History Main / CrackIsCheaper

* The main source of fan outrage from microtransactions in games. Sure, spending extra money on a game you shelled sixty bucks on to purchase new content that took the developers extra time to complete makes sense. Spending money to buy something you could (and probably should) earn with a few hours of play, or even gamble away your money with loot boxes (which may cause gambling addictions to develop when played by children)? You could spend thousands of dollars just to stay 'ahead' of the players who earned their fun through hundreds of hours of dedication, which also breaks the feeling of accomplishment and cheapens the game. And when the game eventually shuts down servers or is no longer fun, all those in-game items you spent your money on are worthless.

* ''VideoGame/{{Medabots}}'' has a main set of characters, the Medabots themselves, as expensive to buy and maintain. (Justified, in the fact that they are built to shoot missiles, lasers and other things.)
* Anime/BusouShinki, in-universe & in real life. Those cute little Shinki can [[IncrediblyLamePun blast your wallet.]]
** Their SpiritualSuccessor, the ''Anime/FrameArmsGirls'', has this crop up as well, both in-universe and in real life. In episode 4, when the girls start making their own 'rooms' inside a bookshelf, the Materia Twins end up using such luxurious and expensive materials that they end up using up Ao's first paycheck from Frame Advance. She's understandably angry with them for this.

** Possibly justified by the fact that wearing them apparently allows the user to violate ''physics''.
** Definitely justified by the fact that wearing them lets you jump several stories and move close to 100 MPH. from shoes. If anything, the fact students on a part time job can afford them makes them cheap for what you get

*** It might be related to the aesthetic ideal of wabi-zabi, and to the Zen idea of the impermanence of all things--that wouldn't be the oddest place in Japanese culture that wabi-zabi has turned up.

* ''Videogame/DigitalCombatSimulator'' comes with two high-fidelity planes, the Sukhoi Su-25T Frogfoot, a ground attack plane, and the TF-51D Mustang, an unarmed training variant of the famous P-51D Mustang. If you want all high-fidelity and low-fidelity aircraft plus maps and a supercarrier, be prepared to shell out more than ''$2,400'' for the full array. And that's not getting into the cost of HOTAS and VR/TrackIR equipment to make flying that much easier.

* If Doc of ZoidsNewCentury had his way, he'd have every Zoid ever built much like Harry Champ does. Granted, much of why he buys what he does is because it's cool, but he was "conned" into buying the Liger Zero because "White Ligers are rare". There's also the time he nearly melted at the mere sight of a Red Blade Liger that his son was piloting, and the time he ordered a Buster Cannon to mount on a Shadow Fox. Granted, all of this pales in comparison to the sheer number of model kits he has laying around, some of which he'll break out during a fight or a briefing.

* A realistic example occurs in ''Franchise/StarWars KnightsOfTheOldRepublic''. The card game pazaak gives players the option to buy more powerful cards for their deck for a sum of credits that would be meaningful to a normal citizen of the galaxy, such as 25-200 credits. For comparison, a normal blaster rifle (the sort many characters in universe would carry around in a dangerous wilderness) costs 300 credits in this game, and high-stakes games of pazaak could be played for a couple of hundred credits. A top tier pazaak deck would run about a thousand credits, or about half of what Luke sold his used speeder (think car, but floating just off the ground) for in ''Film/ANewHope''.

Can be made worse by the hardcore FanBoy's ''preference'' for overpriced merchandise. This guy wants geek paraphernalia to be overpriced because he wants to be the only one on the block who can afford to own it. If an item costs $9.99, then any old fan, even one who has a mortgage and bills to pay, can afford it; but if it costs $129.99 and comes with the [[strike:fake]] totally legitimate signature of the fandom's creator, then only a true fan would spend so much of his [[strike:mother's]] money to purchase it. This is a dream come true for the manufacturer, who would much rather sell 10,000 items at a $128 profit margin than 50,000 items at an $8 profit margin.[[note]] In case you're wondering, that comes out to 1,280,000 in profits versus 400,000 in profits. [[/note]]

* There exists an aptly named TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering webcomic titled Webcomic/CardboardCrack. Many of the jokes resolve around the absurd price of Magic cards, like [[http://cardboard-crack.tumblr.com/post/56747355348 this]].

