Dulfite said:
For those complaining about prices, it's important to look at inflation
Source: https://techraptor.net/gaming/features/cost-of-gaming-since-1970s
In 1990 average game cost was $60. If you adjust for inflation that would be $121.60.
Super Metroid sold roughly 1.42 million copies at a value of $121.60 a piece, by today's standards. That would be a total of $172,672,000 revenue adjusting for inflation. We can't know profit as Nintendo isn't that specific with reporting data, so all we are left with to look at is revenue. To generate that same level of revenue now, at $60 each, they would need to sell 2,877,866 copies. They would basically have to sell twice as much as they did in 1994 with Super Metroid to generate the same level of revenue at $60 each, which is absurd by itself. Now, for those of you wanting the game to be priced at $40 each (a whopping $81.60 less in value than they sold Super Metroid for in 1994), they would have to sell 4,316,800 games just to have the same revenue generated as Super Metroid did. Now, what about development? Some estimates are that cost of development has gone up 200-300% since the early days of gaming, all while the price hasn't gone up hardly any. More digital sales offset costs that would have otherwise been spent on boxing/shipping/manufacturing, but that doesn't put much of a dent in the loss in revenue companies are making now by selling the same amounts as they did decades ago.
|
This is all true, but it should be self-evident that the market wasn't going to always have the same return on investment it once had, especially when said investment consisted mostly on churning out short arcade titles with artificial difficulty so kids wouldn't beat it in half an hour. I'd say Super Metroid itself was already an example, back in the early-to-mid-nineties, of a game that increased in quality and length (and development costs) in order to stand out as the market became more saturated and demanding.
I think when the arcade-like Saturn died while the PlayStation became dominant with the first "AAA" games such as FFVII etc. that kind of proved that was no going back to the early golden days of low-hanging fruits. And that, as we know, was the absolute norm until development tools and distribution costs fell enough for indie games to become a relevant thing, but you still can't build a platform around it.
On the flip side the market is much larger, so it's not all that bad.
