You know, like McDowells. I don't actually care what color my shells are. There are principals involved. Principalities!
this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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this argument is so fucking dumb
Volume of video game sales has changed monstrously over the years as it moved from a niche hobby to mainstream
SNES Mario kart - 8.76 million copies sold worldwide Switch Mario kart 8 - 67.34 million copies sold world wide.
SNES mario kart (inflation adjusted) earnings - 1,095,000,000 Switch Mario kart earnings - 5,252,520,000
Game dev budgets have obviously exploded in that time and nintendo doesn’t disclose their budgets but on average its estimated snes titles got about 1-2 million and switch/wii u titles got 30ish million. That’s a sizable increase in development that wildly outpaces inflation, for sure, but their earnings obviously did too.
Also, people tend not to account for manufacturing drops. Cost to produce dropped dramatically when things moved from cartridges to optical formats. Dropped somewhat in the move to digital distribution, though not as much as you might think.
Removing significant printed instruction manuals helped, too. Printing has gotten really expensive over the last 30 years. Falcon 4.0 came with a spiral bound book written by an actual F-16 pilot, and it was basically an F-16 flight manual. Nobody expects that to ever happen again. Not with a base game, anyway. That game was about $53 at launch (going by the "Chips and Bits" ad toward the back of this old CGW magazine).
There's a good $20-30 in reduced production costs that were never directly passed on to customers.
Snes carts were $20-60 not including license fees without the game. They also had a 100% markup at retail. Small 8GB switch carts are about $10 with $12, including licensing, and have a 40% markup. The take home for a publisher was $2-5 for snes and should be $18 for a switch game on the small cart on $60 at retail. Digital take home is $40. Comparing the take home price for the consumer is disingenuous. It is especially bad when we are not comparing to Gameboy and includes optical media when it is essentially free with the box.
The publishers are getting a minimum 9x more take home now on the expensive switch carts and licensing. Thr wiiu and ps4 were more like 11-12x with the ps5 and digital switch games even more. Those far outback inflation and even outback the increase in dev costs most of the time.
Because they... sold more copies?
yes obviously
your pricing is higher when volume of sales is lower because you have to cover overheads and still make a profit.
When volume is significantly higher the pricing can be lower. You can still cover your overheads because even though you make less money per unit, you overall still can make the same amount (or in this case, 5x as much) because of the increased sales volume
The “need to increase prices” is motivated by several factors like a weak yen and remaining fear from the commercial failure of the Wii U but it’s primarily greed and hostility to consumers. Mario kart is the most successful nintendo game so it is not fair to use it solely as the metric but it is also not as if their other games all suffer and that they don’t make shitloads of cash; 11 billion last year and 12 billion the year before.
And those numbers don’t include companies that are commonly associated with by divested from nintendo like the Pokémon company, which made another 1.9 billion on top of that last year. And unlike many western AAA developers their development costs appear to be far more controlled, with estimates of 20-30 million per game vs something like Spider-Man 2 for the ps5, which was over 10x that at 315 million. According to the leaks the first Spider-Man game cost over 100 million to make and made 827 million back.