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I really cannot remember how much most of these games were upon their original releases. Does anyone know how much games cost from the early 1990's?
low rated
over 9000
Game prices here in Aus have pretty much stayed the same, maybe a increase in $10 for the first couple of months on AAA titles.
Console games have risen to absurd amounts for big name releases, almost double in some cases from the 1980-90s.
Well, at least here in Finland it is the same as in Aus. I just found a receipt from one of my game boxes from mid 90s. It would indicate that the price was 300 Finnish Marks which translates to something like 50 € (which is the price today).
Although I'm not a console gamer myself, I too am of an impression that the prices for console games have risen in Finland as well (can someove confirm this?).
If so, then why is that? Would it be possible for us to address that question without this turning out a shouting match about gamedevolepers being sonofabitches? Well let's try, shall we... I'll open this up a little bit more.
Many game developers claim that PC piracy has increased tremendously while console piracy has remained non-existing. Would this not result in higher prices for PC Games to conpensate for potential losses? Or is the general trend that you have to produce both a PC and a console version of the same game and overprice the console game to compensate for losses on the PC side? And if so, why is it that some companies still manage to get their share by only producing PC titles?
I certainly do not have all the answers to those questions, but it would be nice if someone would have some inside info (or a well justified oppinion) for us to chew on.
Post edited January 03, 2009 by Zer0
nah developers are fine, it's PUBLISHERS who are sons of bitches...
Back in the extremely old days when C64 games came on tape, kmart used to charge au$20-30 each for games (which had sat out on the back loading dock in the summer heat of australia and had a 50% failure rate). That was pretty damned expensive at the time, 3 weeks worth of pocket money and I think that'd probably be fairly consistent with modern prices (unless kids are getting too much pocket money, spoiled whippersnappers)
I have no idea what UK prices used to be, except I think they've maybe got slightly lower over the past 10 years.
Before that I lived in the middle east, and they sold pirated copies on the shelf (in badly photocopied boxes!). You couldn't find real copies without being in the capital and paying a premium. That was possibly since the real copies had to be imported from farther away.
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Aliasalpha: nah developers are fine, it's PUBLISHERS who are sons of bitches...

Ah well, wrong word then... English not being my first language and all but... I guess we can drop that discussion anyhow.
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PieceMaker42: I really cannot remember how much most of these games were upon their original releases. Does anyone know how much games cost from the early 1990's?

Ah HA! I knew my extensive collection of Amiga Format Magazines would come to use one day!
I have issue 33 here, which lists most titles around the £10 to £15 mark. With inflation, I would roughly read that £17 - £23.
Unless you want a disk drive, that will set you back £54.99 or 1 Meg expansion for your A500, which is a cool £49.99
I had a WAY cooler 1MB expansion for my amiga, it supported up to 8MB! Only came with the additional 512KB but I had the OPTION to take it all the way up by manually pushing chips into the sockets mounted on the PCB (none of this modern DIMM rubbish). Never found any additional chips for it though.
Duke Nukem 1 cost $15 per episode, $30 for all the episodes + a hint/tips guide. Shipping was $3.
In Spain, 1990's games like Duke Nukem, Monkey Island or Baldur's Gate cost around 7.000 pesetas (42€). Then we got Diablo, which was almost 50€.
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PoSSeSSeDCoW: Duke Nukem 1 cost $15 per episode, $30 for all the episodes + a hint/tips guide. Shipping was $3.

Man, those were the days eh...
I remember that here in Slovakia back in 1997 I got Z for ~1200 SKK (40€)Earth 2140 for ~1100 SKK (36€), which is plus minus the same as now. I don't remember any prices before that time (I was too young to remember :P)
In the UK, prices for new retail PC games were pretty rigidly at £30. Console games were about the same, or £10 more, depending on the system. Budget price games were about half the cost.
Back then £1 = $2.
I swear, if Modern Warfare 2 manages to raise the average PC price to $60, I will not be a happy camper, and neither will the millions of PC gamers...