u/oldsoulrevival

Anything out there like this?

The Seestern is a near 1:1 of the Glashütte SeaQ, whereas Phorcydes has its own thing going on.

1. Which likely has a better fit & finish?
2. I am not a lume chaser. It's cool, but the novelty wears off quickly for me. With that out of the equation does that lessen the reason to go with Phorcydes?

Any other thoughts/considerations?

This chart tracks four indexed metrics for major game releases from 1990-2025 (real game price, AAA dev budget, average playtime, and best-selling title units), each deflated to constant 2025 dollars via CPI-U and normalized to 1990=100 on a log scale.

Sources, Notes, & methodology

Game price:
Launch MSRPs for major console releases: $50-60 nominal in the early 1990s, $60 standard from 2005, $70 standard from late 2020 (Bloomberg, "Game Prices Go Up to $70, the First Increase in 15 Years," Nov. 2020, bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-09/game-prices-go-up-to-70-the-first-increase-in-15-years). Historical launch-price data: Gameflation, 500+ titles (gameflation.com); TechRaptor, "The Cost of Gaming Since the 1970s" (techraptor.net/gaming/features/cost-of-gaming-since-1970s); InfographicSite, "Console Game Prices Inflation Adjusted: Surprising Trends" (infographicsite.com/infographic/console-game-prices-inflation-adjusted).

AAA dev budget:
1990-2005: Raph Koster, “Moore's Wall” talk (2005), summarized in SuperJoost Playlist, "Gaming's billion-dollar gamble" (superjoost.substack.com/p/gamings-billion-dollar-gamble), budgets grew from under $1M in the early 1990s to $12M+ by 2005. Late 2000s: $15-20M typical, Halo 3 ~$30M (Wikipedia, "AAA (video game industry)," en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)). 2018: $50-150M average; 2024-25 greenlights: $200M+ average (UK Competition and Markets Authority report, 2023, cited in Wikipedia AAA article and ejaw.net/the-rising-costs-of-aaa-game-development). Most budgets are undisclosed; values between anchor years are interpolated.

Time spent per game:
HowLongToBeat (howlongtobeat.com) crowdsourced completion data. Franchise-level trend via Quartz, "Why do studios release such long video games?" (qz.com/1787043/why-are-video-games-getting-longer): GTA 2 ~12 hrs vs. GTA V ~32; Witcher 1 ~36 vs. Witcher 3 ~52; RDR2 ~47. 2023-24 releases average 56-66 hrs to 100% (Solitaired, "Video Games That Take the Longest to Beat," solitaired.com/video-games-that-take-longest-to-beat). Pre-2008 values are estimates from HLTB entries for era-defining titles, since no aggregate study exists for that period. Weakest series on the chart.

Best-selling US title, units:
No publisher discloses average unit sales across all major releases, so this series uses each year's top-selling US title as a proxy, drawn from Wikipedia, "List of best-selling video games in the United States by year" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games_in_the_United_States_by_year) and NPD/Circana-sourced figures on the Video Game Sales Wiki (vgsales.fandom.com). Anchor points: Super Mario Bros. 3 sold about 8M in the US in 1990 (cited to Good Housekeeping, 1991, via vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Video_games_in_the_United_States); Call of Duty: Black Ops sold about 15M US units in its first year (Gamasutra, "Black Ops Leads 2010-2011 U.S. Sales With 15M Units," Nov. 2011). Other years are estimated from comparable top-sellers in adjacent years. Least reliable series on the chart; unlike price, budget, and playtime, top-seller units show no clear long-run trend, mostly clustering in the 4-15M range across three and a half decades.

Inflation adjustment:
CPI-U annual averages, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Historical Table 24 (bls.gov/cpi/tables/historical-cpi-u-201710.pdf) and FRED series CPIAUCSL, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL). 1990 = 130.7; 2025 approx. 322. All dollar values are expressed in constant 2025 dollars.

All figures are industry-average approximations for major (AAA) releases; individual titles vary enormously. Values at five-year intervals; intermediate years interpolated.

Winning-score data (relative to par) for all four majors, 1970–2025, was compiled manually then aggregated into yearly cross-tournament averages and decade averages using pandas; trend lines are ordinary least-squares linear fits per major and across the yearly average.