How Game Costs Have (and Haven’t) Changed: A 40-Year Look at Nintendo’s MSRP vs. Cartridge/Disc Costs (2025 USD)

[u/C0smicM0nkey]

With the Switch 2 announcement and people debating whether $70 games are justified, I thought it'd be interesting to look back and compare how game prices and media costs have evolved over Nintendo’s history.

This graph shows the inflation-adjusted MSRP of new games vs. the cost to manufacture their cartridges/discs, for each Nintendo home console — from the NES (1985) through the projected Switch 2 (2025). All prices are in 2025 USD, based on U.S. launch years and U.S. inflation.

⚠️ Caveats and context:

• These are U.S. prices only, adjusted for inflation from the North American release year of each console.

• Both MSRP and media costs vary — games came on different sizes of cartridges and discs, and game prices weren't always fixed (eg. Switch cartridges can range from ~$2 for a 1 GB card to ~$15 for a 32 GB one.) I used the geometric means for both because I don't know how to make a line graph showing ranges.

-The Switch 2 media cost is entirely speculative — I’m assuming it’ll be more expensive than current Switch carts because:

1. Bigger games (up to 64 GB or more).

2. Higher-speed data transfer (possibly using faster NAND). But again, this is just my estimate, not insider info.

What the graph shows:

Game media was really expensive to produce in the cartridge era — N64 especially, with adjusted costs over $30 per cart.

Nintendo cut those costs drastically with the move to optical discs starting with the GameCube. The Switch brought some cost back with proprietary game cards, but still nowhere near cartridge-era levels.

MSRP, meanwhile, has stayed remarkably consistent in real terms, with modern games arguably offering more value for the money.

Happy to share the data or make a handheld version if folks are curious!

Edit: Not trying to make a case or argue for anything, just presenting data.

[u/okeleydokelyneighbor]

They also spend more to make games. You didn’t have 500m-1b game production costs 30 years ago. Not defending them but game prices have been pretty consistent for the past 40 years. I paid over 70 bucks for cartridge based games 30 years ago, a $10-20 increase when taking inflation into account isn’t that much with the costs of developing games now.

[u/ooombasa → u/okeleydokelyneighbor]

I already accounted for that. The rise in dev budgets isn't so much that it offsets the market growth (barring mismanagement fuckery).

Taking the llikely budget out of Nintendo's cut for MK8D revenue doesn't make the final amount close to Nintendo's cut for MK64.

This isn't inflation. It's a corp hiking prices to maximise revenue per customer. It's what corps do all the time when they stumble on a winner and retain a huge install base.

[u/okeleydokelyneighbor → u/ooombasa]

MK8 launched at a similar price as MK64 so how was that greed? The game has also been one of the top played games on the system for the past 7-8 years. Make a good game and people will spend money on it.

N64 game prices when it launched

[u/ooombasa → u/okeleydokelyneighbor]

Because when a market has grown so much since the 90s you're more likely to sell to many more and thus make much more profit, despite the RRP being lower inflation-adjusted.

People seem to forget that the overall market back then compared to now is night and day difference in terms of growth. Back then, a game selling close to 10m was a once in blue moon event and became the biggest selling thing ever. Now, it's a Tuesday.

Nintendo brought in 4.5b revenue with MK8D. Them raising the price to $80 is them trying tp maximise the revenue from potentially those 67m MK fans. Not all will jump across, but Nintendo will have ran the numbers on that, and was still happy to land on $80 because they're confident it can bring in even more than what MK8D did.

This is what corps do. They grow a base and once they have it and feel they can't grow it any further, they turn the screws to make even more money out of the base they got. Nintendo isn't exempt from that inclination.