Super Mario Bros. 3 was released as a fully finished product that I actually own a physical copy of.

Borderlands 4, will probably be a quarter finished when it released, filled with all kinds of apologies, possibly have micro transactions, and will likely be able to be taken out of my library at some point as it's digital only.

The value is not the same.

you can’t use straight 1:1 inflation to infer what the contemporary cost should be of digital products like video games, movies, tv shows, music etc. There is no physical asset to tie the individual product value to. There are of course production costs, but those are the same whether you make 50 copies or 50 million.

The reason inflation hasn’t hit video game prices is because the video game market has grown exponentially since the 90s. They make more money by selling low margin at higher volume, compared to high margin and low volume. It’s all about maximizing that total profit, not individual sales.

Publishers can try to charge more, but it’ll be up to consumers if that actually gets them any more money overall. only time will tell.

Nah. I keep seeing this argument and I really disagree with it. It's actually really simple economics; we don't need to calculate inflation into this. If I think the price of something is too high (especially something I don't need to survive), I don't buy it. Companies can cry all they want, in the end I don't care.

Except the production costs have also gone down. The development itself is easier thanks to better tooling and developers no longer require putting out physical media (which used to be a pretty significant part of cost).

And there's no excuse for $80 when Clair Obscur released at $50 and is one of the best games released this year. I seriously doubt BL4 will be $30 more impressive than Clair Obscur. How about studio heads do their job and streamline their production process to make better products for lower costs instead of offloading their bloat onto the customers.

Counterpoint for the general case: games also have a much larger playerbase these days and manufacturing of cartridges and components can be done at much greater economies of scale. In many cases, there is no physical media manufacturing cost to a lot of the sales.

For the specific point: Gearbox/Take2 have lost all faith from me so, while I don't generally mind some games being in that price range, there's zero chance pitchford and his ilk are getting that from me.

The industry is completely different now. The original was made in the 80s when programmers were hard to find and it took 10 of them 2 years and a million dollars to make. Then physical cartridges needed to be made and distributed that only ran on specialized hardware that also needed to be made and distributed. It selling for the equivalent of $180 could be justified since it was niche technology. There's a reason Biggie Smalls brags about owning a Super Nintendo and a Sega Genesis in a rap song. That shit was expensive even in 1994.

Today, someone can make Super Mario Bros 3 in a month after watching some game dev tutorials on YouTube, upload the .exe to Steam, and sell limitless copies to anyone who owns a computer. Selling it for $180 would be ridiculous. There's no reason tech today should cost the exact same as it did in the 80s.

I'm not sure where you're numbers are coming from, but the inflation calculator I found through Google says that $59 in 1992 is more like $135 today. That's still a significant increase of course, although I wonder how much publishers benefit from not needing as much physical distribution. After the initial investment selling digital keys on a third-party storefront like Steam should be pure profit, no?

1992 was a very different time with very different market conditions and consumer behaviour for video games. Games used to have a much greater perceived entertainment value, despite their relatively small development budgets compared with today. They were also entirely physical media and renting was still a very common way to play them. From what I remember, it wasn't the most financially accessible hobby either. Most of my friends growing up didn't have permanent access to their own gaming console and not everyone that did had all the latest games. Nowadays, the gaming market is completely saturated with high quality titles, most of which are fairly cheap as well if you don't buy them on release.

In any case: Super Mario Bros 3 came out in 1988 and released 1990 and 1991 for the US and Europe respectively. It also didn't cost $59 and your inflation calculation seems off...

That's not how the market works

$60 in 1992 is about $135 in April 2025, inflation included.

Sure games became more complex, but tools became more powerfull, and so did computers.

In 1992 you often had to code your own engine, which amounted for a good chunk of the development cost. They had to do that using a ressource envelope magnitudes smaller than what we have today. Heck, a jpeg screencap of the original Mario game is bigger than the whole original game itself. Let's not forget that games where physical, which had to be included in the final price.

Todays devs often uses off the shelf engines, tools that automate some of the tedious task, like making trees (Speedtree) and asset reuse is done on an industrial level, there are even marketplaces for that. Moreover, game distribution changed to be mostly digital, you don't need to factor the medium price into the asked price.

You cannot really compare 1992 dev costs with modern ones. The whole way games are done changed way too much for that.

Moreover, the market has grown way beyond what is was then. The required profit per copy sold is a lot smaller than it was then, and thus should be accojnted for.

Honesty, I don't see a AAA needing to have more than $60-70 atm, and I think this bump in price is entirely due to the ever increasing marketing cost, more than the game development.

reddit moment