Remember when videogames used to be expensive?
 

After posting in another thread and touching on this lightly, I had a good laugh.

Most people nowadays refuse to pay anymore than $50 for a video game and some absoloutly refuse to pay no more than $30. Thinking back to my teenage years, I remember SNES games (FF, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger) retailing for $100. I beleive Final Fantasy 3 and Secret of Mana were about $119.99 CDN.

I realize that cd/dvd media is much more cost efficient (read:cheaper) to develop than cartridge based games but just wondered if people complained as much back then.

PS. I am still debating to drop about $70-80 US on Lunar 2 for the PS1. That's what used copies seem to be going for on Ebay.

The most I ever paid for a game was $70 plus tax for Street Fighter II Champion Edition way back in the early 90's. It had just come out for the Super NES, and Toys R Us had one copy left. If I recall, it was a hit and everyone and their mother wanted it. I was about 11-12 years old and an arcade freak, so I just had to have it :lol:

The funny thing is I barely played the game after I got it.

I paid $70 for Guitar Hero, too, but that's the standard going price.

I remember paying $79.99 for Shadows of the Empire for N64. That was worth it. :rolleyes:

I remember paying (or rather my parents paying) $70 for Street Fighter II CE too. Considering the technology today, I consider $50 more than fair for most games, especially considering how much games used to cost (adjusted for inflation)

Killer Instinct was another $60-70 snes game.

$50 is a fair price, but I'm so used to seeing games drop so quickly in price I just as soon wait.

Of course, costs have risen elsewhere: consoles, controllers, memory cards, etc. Not to mention the collective raping on the horizon if microtransactions gain traction.

I remember paying $70 for some Genesis and SNES games. I still have the price tag on Strider for Genesis for $69.99.

I'm really starting to feel tired of console gaming, but I'm moving more and more to handheld gaming. So why I don't really care that much about any of the three new consoles here now with the 360 and on the way next year I am pretty excited about the handheld titles on the way.

I know some say the $59.99 price of Xbox 360 isn't a big deal because N64 and Genesis titles were that expensive, however, it is a big deal. The $59.99 prices on games killed most of my interest in the N64 and I never owned more than 20 titles in the entire life of the N64. I greatly prefered picking up $39.99 titles on the playstation.

With this next generation high game and console prices are definitely going to keep me from investing in new hardware that really isn't going to be that big of an upgrade without an HDTV to show it off on.

The most I ever paid for a video game was $125 for an import version of Street Fighter II CE for the Turbo Grafx. Oh and another $50 to get a converter to play it on my Turbo Express. That was back in 1993.

I remember shelling out over $70 to get Final Fantasy III(VI), Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana. At the time it was money well spent becuase of the number of hours I got out of those games. :)

Console games ARE too expensive these days. You know they can sell them cheaper cause of all the platinum/classic titles that come out 6 months after the games inital release. Half Life 2 is now half the price it used to be and my computer still isn't fast enough to run it.
Best to wait until there is more competition on the market and then you will see game/console prices drop.

I remember paying $74.99 for Strider on Genesis. :(

I'm more against (practically) every game coming out at a $50+ price point. Some games deserve to cost $70+, but some aren't worth the disc they are put on.

Willingly paying $50 for every title that comes out only supports bad/mediocre games continuing to be priced at that level upon initial release.

I will continue to buy some games at their full price, but most aren't worth it.

I swear my friend paid $85 for Strider for the Genesis, but I think that was at KB Toys :)

I rarely buy games anymore. In fact, I sold most of them. I only play GTA San Andreas and NBA Live 2006. I think I have 5 games total now.

:lol: Serious?

Yup.

This particular friend used to get his year's allowance at one time, in an effort to teach him to manage his money.

All it really did was allowed us to buy some crazy expensive things when we were kids. On top of the video game purchases, we used to go to the arcade and purchase "birthday parties" so we'd split like 200 tokens between us and go nuts for a few hours. Good times :)

Not only was the Sega 32X a total crock, but $70 a game was just nuts.

Same here. totally worth it, I remember reading about them being the biggest in size ever (I think they were 32 Meg carts), which probably added to the cost. Nowdays with game prices dropping so fast, there are few games I buy at full price (with the exception of DS games which are very reasonably priced). The artificial $10 markup Microsoft is doing with their 360 games isn't a good sign :(, hopefully that won't be a trend.

Spent $70 for Super Return of the Jedi for SNES. Loved it though, and it completed my Super Star Wars trilogy. :)

I have probably 200 games, I haven't paid over $30 each for any of them

It's not entirely artificial. While the actual medium costs much, much less, development costs these days have gone up quite a bit.

I was so young when we got our NES back in the 80s I had no idea how much games cost. If they were indeed so expensive, no wonder we always rented. I remember getting Mike Tyson's Punchout, and we had each of the Mario games, but we rented just about everything else.

SO, to answer the question, no I don't remember games being expensive. TO me, $50 is expensive, but I can understand teh cost.

I'm hoping the $60 price tag is just Microsoft making it appear as if the 360 is better than the current generation since it's more money and it's trying to make the most of the window it has before Sony and Nintendo strike. It's true that games do cost more to produce these days, but do you really think it warrants the price hike? I'm not so sure it does. The next generation is not such a giant leap as say, 16-BIT to 32-BIT. Next generation games appear to be very similar to the current crop of games but with slightly imporved A/V. Maybe that's because it's still early, but how much better is the next generation of games going to be if they're still pumping out sequels and the same genres. I remember console games before the 'crash' were also $50 and that was twenty years ago. I think once the PS3 is released Microsoft will make the 360 more appealing by not only lowering the price of the consoles but of the software as well. As far as the expensive cartridges were concerned I think some of the reasons for thier high price were the low demand of import RPGs, the cost of translating RPGs, many of the $50+ games had special chips (i.e. StarFox and Virtua Racing) or were larger than your average cart (i.e. Strider was 8 Megs compared to the usual 4 Meg Genesis cart). The best part about gaming today is that games drop so fast in prices. Back in the cart days you basically had to wait until the system was defunct to get $20 games.

I always wait until the next gen systems start to appear and pricing bottoms on the last one. For instance,

I jumped on the ps2 once it had been out a while, then picked up a used console and all the games I really wanted to play at one time, which costs a LOT less than getting things as they are released.

Just today I stopped by EBgames and picked up a used gamecube console, an extra controller, memory card, and an svideo cable set along with the top 10 games for the system, and the total damage to the pocketboot was $170.00!

Now thats called saving some serious coin right there :)
The other benefit to this, you start off with a complete setup, and have all the best games at your fingertips.

I think I paid $80 for Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System. I did get it in a department store (A & S for you East-Coasters, that is how long ago this was).

I do understand that development costs have gone up, but I'd have to disagree. I don't believe for a second that it costs a premium to make an x-box 360 game when Sony is able to make high production games like Shadow of the Colossus and start them at $40, and every other game is $50.