I’ve seen a lot of discussion about Nintendo charging $70 for Tears of the Kingdom and wanted to raise a few points and essentially show that it’s reasonable to expect to pay that much for a game in 2023.
1. Inflation: The simple reality is, your money is worth less than it used to be. Using this [inflation calculator](https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm) you can see that even looking at inflation from 2018 to now, $70 is a reasonable price to pay for something that was $60 in 2018. **$60 in 2018 = $70.88 now**.
2. This isn’t the first time games have been $70. Look at [this](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DS5_OlmVQAEsPRG.jpg&imgrefurl=https://twitter.com/VGArtAndTidbits/status/949836469744619520&tbnid=bVpwf8S5JCn8tM&vet=1&docid=rFxctqkORacdQM&w=884&h=1200&source=sh/x/im) catalogue of Nintendo 64 games. You’ll see that both DK 64 and Perfect Dark were being sold for $69.99 in 1999! That’s equivalent to $123.44 today!! Even “expensive” games today are ludicrously cheaper than they were years ago. For example [Ocarina of Time](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/524458319089222844/) was sold for $60, **$108.65 today**. Even SNES games like [Street Fighter 2 Alpha](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/n822tu/toys_r_us_super_nintendo_ad_circa_1996/) were $70 (**$130.99 today**), $60 for Donkey Kong Country III ($112.28), or just for Zelda comparison, $50 for [Link to the Past](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/huguesjohnsoncom-electronics-boutique-spring-1993-catalog–106116134942054622/) ($101.78 today).
3. Games cost more to produce. While prices have remained stagnant (ie decreasing accounting for inflation), production budgets have exploded. Games like Zelda could be made by a team of 25 in the 90s and that’s simply no longer the case. Now you have 100s of staff working on games that have even longer development cycles. While I’ll acknowledge that the popularity of games has led to selling games for lower prices being more feasible (just because more people playing games = more people buying games = more profit, even at a lower price point), this can only be true to a certain extent. Not to mention, because of increased production costs/values, you’re getting more bang for your buck. Today you get beautifully crafted world that will take 100s of hours to explore vs a game that could be beat in a tenth of the time that you’d get 20 years ago.
4. Nintendo has [promised](https://kotaku.com/nintendo-switch-union-pay-raise-layoffs-pokemon-scarlet-1850082365) a 10% raise for its employees. In a time of record inflation and huge layoffs in the rest of the tech world, this is the sort of behavior that we should be happy to see from a corporation like Nintendo. Of course, those raises must be paid for somehow.
All in all, I get that it sucks to pay $70 bucks for a game when you’re expecting it to be $60, and it sucks that video games, formerly seemingly free of inflation, are now being impacted by it. Despite this, it’s totally reasonable to expect the price of games to increase as time goes on, and Nintendo or any other publisher is not “price gouging” or being “evil” by doing so.
TL;DR: Looking at inflation, production budgets of today, and even just raw price comparisons, video games have never been cheaper than they are right now.
by pianoguy212
34 Comments
Hey now let’s not be reasonable.
I am a fan of raising the price to 70 if that is what it take to get aaa single player game like Zelda with no micro transactions. But I will only pay it for games that earn it
Why are so many people rushing to defend Nintendo on this? They’re raising prices to keep shareholders happy, and because they know they can get away with it.
Trippin
They are also massively cheaper to make and thanks to digital sales, virtually free to mass produce.
[Here’s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvPkAYT6B1Q) videogamedunkey talking about it more eloquently than I can.
Video Game publishers are more profitable than they’ve ever been. They have a larger market than they’ve ever had.
The price doesn’t need to go up. Nintendo or any other publisher isn’t scraping by and needs to increase prices. They’re making money hand over fist and want to make more money.
They don’t need consumers out there defending them.
You’re not wrong, I lived through this and have had consoles since the Atari 2600. Business practices have never been this predatory and you could argue (statistically speaking) that 99% of the world hasn’t been this broke since the mid to late 70s. Especially if you’re not first world. 70 bucks (not counting shipping/import tax/taxes) is 48 hours or 2 weeks and 1 day of minimum wage in my country. Listen, I don’t mind much in the long run, but it simply doesn’t add up for many. I understand r business decision and I feel it’s fair in _many_ cases (just not all, and definitely not a standard).
I got absolutely torched by r/gaming for posting essentially this earlier today. It seriously saddens me to know there are so many people amongst us that have no idea the basics of how our society works.
