What's your point chuds? Crying to go back to a Steam Deck which sells for the same price? Kek
SNES GAMES WERE SOLD FOR 89$
These are Canadian prices. In America they were $60 but many games were $49.99 or less. Still way more expensive accounting for inflation. A large part of why prices got cheaper after the 90's was the rise of disc based games because its so much cheaper to manufacture a cd or dvd than a cartridge.
That's why kids would get 1 game a year and rent the rest
Who makes these threads? Are Apus being paid to shill with inflated catalogs and canadian prices, countries with high tariffs?
Next thing you disingenuous fags are going to start using Brazillian prices to justify high prices.
false, MK was sold 70$. Take that amount with inflation is still higher than than the 89$.
electronics boutique US catalog of 1991 had a lot of $70 games for SNES and genesis.
And Neo geo games were all $200+ each.
Exactly.. so why are we upset?
NEO-GEO games were sold 120$-180$ at the time and nobody complained. Hell, nobody complained back then. People had money.
The biggest difference back then was people mostly rented games, and a game was only bought for a birthday or christmas. Most people owned only 3-5 games over the life of a 16 bit console. Video stores were responsible for 80-90% of all console games sold in north America at the time. It was rare for a game not bundled with hardware to sell over 1 million copies.
Yes, they were expensive because the hardware in the cart were expensive and publishers passed that cost onto consumers. Once optical medium was adopted game prices dropped. What's the excuse for Switch 2 digital games costing $80 other than greed?
How much is that with inflation?
the $ also bought a lot more back then
if anything, games should be cheaper than $60
Yea it was the ROM chips stself that cost so much. PC games at the same time were often only $40, compared to $60-$70 for a console RPG or other large game.
Why was games different prices? All games are sold at the same price now
Because carts with more storage cost more to manufacture. OP is being disingenuous, these games were expensive due to carts being expensive.
Neo Geo was a luxury console that tried to do the unthinkable at the time: have an absolute 1:1 Arcade experience at home, no compromise, the game cartridges were just as luxurious, being pretty much a slightly different package of the full blown Neo Geo cabinet cartridges.
Average wages have never caught up with inflation and price gauging
Digital distribution is dominant, has significantly cut costs of game distribution
More people are buying games than ever before, meaning significantly higher profit margins
Games are monetized in several ways, often with predatory practices
Unfinished and buggy releases have become the norm, even after numerous and lengthy delays
Every console platform owner requires mandatory subscriptions to access non-F2P games
To some extend that is true, but for the target audience of games its more of a problem bakc then.
Minimum wage 1990: $3.75
Hours of tax-free work required to buy a $70 game: 18.6 hours.
That is almost a half weeks wage more or less, or a full week of part time job for a student.
West coast mimimum wage today: $16.50/hr
hours of work to buy an $80 game: 4.8 hours
That is now a half days wage at a part time job. Some states have a much lower cost of living and only a $12.hr or so wage, but you can still buy a game on less than a days pay.
And Neo geo games were all $200+ each.
There was a very good reason for that, and you're conveniently leaving that out.
Yeah and my parent's rent was $300 a month back then. Fuck off.
chuds
Everyone is pissed about it.
Markets are corrected by behavior.
Crabs and Lobsters were considered a low class food at one point and were loser coded.
They are now a high priced item.
Culture created a demand for high performance high graphics games that drove up development coat while decreasing the cost of distribution and physical shipping.
The marginal increase relative to the cost of everything else isn’t terrible.
AI can make gaming very affordable… but it’s a matter of what the community and culture values more and values most.
Everything can’t be free and accessible to everyone, and also be the best Gary on of those things possible.
We have to make a concession somewhere.
I'd rather have every single game in that pic over the entirety of the Switch 1 + 2 library
That's my point, I guess
AI can make gaming very affordable
You're making the mistake that game developers are going to pass those savings onto the consumers when shareholders won't let them even if they wanted to.
Are wages adjusted to inflation?
Yes. Jeet shilling has become quite obvious.
inflation wasn't out of control back then
I WANT TO PAY MORE YES I WILL DEFEND MY RIGHT TO PAY MORE FOR PRODUCT
What the fuck is wrong with these people
Jannies delete this
My SNES came with Killer Instinct and I only owned 5 games throughout the SNES life. Rented the rest. Rentals would be 100% the answer to higher game costs but most companies don't want to rent out the games anymore. Even a demo that is a cool 20% of the game would probably help since you can see if you like something enough to buy it.
Double False, these are Toys R Us prices, who hiked up the prices on all their toys and games.
