Games were more expensive in the past (proof inside)

I was just going through some old games from 1990 and what do you know. i found a little catalog with tons of games ranging from as little as 14.99 to OH MY GOSH $59.99 LORDY LORDY THE PRICES ARE TO DAMN HIGH!

If you were to calculate for inflation from 1990 to now we would be paying over $100 just for one NEW game. i for one am glad to be spending $60 on a new video game when you look at it like this.

minimum 512K required

vely expensive yar.

I remember SNES games being £50 odd. That's more than we spend now in the UK really. There was even a Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo in a metal case I remember being £60.

The audience is bigger, the games are more generic, you don't 'own' them anymore when you buy them, most are broken and unfinished when you buy them. What do you mean they are cheap.
When you take so many steps back you don't go look at the past and say "hey they had it way worse", you try to move forward not back in the past.
My dad's car broke down he's not going to say "well whatever in the past people had to run everywhere". He fixes it because it won't do.

Games seem reasonably good value to me. If I don't think it's worth full asking price then I just wait for a drop. Can't see that it's really an issue myself.

I don't remember prices of games when i was a toddler-pre-teen. Most of my games were bought for me but i do remember buying 10 games for my ps1 for $10. Only later did i realise this was piracy.

Yes they were. But things were different back in them days - games were different (more so if we're talking console games) and gamers were different; niche market/geek/luxury products not designed for the all consuming gamer of today. Gaming had a different role in the lives of most people back then - the price merely reflected it's position (a comparatively obscure one) in the entertainment world.

Yes, games are relatively cheap when comparing inflation-adjusted prices. However, wages have not kept pace with inflation, skewing the relative affordability.

Gaming, particularly PC gaming, was a niche market back then.

Everything was more expensive in the past considering inflation

what about ... petrol?

Back in my day you could buy a sack o' cabbages for a penny.

Yessir. Cook 'em all in one big pot. Dat'd feed me, you, ma, pa, and the young'ins for a week, and at the end o' the week you'd take the pot o' water and clean yer linens in it.

Yessir. Those were the days.

I remember when a bottle of coke was 1 cent. Now if I want a Coke I need a mortgage extension every time.

Yes Nintendo use to milk us, then Sony came along and changed all that. Thank you Sony. :P

I certainly remember some SNES games being priced exorbitantly high. PC games too, The 7th Guest; needed a $500 CD-Rom drive (price at the time).

I can understand why console cartridges were so expensive, since cartridges cost a lot to manufacture, but why would computer floppy disks be so expensive back then?

I remember buying NBA jam as a kid for my mega drive for $120 AUD.

Gaming is super cheap today, except for broke ass uni students, children and bums.

I remember buying SUPER STREET FIGHTER FOR Sega for 60 and killer instinct for SNES for 55.00 but NBA LIVE 95 was 65.00 yes games always been expensive Most of these youngins wasn't buying there own games and probably still not lol

Games from what I can roughly remember here in the UK they are roughly the same price (I'll look in some of my old PSX and PS2 Mags tomorrow frkm 97 upwards). I remember paying £50 Back in tbe day for games like Sonic 3 on Mega Drive, I ppaid £50 for RE2 on the PSX, When RE0 was released on the GC I vividly remember paying between the 45 / 50 Mark. I purchased a couple Games full price this gen like CoDBO2, Monster Hunter Tri, Mario Kart in the same ball park as those of previous gens in the price department but this does not include DLC on some games which I paid for on some games.

I mainly use to purchase pre owned games as a Kid though and it was a rare treat to haave a new game.

The main thing which has gone up quite alot is Handheld games. I think the most I paid was for RE Revelations which was 45 Poun, FE A was 35. The most I paid for a game last gen was 30 which was FFTA2 but could not put a figure on games like Pokemon on the GB.

Let's not forget the development costs of games is like a hundred times higher now than back then. Yet they're cheaper for us to buy and include way content & length than the olden days.

The 1990's have been owned.

Games are very reasonable value compared to some other forms of entertainment that's true.

I used to buy games on the mega drive for £39.99, sometimes they were more than this and they scarcely came down in price. Last gen the price for a brand new game was very similar and when you take into account inflation and development costs I can totally understand why they want to introduce DLC. I might not like it but we're certainly getting more for our money than we used to. PC budget titles used to be £10 on white label in GAME and these days, you can pick up any game on steam for next to nothing if you wait long enough.

At the same time, manufacturing costs have also dropped a hundred-fold. For example, to manufacture a single N64 cartridge with packaging, it would have cost some $15-35 each (or around $25-50 in today's money), so they had to sell each one expensive in order to make a profit.

To put this into perspective, if each of the 7.6 million Ocarina of Time cartridges/packages sold cost about $25 each to manufacture, that would be $190 million in 1998 money, or $272 million in today's money, more expensive to manufacture than even GTA V's entire development & marketing budget...

Nowadays, it's very cheap to manufacture a DVD or Blu-Ray, while it costs next to nothing to distribute games online. That's why companies can now afford to increase development costs, since they no longer need to worry about manufacturing costs.

@hofuldig: Definitely agree with you on that one. I've been gaming since the Atari 2600 days, and here in Canada games today are overall cheaper as well. Most titles cost 59.99$ today, they often offer more content than your 2D games from the 80's and 90's did, as well as offering a potential for infinite replay value via an online component. Imagine for instance if you could have played SSF2 Turbo online with the SNES. I remember NES & SNES games costing 79.99$ back in the day. I clearly recall paying that for Batman Returns on the SNES, which after taxes came out to about 92$. Dragon Warrior 2 was also a very expensive game but I cannot remember exactly how much I paid. It was so cool when Nintendo Power had a subscription promotion that gave you Dragon Warrior 1 for free......that was unheard of at the time, and it pretty much introduced me to RPGs.

of course, every once in a while we see an article we see an article comparing older consoles with current ones and showing their prices adjusted to current inflation, latest being...

Haha, yep. Sometimes when I go through my old comics from the '90s, I always remember how damn expensive some games where. Some shit on there was $70 for a single cartridge.