I just want to be clear I’m not a genius, but I think we should wonder why they are doing this now. Switch games sell amazing, they are not loosing money on the console and the games have always been 60. I think it’s stupid
I am more angry at the price of a carton of eggs and a tank of gas than I am about video games being expensive. It costs a lot to live and a price increase in video games is inevitable but not unique.
If you don’t consider microtransactions, DLC, battle passes, service subscriptions, the cost reduction of most sales being digital, the mass adoption of commercial middleware, the huge increase in overall sales volume, direct marketing, etc.
Publishers didn’t let prices stagnate because they felt like being nice. They did it because it was more effective to monetize on top of the initial sale.
But will those extra 10 dollars get us an actually finished game?
With the ubiquity of season passes, battle passes, DLC, microtransactions and other forms of monetization… No. No they are not. Games are actually MORE expensive considering how much a AAA release is expected to wring the customer’s wallet upon first purchase and then for a time thereafter.
Nintendo has been relatively tame about monetizing their games but let’s not pretend games are cheaper. That’s a lie.
All 4 of your points are inflation… I’m sick of listing the reasons why it’s a wrong point to make…. I’ll just copy and paste what I said in another thread today lol
“- micro transactions are rampart in most games, gaas, longevity of games beyond a play once, done and move on. Also mobile games
– pretty much all games have multiple editions well over 60/70 dollars
– digital cuts the cost of shipping and producing physical games, and for console makers with their own stores give them the full retail cut.
– each copy of a game is not a individual work of art, they are mass produced to sell as many as possible
– the game market has grown massively and as such, has subsidized dev cost by more people buying games / the point above this one”
Also there are so many games released these days. So many more than back in the day. Competition brings prices down.
Video games also sell exponentially more copies than ever, and have near zero overhead after initial printing thanks to digital distribution. 70$ is still nonsense, especially when the hardware is over a decade outdated.
Stop pretending the price rise from MS/Sony/Nintendo is for any reason *other* than profit. Nintendo is just raising the price to match its competition, because where else are you going to go? It was already the “budget” console *(at least until you start buying common sense accessories like a usable controller)*, you’ve already bought in.
Without even mentioning “DLC” and mtx.
Post like this make me wonder if this is a real person or corporations out to defend their prices hikes by trying to make manufactured consent
I had to pay like $60 for Might & Magic on the Sega Genesis in 1991.
Minimum wage in 2009: $7.25
Minimum wage in 2023: $7.25
Inflation often gets talked about as if it’s one uniform multiplier over the entire economy, but that’s not how the real world works. If goods get more expensive while wages stay the same, that just means purchasing power has gone down for the average consumer.
Cool. Granted, I was never gonna buy this game anyway but if a game I wanted was 70 bucks at base, then I’d still wait for a sale or buy it used.
Just because some people are okay with it, doesn’t mean everyone is. Not everyone can afford 70 dollar games with 40-50 dollar DLC expansions.
I remember some of the MSRP for certain N64 games would cost over $70. Sears sold brand new copies of Ocarina of Time for $70 back in 1998 for their [Christmas Catalog](https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1998-Sears-Christmas-Book/0162).
Of course, I would rather pay only $60 for a copy for Tears of The Kingdom, but honestly it is way easier to find a store that sell a copy at a discount. I managed to get a copy of Pokémon Scarlet for only $50 like two weeks ago by finding a listing on Amazon and I just went to my local Best Buy where they price matched it. I would imagine Costco will sell copies of Tears of the Kingdom at some discount.
the amount of shilling for Nintendo in all gaming subs in this matter is staggering and reminds me of the first time 70$ games were introduced.
And with every time, the shills are arguing with missing context. especially for point 2.
It’s tiring arguing against the same faulty arguments every time.
Early cell phones would cost over $10,000 after adjusting for inflation, so we should be happy to pay that much now for more powerful devices :/
Let’s raise the price of games to 130-150uss then, I mean, to *really* account for inflation…
Everyone talks about costs of production and distribution. Those have very little to do with prices. Goods and services are worth what the market will bear, regardless of their costs. People don’t like to pay much more than $60 for games, so that’s where prices have stayed for a long time.
If a price of $70 cuts sales in half, you can bet they’ll lower it. But if a game sells like gangbusters at the new price, then that’s what we’ll see more of from now on.
I don’t have a problem paying $70 for a PS5 game… I’m not paying $70 for a Switch game though..
Since Steam prices have never been cheaper I agree. But not at 70.
Wait a few months and I’ll be able to get Hogwarts Legacy for 39.99. Wait more if you’re not in a hurry and 29.99 easily.
No one should be defending 70uss games. No one.
aren’t there some boots you need to lick somewhere?
