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.
Don’t forget distribution. It costs money to make a nice cartridge. It costs money to stamp a CD and put it in a pretty box. And that cost applies for every. single. copy.
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.
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.
For context, here’s what prices ran for NES games:
https://www.33rdsquare.com/how-much-did-the-nintendo-entertainment-system-cost-in-1986/
I’m going to adjust for inflation to 2024:
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
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:
Reasons why new games should be pricier:
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.
Don’t forget distribution. It costs money to make a nice cartridge. It costs money to stamp a CD and put it in a pretty box. And that cost applies for every. single. copy.
Now compare that to digital distribution…
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.
There was also a smaller market since video games were new. So higher costs, lower sales leads to higher prices.
You could argue that cloud servers are a cost like a cartridge. A stupid forced cost.
It’s a cost that wouldn’t be needed if they would let us host our own servers.
It’s so infuriating
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.
Compared to the market for games back then to now. Was the game industry bigger than movies and music combined?
Is gaming a niche now as it was back then?
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.