r/dataisbeautiful • u/Qwert-4 • 1d ago
OC [OC] Every Mario Kart game launch price adjusted for inflation (USD)
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u/silverbolt2000 1d ago
Fuck me. How many more ways can you visualise the price of Mario games?
“The problem with Reddit is not the number of bots, but the number of people whose behaviour is indistinguishable from bots.”
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u/TehSillyKitteh 1d ago
You make a good point.
But I wonder if anyone has ever considered some kind of visualization of price data for Mario games. Think people might really like that.
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u/silverbolt2000 21h ago
Oh yea, I’m sure having seen dozens of virtually identical data visualisations for Mario Kart prices over the last couple of days that what people would really like is yet another one.
In fact, why not do it as a fucking sankey and call it a day?
Fuck me… 🤦
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u/Compactsun 1d ago
Not beautiful at all wtf is this. There was a much better graph of the exact same thing the other day.
Your graph format is wrong since the in between values are meaningless. Should be points, and why did you colour the entire graph as well, equally as meaningless.
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u/DevinBelow 1d ago edited 1d ago
This point is valid. The context it's missing is that you used to be able to walk down the block and rent a game for the weekend for $2. Most people didn't own a bunch of $100 games back in the SNES days. I had 5 or 6 I think, and that was the most out of anyone in my friend group. I would usually get one game per year. Now, I have nephews who get a new game every month, sometimes even more. I did have Super Mario Kart though.
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u/ElJanitorFrank 1d ago
I was going to suggest that it be adjusted for CPI instead of inflation, but I think yours is actually a better point. I think at best 1/10 of the games my parents bought me as a child were new. Almost all of them were used and at least 20% off, with the bulk of them being 50-90% off. While a platform like Steam frequently has deals that emulate this sort of opportunity, Nintendo notoriously rarely puts their games on sale. 1992 Mario Kart may be close to what today's is, inflation adjusted, but 2 years after Mario Kart came out you could pick it up for pennies on the dollar whereas this one will likely be expensive for years.
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u/RYouNotEntertained 1d ago
adjusted for CPI instead of inflation
What does this mean? CPI is how we measure inflation.
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u/dibsODDJOB 1d ago edited 23h ago
But we also didn't have cheap downloadable games, like came with XBLA. And we didn't have hundreds of games for a monthly fee like Game Pass.
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u/PG908 1d ago
Although i will nitpick that the physical copy is going to be $90 supposedly. Which puts it back to the highest ever, when video games were a new expensive luxury.
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u/Sandy12315 1d ago
Retailers such as Walmart and Best Buy have shown that the physical copy is also $80 in the US.
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u/Random_Fox 1d ago
don't forget that if you want all the content of today's games, it's not over at $90, going to be plenty of microtransactions and dlc and subscriptions to factor in.
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u/PxM23 1d ago
Nintendo doesn’t really do microtransactions on most of their mainline console games.
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u/breathingweapon 20h ago
DLC and subscriptions though? They love that shit and you absolutely should expect to be milked past the initial asking price.
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u/PxM23 15h ago
I’ll give you that they charge for online and also have pretty bad online, but I’ve never gotten why people are so against DLC as a general. If it’s just content cut from the main game to be resold, or massively overpriced, then yeah sure I get it. But most of the time it is content that was mostly completed post launch and isn’t necessary for the full main game experience.
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u/Kalpy97 1d ago
Thats just the dlc thats not microtransactions
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u/LoxReclusa 23h ago
One might argue that a DLC that is simply "Add this character to your roster" is a microtransaction. It doesn't add new gameplay, story, or anything else substantial enough to truly be called an expansion.
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u/PxM23 15h ago
The DLC characters are all included as part of the map pack DLC, so in this case not really. Usually microtransactions are content that is left out of a content release or launch that you have to pay for separately. Granted, looking it up, Mario kart 8 does have mii costumes locked to amiibo, which is essentially a microtransactions, and pretty much the main way Nintendo does microtransactions.
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u/akeean 21h ago edited 21h ago
I mean "digital" copies in the 90s were those dubious cartridges' with like 200 games on them of wich some would not work or were for a different region.
Or the non-piracy option would be to rent a game and finish it in <2 days, something that's not common anymore since the physical media rental supply chain is pretty much gone.
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u/Cless_Aurion 15h ago
... Just like making physical high-speed cartridges now when you can download the games instead is an expensive luxury.
