Nintendo's unrealistic pricing for old-school platformers et al.

[forest-spirit]

happydolphin said:

forest-spirit said:
Shouldn't 3D platformers also be at a way lower price? They have been around for almost 20 years after all. Super Mario Galaxy followed the same formula as Super Mario 64. Shouldn't Galaxy be at $10 tops then?

Planetside 2 offers a deep FPS experience for the nice price of $0. Does that mean that $60 shooters are way overpriced?

The problem is that cutting-edge 3D games like Halo 4 or even high-production 3D games like Galaxy require a lot more effort, general rule, than 2D games.

I conceded that I considered SFIV a high-production game, but it's the exception to the rule imho. The game seems to have required a lot of work in terms of artistic detail, much more than NSMB. And the gameplay at least appears to require more fine-tuning in terms of balancing and timing and all that. I'm not an expert but it's my understanding of it.

Galaxy may require bigger teams then NSMB but compared to games like Halo 4 the team size is probably closer to NSMB so following your logic the Galaxy games are still way overpriced. And 2D games do require lots of effort if you want to make good ones. You don't just sit 5 minutes with a level editor to make a good stage for a 2D platformer. It takes time, especially if you want the gameplay, level and playstyle variation offered by NSMB.

 

SFIV requires a lot of fine-tuning but so does 2D platformers. Just look at speed runs. Something as simple as placing an enemy requires testing and tweaking.