Quote:
Originally Posted by mdubz
It was also a lot more expensive to manufacture games on cartridges back then, compared to a cheap disc today. Especially most of the games you listed, which required a higher-end cartridge with more memory.
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It is more expensive to develop/publish/market games today than it was back then. Even taking that into consideration, alongside inflation - we're paying the same price for games today as we were 20 years ago (ignore the weak Canadian dollar).
Final Fantasy VII, the most expensive game ever when it was released, had a development budget of $45 million.
GTA V's development budget was $140 million.
The cost of manufacturing an SNES cart was roughly $12-$15. After shelling out that money for manufacturing, the costs were done.
The cost of manufacturing a modern blu-ray game is around $2 a disc. However, the cost AFTER manufacturing that disc goes on...and on...and on. Online server management/back-end support, patches to fix bugs, updates to re-balance gameplay, storage and bandwidth costs associated with all of this. So the gap between the cost of releasing a cartridge vs. releasing and supporting a modern game are not that different.
As mentioned earlier as well - thanks to digital distribution and big box retailers like Amazon, if you think the game is too expensive at launch, wait a few months and get it for half the price.