Why did you edit in "Et al" into the title? I don't get it. (Maybe it was already there, I didn't notice, though.)

I'm sorry I misread your post. You can quote me by the way and refer to me in the 2nd person too, if that's not too much to ask.

So, to your point, it's my understanding that if the makers of GTA IV offered it at 140$ they would go bankrupt. The reason is that at that price the volume would be so low that nobody would buy it.

So... to do business, they have to take the cut, bite the bullet and hope to make money. Well, priced at 50-60$ it is possible for them to make money, and they have.

The case I gave was the exact opposite. You have game that are not under-priced, but overpriced. It is a very different conversation I hope that's something that makes sense to you.

Because some people were being smart and saying "those are not all platformers" and it was totally unimportant to the point I was trying to make in OP. So I fixed it.

Is that ok?

It could lower your revenue. We wouldn't know until it's done right, right?.

In the meantime you have happier customers, and happier customers tell more of their friends, who end up buying more Nintendo games.

People still buy it at full price. You don't like it, but you buy a Nintendo console for these games.

It's also not just platformers, it's any big budget Nintendo game. Zelda and Smash Bros also sell for near full price, or full price.

OK, but I don't get what it means. Like, what does "Et al" actually mean?

Why'd you ask me if that was OK? It's your thread!

That's an awfully big gamble, taking a business model that is working really well and changing it becuase it "might" make more revenue, if it doesn't it would be disasterous.  It's actually a stupid gamble depending on how many more copies you would have to unload to surpass your previous revenue.

Do you consider them of similar effort? If so I don't know what to tell you. Clearly Mario Galaxy is a higher-production game than Epic Mickey.

Otherwise you wouldn't have made this post I presume. You're trying to prove by contradiction but it's backfiring because you're playing on a false premice, which ironically is part of your tactic.

So you consider all Nintendo games to be of similar budget? Sorry if I don't understand you correctly but NSMB, Wii Sports, Wii Play, Mario 3D, Zelda 3D, Smash Bros, are they all on the same playing field? Because if so I could understand but I starkly disagree on it. And I don't think the market agrees with that either. The mass-market may be a little unknowledgeable but they aren't totally oblivious.

I asked because I can't read tone easily off of written word and I presumed you were being inquisitive, as in suspecting I made a late change in logic, which I didn't.

But to clarify "et al" means "and the others", from latin. 

Sometimes if you don't know something like that, try google. Most things it knows.

I understand, but it is also a big gamble to price games at a traditional $ number, games that have likely lost their novelty and may have a discovered "cheap" value in the greater market after experiencing the past entries, allthewhile new games are emerging in the market at a very low price with novel concepts that people are craving (I believe, especially after the Wii era).

Gamble versus gamble, I'd go with lower price.

In the example I've described, I honestly don't believe a $10 cut on NSMBW would have brought an extra 5 million copies. But to further the example, the games you've listed in your OP don't go over $15 which you seem to suggest is the reasonable price for 2D platformers, at that price Nintendo would need a 110% attach rate for NSMBW to have a similar revenue from the game.

So if Retro Studios had a budget of $15 million to make DKCR, and it took 2 1/2 years with a team of 50+ people, they should only price it at $10 instead of $50 because the camera is programmed at a fixed perspective from the side of the level and not from over the shoulder?  I don't understand your logic at all.

Do Mario Kart games have less value because they're extremely short games to complete and require relatively little money to develop?  I've gotten hundreds of hours of enjoyment with my friends playing Mario Kart Double Dash than I get with Jak II or Kingdom Hearts, where I play it for 30-35 hours and then when I've finished the game I never touch it again.  That's more than $1 an hour to play a single-player game with a story, versus a fraction of 1 cent per hour to play Double Dash for years after it comes out.  Is that not value in your eyes?