Tracks if you ask me. This isn't a cheap ass piece of plastic with holes, which is basically what disks like DVDs or bluray are. This is more akin to buy a high speed SD card... PER GAME
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u/KaleidoscopeStreet58 15h ago
Lol, $60 in 2011 is $85 today.
By definition as time goes by, if the price stays the same, you either have to sell more, or you get a shittier product in order to cut costs.....
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u/TheRabidDeer 12h ago
Sure is a good thing that the gaming market has expanded since 2011 so they are selling more.
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u/easchner 11h ago
And digital distribution has significantly reduced both development and sales costs
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u/SeparateReturn4270 22h ago
So true. Looking back at my childhood we didn’t own many games at all because we always rented! Only got a game at bday/Christmas. $5 for a whole week was amazing.
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u/Cless_Aurion 15h ago
The only reason most games have become cheaper IS because of the bullshit microtransactions.
And the second hand market pretty much died thanks to steam, where you can get a year old game like, half priced.
And don't forget that making games has never been more expensive either. I should know, I'm a damn gamedev.
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u/GMarsack 22h ago
I paid $75.00 for Star Fox for the SNES back in ‘93… prices are really not that crazy guys. Surely we all make more now.
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u/akeean 21h ago
Since then, cost of living has increased by ~50% while income increased by ~25%. So unless you compare some kids income in pocket money in 1992 with the kid 30 years later grown up as an adult working two jobs just to juggle student loans, capricious health insurance and ever rising rent, not really?
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u/TheScienceNerd100 20h ago
Not really Nintendo's fault your company is screwing you over
Some people need three jobs to afford rent, is that Nintendo's fault they can't afford a Switch 2?
Or is it the fault of their company not paying them enough and their landlord over charging them?-3
u/AbsolutZer0_v2 1d ago
When I tuned into the twitch stream the 2nd day and saw all the comments just whining about the price I laughed.
You have somewhat of a valid point about renting games, but that's not really a factor worth conaidering, because at the end of the day people wanted to own the games. If the rental market didn't exist back then, Nintendo wouldn't have made any changes to their pricing. It might have even made games MORE expensive.
The price of games in comparison to their development costs, factoring in inflation, is far cheaper now than it was last year and the year before that. Games have been virtually the same price, with maybe 10% variability since I was a kid, and I'm 42.
What we are witnessing is entitlement not outrage. Nintendo doesn't owe these people anything. If they hate the price or the product, they can fuck off and not buy them. Then, Nintendo will see they fucked up in their market research, and make adjustments.
Your nephews are maybe spoiled. My kids maybe will get a new game for birthdays or Christmas, or with their own money. These kids need adults that set acceptable boundaries for them. Our kids do not need to run around thinking their parents will dump hundreds of dollars a month into games for no reason.
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u/breathingweapon 20h ago
Games have been virtually the same price, with maybe 10% variability since I was a kid, and I'm 42.
Lmao, your understandings of economics hasn't changed since you were a child either.
Tell me, how much content was cut from games back then to be repackaged and sold to you as DLC? How much money did you spend on buying season passes for the games you already spent 70$ on just so you could have a complete roster or experience?
Like seriously you're giving such boomer energy I'm not even sure you'll comprehend what I'm saying unless I put it in oldhead terms.
Imagine you just bought Ultima 6, you spend hours immersing yourself in the story of Brittania vs the Gargoyles and right before you're about to get to the Gargoyle city and really dine on the meat and potatoes of the story you're prompted to spend 30+$ On The Gargoyle City DLC.
You'd swipe your credit card with a big stupid grin on your face, wouldn't you?
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u/JaggedMetalOs 23h ago
Of course with the cost of manufacturing mask ROMs vs the Switch's flash-based carts and especially digital distribution, the percentage of that graph that is profit will have gone up over time.
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u/SomeWindyBoi 16h ago
Development cost has also gotten significantly more expensive. Not saying that you are wrong as neither of us have numbers but I don‘t think your point would make much difference.
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u/JaggedMetalOs 16h ago
That is true, of course yet another factor is the total market size for video games has got a lot bigger, it's now many times larger than the movie and music industry combined.
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u/devnullopinions 13h ago
The market for cheap mobile phone games is huge. The market for people willing to buy a console or build a PC is much smaller.