* The main source of fan outage from microtransactions in games. Sure, spending extra money on a game you shelled sixty bucks on to purchase new content that took the developers extra time to complete makes sense. Spending money to buy something you could (and probably should) earn with a few hours of play, or even gamble away your money with loot boxes (which may cause gambling addictions to develop when played by children)? You could spend thousands of dollars just to stay 'ahead' of the players who earned their fun through hundreds of hours of dedication, which also breaks the feeling of accomplishment and cheapens the game. And when the game eventually shuts down servers or is no longer fun, all those in-game items you spent your money on are worthless.

[[folder: Anime and Manga ]]

[[folder: Comic Books ]]

[[folder: Film ]]

[[folder: Literature ]]

[[folder: Live-Action TV ]]

[[folder: Magazines]]

[[folder: Music ]]

[[folder: Theater ]]

[[folder: Video Games ]]

[[folder: Webcomics ]]

* In ''VideoGame/Persona5DancingInStarlight'', Futaba mentions that her Featherman figurines cost a total of 200,000 yen or nearly $2,000 together. She sheepishly admits that it along with her high-end PC, video games, and manga collection all came out of Sojiro's pocket.

[[folder: Web Original ]]

[[folder: Western Animation ]]

-->"You see, I need the money to buy more toys. I love toys. They can play songs. They can dance. They can even eat money. Oh, boy, can they eat money. All my money. [[spoiler: And then I remembered an episode of ''The Gray Ghost''. And I knew what else a toy can do. It can carry a bomb. It can hold a city for ransom. Oh, the power of the toy. It can earn millions. Millions for the little old toy collector, me.]]"

''On back issues of ComicBook/TheFlash."''

Can be made worse by the hardcore FanBoy's ''preference'' for overpriced merchandise. This guy wants geek paraphernalia to be overpriced because he wants to be the only one on the block who can afford to own it. If an item costs $9.99, then any old fan, even one who has a mortgage and bills to pay, can afford it; but if it costs $129.99 and comes with the [[strike:fake]] totally legitimate signature of the fandom's creator, then only a true fan would spend so much of his [[strike:mother's]] money to purchase it. This is a dream come true for the manufacturer, who would much rather sell 10,000 items at a $128 profit margin than 50,000 items at an $8 profit margin.

[[Administrivia/NoRealLifeExamplesPlease Please don't list any real life examples of this]], as this is a thing that happens too often to be made an example.

* For some bizarre reason, ''bikes'' in the Pokémon series are sometimes this, dating all the way back to the first game where a bike cost more money than the player could possibly carry. Not that this stopped an NPC from giving away a voucher to anyone who talked to him...
** This is because the bikes are one of only a few things that expensive that are actually reasonably priced. Poké Balls, a technology that lets people convert Pokémon into digital data... [[MagicFromTechnology somehow...]] costs as much as a bottle of water straight out of a vending machine. The game's currency is actually a CulturalTranslation of yen: a bike that could easily be folded up and fit into your backpack really ''would'' cost that much. Unfortunately this is lost on Western audiences. It's not that the bike is incredibly expensive: it's that the player is actually carrying around very little in the way of money and doesn't realize it!

[[Administrivia/NoRealLifeExamplesPlease don't need to list any real life examples of this]], as this is a thing that happens too often to be made an example.

!!InUniverseExamplesOnly:

* In ''Series/LethalWeapon2016'', Murtaugh actually says this word-for-word when a posh hotel bar bills him $14 for a bog-standard soda.

* ''Literature/DonQuixote'': This attitude is showed InUniverse (and deconstructed) by Alonso Quijano. At chapter I Part I we learn that he has acquired a lot of chivalry books (almost three hundred), and if you remember that the [[OlderThanSteam printing-press had been invented in Europe only some years ago]], it's a considerable feat. Later, Alonso Quijano will decide that it would be a great idea to become [[MeaningfulRename Don Quixote]]:

--> I will be ''literally'' [[NurseryRhyme the woman who lives in a shoe!]]