David Thomas of Crispy Gamer recently looked at one of this generation’s more indigestible features that we’ve simply learned to just live with, that of almost any and all new games costing sixty dollars for next generation machines. He dissects the reasoning behind every high-profile (whether it be good, great or garbage) next-gen game costing this same amount and poses some of the hypothetical reasoning as to why sixty bucks has become the welcomed norm.

One such idea stemming from blog Law of the Game’s Editor in Chief Mark Methenitis is that of conscious parallelism, wherein he describes a scenario where one developer believes it’s game is so good that it should rightly charge more for it, considering the hefty development costs the game entailed. Other developers, believing their product is just as good as the first developer’s game, see no reason not to charge more for their titles as well, bringing the industry standard to that sixty dollars we know today.

One thing I hate is when people bring up the “Well the N64 and SNES had 70 dollar games last decade!” during these kinds of arguments. Yes, 70 dollar games weren’t uncommon back then, but even though many gamers remember the N64 and SNES as these great systems of old, they weren’t exactly as mainstream as many gamers might remember. The Playstation got a lot of traction for a variety of reasons, one of them being cheaper formats for both the developers and the consumers to work with. Developers didn’t have to charge seventy dollars for a PSX game to recoup the cost of ordering cartridges to put their games on.

This argument will probably get brought up again over the fall period as many of the new releases, while a lot of effort is put into them, might not resonate with the consumer concerning their sixty dollar price tags. Most notably gamers who aren’t that into Halo multiplayer for whatever reasons they have are taking issue with Halo 3: ODST at the moment. The game that was originally supposed to be a reasonably priced side story to the main Halo games ended up becoming a package of things that the majority of potential ODST customers weren’t exactly looking for. So when the credits roll for the first time after completing the single player portion of the game, some gamers might feel slighted by having this experience set them back more than half a Ben Franklin. – The Ben