Quote:Original post by Mastadon I remember when I saw Chrono Trigger at Target or Best Buy, and it was $80!
Yeah, the SNES days were awesome. The price of the game literally depended on how much memory was packed into the cart, or whether there was a coprocessor in the cart.
Man. I miss the days where the games themselves came with fucking math coprocessors :-D
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I remember this bit of dialog at the end of Monkey Island I:
Guybrush : At least I learned something from all of this... Elaine : What's that? Guybrush : Never pay $59.99 for a computer game.
...and I have found this to be true, and it is pretty rare to have to pay that much now. The most expensive game I ever bought was Street Fighter 2 for the Genesis at $64 -- and I played the hell out of that game, so I think it was worth it. My dad actually worked for Sega in the Genesis days, so I got a discount for any Sega-made game ;) I think I paid about $15 for ToeJam & Earl.
A couple years ago, I worked as the game librarian for my company. Part of my job was to buy (& expense!) any popular game that just came out. I found that if I went to the right places, I would never have to pay more than $39 for a new game, PC or console. Fry's Electronics typically knocked off $10 on opening week, but the same game will often be marked UP $10 at GameStop -- a $20 difference between stores.
my parents paid $120 for Phantasy Star 1. I don't think prices have changed much at all across all consoles. The first Nintendo was like $100-120. I bought my dreamcast 11 years later for $150. I don't recall the prices for nintendo/master system games but I know brand new Genesis/SNES games were $50, used and popular were $30-$35, and the crap ones were $5-$30. Contrast that to today's games and they are almost identical.
The other thing about prices is that they are never adjusted for popularity anymore. Halo 2 was the same price as Nancy's Pony Adventure even though I had to wait in line for 2 hours. 10 years ago if you had to wait in line for a game (Super Mario 3, Phantasy Star, Chrono Trigger) you had to pay more for it.
As for markup, the retail markup for games and hardware is very small (~10%). Retailers make almost all of their money on accessories and warranty plans. Not sure of the packaging and distribution cost of the publisher but I'm sure it's cheap as the volume is high and the dimensions are small. My guess is it's about 5-10% of the final retail price.
I paid about $10 for a casette with a TI99 game on, but carts went for about $30 (Canadian). Consider the console went for $99 when it was discontinued by the manufacturer.
Games on diskette went for between $30 and $60 for the Atari ST and Amiga. All prices in 1980s Canadian dollars.
An Atari game cost a quarter at the arcade (think Tempest). Pinball was 3 balls for a quarter. That was a rip-off: when I was a kid it was 2 games (5 balls per game) for a quarter. Now that's value.
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Some of the memories of game prices are WAYYYY off!
I paid $75 for a new copy of Donkey Kong Country for the SNES in 1994. True, the Playstation systems started a whole Greatest Hits series that made games cheaper but from what I remember most games are between the $30-50 range. It has been this way for a good while.
The development time frame and crew sizes have increased vastly which require more funding. This, aside from just plain ol' inflation, are the reasons why video game prices have risen....modestly overall.
Quote:Original post by Kest The most expensive game I've ever owned was one I pick-pocketed from a department store when I was about 10 years old. It was Phantasy Star IV for the Sega Genesis. I got it for free, but it cost everyone else about $80.
back in the days of the n.e.s. and the s.n.e.s. we always got our games new from eather walmart k-mart or toys r us and toys r us was the most pricey costing as much as 50.99 u.s.d. but at walmart and k-mart there where not as bad i remember when my dad would swear at the the check out at toys r us saying "you kids better not ask for another thing for a month i am having to pay 106 dallers and 50 cents for your two games if you say another word i will bust both of your a**es do you hear me" but at walmart and k-mart he did not act a fool cause he only ended up paying 69.95 u.s.d. for two n.e.s. or s.n.e.s. titles back then i was between the ages of 7 and 11 years of ageand lived in a small kentucky hick city
Quote:Original post by RivieraKid
interestingly even without the net piracy was still rampant. 90% of my games on atari were pirated, copies of copies of copies. dont copy that floppy! I was too young to understand what piracy was.
Piracy is not what dictates the rise in game prices, though. Rising development costs have a lot more to do with it.
Development costs are mostly irrelevant aswell, prices are almost entierly dictated by what people are prepared to pay. (When you have an artificial monopoly on your product and an unlimited supply keeping the price as high as the customer will tolerate and then lower the price with time to reach those with less money is the best way to maximize your profit), The higher development costs make it harder to actually make a profit (You have to sell far more copies of a game today to break even than you did in the 80s)
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