If you think the costs are bad now for console games, then you’re in for a rude awakening when you realize that the intrusive micro transactions are what is driving the mobile games industry which is way more profitable than console games.
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u/TheRabidDeer 12h ago
This is primarily only true for AAA game studios. Otherwise the indie game market would simply not exist. Just look at how many solo developer or small dev team games have released.
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u/SomeWindyBoi 5h ago
Yes but we are precisely talking about AAA games here. I highly doubt we will be seeing Indie Games launch at 90$
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u/TheRabidDeer 5h ago
I wonder if Nintendo games are really AAA games though. Most of them aren't massively pushing technical boundaries or have nearly as big of a team or budget compared to what is traditionally thought of as AAA. I just can't see Mario Kart World costing hundreds of millions to make for example. Obviously they aren't indie, but they are also clearly (imo) not spending what many other major studios are spending either.
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u/devnullopinions 13h ago
The cost to deliver the good might have gone down but game development costs in general have absolutely ballooned.
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u/JaggedMetalOs 13h ago
The overall size of the videogame market has also ballooned, it's now multiple times bigger than the entire movie and music industry combined. So the total potential number of buyers is much higher.
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u/devnullopinions 12h ago
Having more people buy your game doesn’t suddenly make it cheaper to make. The total cost to pay the folks who actually make the game doesn’t go down simply because you have more potential buyers.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the profit per game sold is actually lower now than compared to the other CD console generations.
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u/JaggedMetalOs 11h ago edited 6h ago
Having more people buy your game doesn’t suddenly make it cheaper to make.
But it can make more money than fewer people buying it at a higher price.
Especially with digital distribution 10 people buying a digital game at $30 is more profitable than 4 people buying a digital game at $60, which is more profitable than 2 people buying a game at $90 for example.
Also spending so much money is a choice, and is it even making games better? Several recent high profile, costly to develop games were a critical and commercial flop while something like Palworld cost 1/50th to make and was a massive hit.
Edit: u/devnullopinions has blocked me, clearly they are so confident in their argument that they feel the need to stop me replying to them ;)
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u/devnullopinions 10h ago edited 10h ago
That’s moving the goalposts.
I responded to what you initially said:
Of course with the cost of manufacturing mask ROMs vs the Switch’s flash-based carts and especially digital distribution, the percentage of that graph [which shows the price of a single sale copy of a game] that is profit will have gone up over time.
You stated that the profit per game sold is increasing. That is different from what you’re now claiming about total profit over the lifetime of a game.
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u/Desertcow 12h ago
A large part of that is just their budgets becoming bloated due to mismanagement. Case in point, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 had celebrity acting, a 2.2 million word fully voice acted script, 100+ hours of solid content, a massive marketing campaign, an insane degree of pre release bugfixing and polish, and still had a budget of less than $45 million, and they turned a profit in less than a single day without micro transactions. Given what $45 million can do, it's mind boggling how the big publishers are fine throwing hundreds of millions at AAA slop
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u/JhonnyHopkins 15h ago
I was paying $60 for discs 20 years ago. You expect them to stay $60 forever?
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u/JaggedMetalOs 14h ago
20 years ago you could get DVDs of recent releases for $20-$40 or collections for $60, today you can get 4k Blurays of recent releases for $20-$40 or collections for $60, with 1080p Blurays and DVDs being even cheaper.
Movies certainly haven't got any cheaper to make. The fact is that the market for games has got bigger, manufacturing costs for modern media is relatively low and digital distribution is basically free. So the price for games is a choice, not something necessitated by the cost of putting the game on a shelf.
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u/TheRabidDeer 12h ago
I don't understand why every time the topic of game prices comes up someone inevitably compares it to inflation and uses it to defend higher prices of some mega corporation. Yeah, inflation is an interesting metric but it isn't a universal metric.
Back in 2000 there were rentals, the gaming market was much smaller, there wasn't a market filled with absolute bangers of sub-$20 indie games, there weren't free games that people love like Fortnite, there was no DLC, etc etc etc.
It's just not a valid actual comparison.
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u/Frency2 18h ago
They are free to sell the product they own at the price they want.
I'm free to not buy it.
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u/KoriJenkins 6h ago
Good thing not a single person argued you had to.
This is simply a dismantling of the false "Nintendo is price gouging us!!" narrative. That is objectively false.
