I would never pay that much for a game. I just wait a couple of years and buy them when they go on sale for under $20. I'm not going to pay a premium just to be a beta tester.
A large portion of the cost of those games was the mask ROM that had to be manufactured for each release.
There was no patches or updates. If there was an issue, then your very expensive mask is trash and a new one has to be made, which also significantly delays the release. The games had to be released in a finished and fully working state. A lot more work had to go into testing before release.
Development for old consoles was also much harder. You had to write very well optimized code to get it to run on the limited hardware that was available.
Comparing prices directly like this is almost irrelevant imo. And doesn't really dictate what the price of games should be.
Reasons old games should be pricier:
Hardware involved (cartridges/electronics).
Total number of customers were smaller, you have to subsidize development with less total sales.
Reasons why new games should be pricier:
Development has inflated to hundreds of people and multiple years (instead of dozens of people and multiple months)
But at the end of the day, business just price what the market will bear. It's only indirectly related to the cost of production. The margins on some games are insanely high compared to others.
For another context: That was the time regular children got max 4 games per year and it was a momentous occasion. Games getting cheaper through CD-ROM (move away from cartriges) and inflation is the reason the customer base grew.
Yeah and you could buy a house for 20k back then and that same house is 1.7 million now. So it's almost like people had more disposable income back then. Half of all Americans make less than 35k a year so that $70 price would be like if games back then cost $600.
Yes when they actually had to sell real things and not just a digital download. They also had to actually publish fully finished games as game updates were basically impossible.
I'm happy to pay it if the game is worth $70, but with games releasing in such a buggy state, they're not worth anywhere close to that. I don't care about FUD and am hurting for games to play, so the value is a given game to me is much lower.
So I wait until they're solid, and they're usually much cheaper by then. I'd like to pay Cities: Skylines 2, but the performance and content aren't there. That's a game I'd totally pay launch price for, but the quality isn't there.
I have limited gaming time, so I'm not going to spend it playing new releases with tons of bugs. I paid for new releases as a kid because games actually launched in a finished state. Games these days don't, so I don't buy them.
He told IGN that one of its upcoming titles, Space Marine 2, will retail for $70, but only because he’s concerned audiences would see a cheaper price as emblematic of poor quality.
Yipes. Saber should throw this minnow back in the water and cast that line out again for a bigger fish that knows anything about the videogame market.
When I see a $70 game my very first thought is an over-promised under-delivered mess barely beta quality that contains Denuvo or some other shitware that had higher priority to work at launch than the game itself. Not to mention a day one patch the size of the entire install, login servers that can't handle the load, graphical glitches, and constant framerate drops.
That $30 game is $70 because it's a hot genre and other no name shops a fraction of the size sold a million copies at $30 so this exec's massive studio with its executive team's millions of combined man-hours could sell it for $150 and gamers would buy it because the reputation alone is worth $100 per copy according to them.
So, make good games for lower price, where the graphics is secondary, is the way to go? Who would've guessed! Thing is, it's easier for suits to push all the money into graphics, than attracting and keeping passioned developers and iterate on a good concept. Hire and fire is easier for them.
It's about time they fall on the nose. Give me mid sized games, for lower price and release good expansion DLC. That does reduce the risk for publisher and ultimately gives more control to players as well. But it might not hit the next sales world record and so on paper it looks worse to them.
Hearts in the right place but nVidia are the ones who set Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price, as they are the creator of the item (I think technically they're LSRP cuz they license the tech but same idea)
They just set it stupidly fucking high for a laugh
$70 games will go the way of the Dodo, not because $60 games will signal their demise, but because $80 games with seasonally expiring battlepasses and subscription based non-ownership models will.
What risk? FIFA, MADDEN etc get sequel after sequel, the only real risk is them trying to make shitty live service games to make a quick buck then inevitably giving up on it after it predictably fails.