Brown hands typed this post.
toys r us was a rip off no matter whatever location you went to
not surprisingly that is 90% of the archived images shared here
I DON'T CARE THAT IT'S THE SAME AS BEFORE, I WON'T WANT TO PAY MORE FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER
Go into the store the day after release
Someone has already sold off their copy of [new game]
Get the game $10 off instead of full price
To be fair this only happened to me twice
So, when are we going to admit Xbox is the best company in terms of giving their players value?
-cheapest console ($299 msrp)
-cheapest controller (best one too)
-xbox game pass
-game saves/Some purchases transfer to PC
What is left out? It was a more expensive console but it was sold alongside other consoles at EB, and ran the same magazine ads as nintendo and sega. It just cost more.
but it was arcade hardware
Genesis was based on system 16 arcade hardware, using a 68000 CPU same as the neo geo. Just a few years older and a lot less ram.
Genesis 68000 cpu ran at 7.6mhz and the neo geo 68000 was 12mhz.
A 3 year difference in hardware was pretty drastic back then.
To be fair thats basically what these streaming services are for the big games. Remember that renting games used to be like $5 for two days or $7 for like a week.
Oh, you want to play Assassins Creed Shadows? You 'rent' ubisoft + for $15 and get it for 4 weeks, and you also get access to the rest of the ubislop inventory. You want to play Call of Duty? $10 to $20 depending on game pass tier, and you also get access to every first party xbox game ever as well as a good variety of third parties.
The only 70 dollar game there is Phantasy Star III, which was infamously expensive because it used the largest memory chip SEGA could get their hands on.
Neo-Geo "consoles" were intended to be high-end rental products for hotels. I didn't know a single person who owned a Neo-Geo.
This. I only owned four Genesis games.
Sonic 2
X-men
Ecco the Dolphin
The Ex-Mutants
The last one, I'd wanted to get Phantasy Star II or III but when I went to Toys R Us they didn't have any. My mom insisted I get my gift that day and it had the most interesting box back.
Everything else for the Genesis I rented, including games I really loved like General Chaos, Buck Rogers, and Beyond Oasis.
AI can make gaming very affordable…
They LITERALLY SAID THIS ABOUT DIGITAL GAMES, you fucking retard. Look where we are now.
Specifically using west coast minimum wage.
This is disingenous when the deadbeat shithole states still use the Federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Washington minimum wage in 1990 was $4.25. Also, a greater percentage of your salary was available for luxuries since food and housing costs were lower.
$80 in 1990's
nintendium cartridge, pcb with game specific enhancement chips, full color manual, resale value grows over time
$80 in 2025
you are now allowed to download the game (until your account is banned or nintendo shuts off the server)
These are US prices.
PS - i specifically remember games like FF6 and Chrono Trigger and SF2 costing way more than $60US
The only 70 dollar game there is Phantasy Star III,
Only game on that page yea. but other pages had $70 games too. In 1991 it was typically the larger games that cost more, understandably.
By 1994 many new releases were hitting $70.
What is left out?
NTA but you left out the fact that the ROM sizes were orders of magnitude larger than those seen in SNES/Genesis games.
And it was ROM size that determined the price of 16bit games.
Neogeo prices do not count in this argument. Comparing them with SNES/MD is nuts/
that fucking phantasy star IV...
final fantasy legend 3
80 dollars for a gameboy game? I would've killed a man if I got this game instead.
yeah but those games were good though and novel ips
The biggest difference back then was people mostly rented games
No, you rented games because you were 9 years old.
Do you think everyone on the planet was your age?
No - People with jobs and incomes played video games, even back then. And they bought games all the time.
Use your head man, come on.
Depended on the game and where you got them. Smaller B&M charged a premium, and a couple of carts were high priced (such as Stunt Race FX and Daytona USA)
i was a kid and i rented games so that must mean everyone else on the planet was a kid also and nobody had jobs and bought games ever
What?
Yeah that much for such a mediocre game is criminal.
Blockbuster had a wall of genesis and SNES games. Much like you rarely bought a VHS tape in 1991, you didnt buy games either unless it was something special. Older gamers rented too, it would be weird not to, when such a resource was available.
The games people bought back then were the sports games, SF2, stuff like that. Games with very long replay value. Its the reasons sports games flood all used game shops to the point they dont even buy them, and every yard sale is just EA sports and ATV/Skateboard games. You buy sports games, and you rent shoot-em-up or side scrolling action titles.
That cheapest selection to trick grandma into disappointing kids on Christmas.
Not him, I was in highschool in the 16 bit era and sold christmas trees for extra cash (bought a sega CD). Even then I only owned 4 games for sega CD and 3 for the genesis, excluding anything bundled with them. For SNES I only owned FF2,3 and chrono trigger, plus SMW.
My grandma bought me Tetris Attack once. My older brother jumped in and saved my ass, got her to trade it in for Kirby Dreamland 2 instead.