All Aboard Studios Route- Crewe To Birmingham New Street.

Well, Old Vern, that approach to market pricing is a fairly well established analysis and I am sure the folks at Focus have specialists doing just that. The Old Lady has an inflation calculator and by her estimate 30 quid in 2020 would now be 38.44.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator

 

Interesting thing that's semi-off topic but rather relevant to this whole price thing I feel, so there's been a big Pokemon leak, mainly on multiple projects in the works. However, development budgets also leaked, and it actually shows how insane the gap between what they need and what they get actually is.

The next Pokemon title due out this month had a 2 billion yen development budget, which in a unit more of us are familiar with is only $13 million. For a massive AAA franchise that is tiny, if they only sold those games for $40 with a million units of sales, they'd still be almost triple in the black... And mind you this is for a series currently selling at $60 to $70, while also selling well over ten times the amount of units, even during a "bad" year.

Granted, I doubt that is counting marketing costs, which for something like this is probably insane to be fair. And Japan for various reasons can pay comparably less money than a place like the US can for equivalent development. But even still, I think it's fair to say that a Pokemon game could release at the old $40 that the 3DS games did, even if say they were only selling a few million per release as oppose to a few ten million.

Just to bring up another random example that's of a smaller company and perhaps a bit more relevant to the forum's interests. I don't think Bachmann needs to sell their two decade old HO model of Thomas for over $100 when it launched back in the day only for $30. And mind you even adjusted for inflation would only be about $60, and they would've actually need to do things like pay off the new tooling costs, which almost certainly isn't something they'd have to do now.

Heck, on the flip-side the new Motorized Thomas that Mattel's doing is in the $10 to $20ish range depending on what you're buying exactly. This actually kind of surprised my mother when I was informing her about it, as that was in the same ballpark as what the old Tomy ones cost. Or going off more recent stuff, if you look at the simple looking AEG models versus these new ones it's insane to see they're being done for the same pricing. Add to it how much Thomas has fallen in popularity the past 10 years, and how much 20 years of inflation have added in cost that's actually kind of crazy.

I've been loving them as a collector, but I wouldn't hesitate buying these for a kid. They have their faults, mainly the iffy printing and the lack of freewheeling the old Tomy ones did. But IMO they're a masterclass in showing what you can do if you actually give a damn about not raising prices for the masses. Wish more companies would actually take notes here!

I guess moral I'm trying to get at here with post is be very skeptical of price increase lot of this stuff is priced with a lot of leeway. They don't often "need" to price this stuff the way that they actually do. And frankly between better development tools, potential increase in player base over TSC due to consoles and the general increase in gaming popularity in the past ten years. And finally us not knowing how much margin DTG actually did have back in the day when they initially set their $40 standard, it's hard to say that it's "needed". And I'm far more inclined to distrust companies and assume they're being greedy, even smaller ones.

(Wow, this was so much longer than I expected, admittedly would've been a lot shorter if the Thomas stuff hadn't came to my head midway though)