Calculating for inflation ignores the fact that games are primarily sold digitally instead of Ina full daughterboard that needs its own cmos battery has to be individually produced and tested before being packaged with a manual and shipped worldwide
Even if you buy it physically you’re just getting a modified as card that costs much less to make
Inflation only makes sense as an excuse if the costs to make it have gone up. For the most part, those costs have not gone up. Technology advancements mean its considerably cheaper to produce a Switch game now than it was prior to launch, every single piece of Switch development is cheaper for Tears of the Kingdom than it was for Breath of the Wild. And, Tears of the Kingdom is a Switch exclusive, there was no parallel development process needed for a companion game on the previous generation.
It made sense for some of the older games to be more expensive because there were legitimate costs to consider that aren’t a factor anymore.
For example, the DKC series were rendered on expensive (think $100K a piece) SGI workstations. Switch game development can be done from much, much lower powered home computers. Physical cartridges, printed manuals, additions of batteries and custom chips also made the production of each individual game much more expensive. In an era before the internet was widely available or mature, collaboration without dedicated office space was difficult and you’d have to shuttle employees around to different offices for collaboration between companies — sometimes between oceans.
Sure, there’s additional credits, but there is also a trend towards crediting more people in the process and quite a few people only had comparatively minor roles. Many of these would have been rolled up into organizations such as the “Super Mario Club” on previous releases, so I’m not sure that the scale of the development team is really as massive as the sheer number of credits suggest.
Game development has also been made considerably easier than it was years ago. For the early 3D games, developers generally had to write their own physics from scratch, however, for Breath of the Wild the physics were already there via simply licensing Havok and making modifications. For Tears of the Kingdom, whatever game engine was written for BotW can be re-used again with some modifications. That doesn’t mean that game development is easy, but its been made considerably easier compared to the days of coding everything using assembly language and needing to re-invent the wheel for every new game. While BotW and probably Tears of the Kingdom will be made using a custom engine, other first party Nintendo titles have been known to use off-the-shelf engines, for example, Fire Emblem Engage used Unity — a freely available game engine. You only need to look at the rise of “Indie” game developers and how they’re able to churn out complex games with a limited team. For example, Stardew Valley was made by only a single developer.
Games today are cheaper to make, nearly free to distribute and considerably easier to make. Given there’s not expected to be any major changes in Tears of the Kingdom compared to BotW, and BotW already has its engine completed, its considerably easier and cheaper to make when compared to the previous game. The decreasing cost of technologies also work in the developer’s favour and the things which are increasing in price do not materially affect the cost needed to develop the game, because of this, yes $70 is too much for this
As a child of the 80’s, who grew up with an Atari 2600 and the original Nintendo with Zelda (in a gold case!) I’m more than happy to pay $70 for Tears of The Kingdom.
You can stop pretending to be just some random redditor Nintendo suits, we know what your trying to do and it ain’t going to work
When you try to justify this by bringing up the past tells me that you don’t have any good defence.
> Nintendo has promised a 10% raise for its employees. In a time of record inflation and huge layoffs in the rest of the tech world, this is the sort of behavior that we should be happy to see from a corporation like Nintendo. Of course, those raises must be paid for somehow.
And? Why in the world should i care about people i don’t know? The fact that you use this excuse is just hilarious.
> Games cost more to produce. While prices have remained stagnant (ie decreasing accounting for inflation), production budgets have exploded. Games like Zelda could be made by a team of 25 in the 90s and that’s simply no longer the case. Now you have 100s of staff working on games that have even longer development cycles. While I’ll acknowledge that the popularity of games has led to selling games for lower prices being more feasible (just because more people playing games = more people buying games = more profit, even at a lower price point), this can only be true to a certain extent. Not to mention, because of increased production costs/values, you’re getting more bang for your buck. Today you get beautifully crafted world that will take 100s of hours to explore vs a game that could be beat in a tenth of the time that you’d get 20 years ago.
Yes games cost more, but you forgot to mention DLC, Microtransaction and Loot box to cover the cost.
> This isn’t the first time games have been $70. Look at this catalogue of Nintendo 64 games. You’ll see that both DK 64 and Perfect Dark were being sold for $69.99 in 1999! That’s equivalent to $123.44 today!! Even “expensive” games today are ludicrously cheaper than they were years ago. For example Ocarina of Time was sold for $60, $108.65 today. Even SNES games like Street Fighter 2 Alpha were $70 ($130.99 today), $60 for Donkey Kong Country III ($112.28), or just for Zelda comparison, $50 for Link to the Past ($101.78 today).
How much games cost back then has no bearing on today. That was then, this is now.
Boot licker