesetas standard, 1,200 the expensive one. Which means that for your average worker, a game was between 0.5% and 0.7% of their monthly wage. In today's money, with the average wage at around €2,290 gross according to INE, that works out to roughly €11 to €16.

So objectively, for a working adult in 1988, a game was quite affordable. The problem is that working adults in 1988 didn't buy computer games. That was kids' stuff. And kids didn't work. Kids had the piggy bank, the allowance, and the hope that Father Christmas would be generous that January.

Fast-forward four decades. It's 2025. The average wage in Spain is around €2,290 gross per month according to the latest INE figures. A brand-new triple-A game costs between €60 and €70 on Steam. Some of the big ones — console releases in their digital premium edition with all DLC included — go without shame to €80.

But here's the fundamental shift that makes this debate interesting: now games are bought by adults. The video game industry stopped being kids' stuff decades ago. The average Spanish gamer today is over 35. Someone with a salary, a credit card, and the sense to wait for Steam sales — which cut prices by 50% to 90% several times a year.

And on top of that — and this is key — Steam exists today. And Game Pass. And PlayStation subscription. And Christmas sales. And Humble Bundle. In 1988 there were no discounts. The game cost what it cost, in whichever shop happened to be nearby, and if you didn't like the price you could go home and look at it through the window.

Right. Let's drop the narrative and put the numbers side by side. Because a table is worth a thousand words, and this one in particular is worth several Saturdays of saving in '88:

Are games expensive today? It depends on how you look at it. A AAA at €70 is objectively a lot of money. But if you compare it to what 875 pesetas meant to a twelve-year-old in 1988, the answer is no — today they're not more expensive. They're cheaper, in relative terms.

The real problem isn't the price. The real problem is price perception. In 1988 you asked for the game at Christmas, you waited for it eagerly for weeks, you looked after it like it was made of gold and you squeezed every last drop out of it for months because there was no alternative. Today you have 500 games on Steam you haven't touched and 300 more in the winter sale you haven't even looked at. Abundance makes everything feel expensive even when it's cheaper.

And then there's the other reality I mentioned at the start, the one with the most to it: back then only children played. And children, with their weekly allowance and their ceramic piggy bank shaped like a pig, had the worst possible domestic economy. Now adults play. Adults with wages that, while not spectacular — and 1988's weren't either — let them buy a game without having to give up sweets for four consecutive Saturdays.