Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

GalacticDystopia t1_jeal2j5 wrote

Yeah, people these days seems to forget that, when you factor inflation, games are much cheaper these days than they used to be.

Mostly because cartridges were manufactured ROM chips in and of themselves, and any special co-processors or extra hardware needed to run the game beyond what the console was capable of had to be ran from the cartridge.

The best examples of this were the SuperFX chip on SNES and the Virtua Processor for Genesis. These allowed polygonal 3D games like Starfox and Virtua Racing to run on consoles that were never designed to run 3D anything. I remember Virtua Racing especially was an expensive game and the cartridge itself got really hot from the 3D processing workload it ran.

The Phantasy Star games were expensive due to just being much larger than a normal Genesis game, thus requiring extra large ROM chips and reliable save memory.

If I'm being honest, given the complexity of games nowadays, I'm surprised AAA games aren't $100 each.

If you want some real sticker shock, NEO-GEO cartridges were insanely huge and cost about $200 each in 1993. In today's money, that's $416.

Imagine spending 80% the value of a PS5 on every single game...

2

OlTommyBombadil t1_jebkaai wrote

Games didn’t have microtransactions back then, nor did they have a bunch of DLCs for up to like $40. They are well over $100 if you factor in all the content. And that also doesn’t include the preorder stuff.

If you want all of a game, it is well over $100. Sometimes closer to $200. Sometimes more than that.

The eras aren’t comparable. I hate posts that say stuff like “we should be happy they aren’t more.” That’s horse shit. They’re making billions of dollars, the games are no longer made for gamers as much as they are shareholders. Games should be less if they’re going to nickel and dime customers at every opportunity. But they just went up in price. There is absolutely no defense of what they’re doing now and I’m tired of reading defenses of what they’re doing now.

−2

GalacticDystopia t1_jeblh4b wrote

I never said they should be more. And I'm not defending what they're doing. I was more providing info with a tinge of personal thoughts.

Youre doing that thing that Redditors do when they read something they have a knee-jerk disagreement with and go off on a half-cocked reply. Don't do that.

2