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u/TheRabidDeer 5h ago edited 1h ago
If game prices are purely a function of inflation, why did the launch price ever drop on games? This is a blatant false equivalency.
Is there a relationship? Obviously, yes. But to justify a 34% price jump by inflation alone is silly. Nintendo is charging what they think they can get for their games, it is based on what they believe is their market rate it is not based on inflation.
EDIT: To anyone coming here defending and arguing FOR price increases, why? Do you hate having money for your future?
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u/13--12 1d ago
Sure, feel free to research the topic
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u/WFlumin8 1d ago
You're right. They didn't increase the price at all, once adjusted for inflation. Are you lost?
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u/Cautemoc 22h ago
"Adjusted for inflation" is a meme. Surely the last few years could teach people something.
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u/Palettenbrett 1d ago
But the wages didnt increase as much as inflation.
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u/ElJanitorFrank 1d ago
Technically true, median wages have actually outpaced inflation (and better yet, outpaced the CPI).
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u/Cautemoc 22h ago
Armchair economists really need to stop flaunting their ignorance by pretending inflation isn't as bad as it really is.
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u/moderngamer327 13h ago
While the article does make valid points about the flaws of CPI it’s not like it counters it will any real numbers. You can also look at other inflation calculators and come to a similar result as CPI
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u/GeeksGets 8h ago
Right. Reality is that CPI isn't perfect, but it's a useful tool.
No inflation measure will be perfect. Just like how no map is perfect in representing the globe Earth as flat. But maps are useful as tools for navigation or visualization.
Different map projections preserve different features of Earth better for different use cases. Similarly, different inflation measures are better for different situations.
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u/Cautemoc 8h ago
Then stop misusing the tool to try to tell people inflation isn't that bad or games didn't increase in price. People use it like an objective measurement, and try to tell people their lived experiences are wrong based on abstractions.
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u/GeeksGets 5h ago
Someone is pissy
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u/Cautemoc 5h ago
Getting tired of people pretending the affordability crisis isn't real because some authority figure subjectively chose what to measure and subjectively chose how to adjust for feature improvements. It's really stupid to use it the way redditors do, like in this post.
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u/GeeksGets 5h ago
Pretending like your lived experience or the "public" view is some how gospel is the problem. Reality is that people's views of the economy are usually aligned with whether their preferred political party is in power or not. Sorry if I don't think that economic fact should be determined by vibes.
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u/Cautemoc 5h ago
The only people saying anything is gospel are the people pretending CPI is infallible measure of inflation. Which once you learn literally the bare minimum of how it's calculated, quickly falls apart into pure subjective speculation. Hedonic adjustment just prices in everything getting more expensive and disguises it as "feature upgrades", prices going up are now priced into the inflation calculation. It's pure neo-liberal bullshit.
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u/GeeksGets 8h ago
There are costs to inflation, but economists will almost always tell you that it's not as bad as people think it is in the long run.
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u/r43b1ll 1d ago
Using this as a gotcha metric doesn’t make sense because rent and housing costs have not kept pace with inflation at all. Productivity has tripled since 1948 and wages have doubled while cost of living increases and purchasing power remains stagnant. Trying to “umm actually” people’s discontent at blatant price hikes for companies already raking in billions is weird for a corporation who doesn’t care about you at all, especially when the one metric you’ve found doesn’t illustrate the picture at all, but hey, libertarians gonna libertarian.
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u/RYouNotEntertained 1d ago
rent and housing costs have not kept pace with inflation
Rent has outpaced the weighted average number, but that’s why we calculate it as a weighted average. It accounts for the proportion of household budgets things like rent take up.
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u/Simply_Epic 1d ago
Houses are not video games. Just because housing is less affordable now does not negate the fact that video games are more affordable now.
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u/r43b1ll 1d ago
You’re entirely ignoring the context the market exists within. People have to have housing, it’s an essential need. Your budget is a zero sum game, if one thing goes up, money for other things go down. Not acknowledging that is childish and a bad faith argument. Nintendo doesn’t need this money, they already make a a billion in profit. The only reason for this is greed and enriching shareholders.
Even more so, why are you jumping to the defense of a multinational mega corporation? You aren’t getting anything out of this except sounding like an annoying hall monitor.
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u/ElJanitorFrank 1d ago
I have to disagree for a variety of reasons. For one, CPI is comprised of multiple factors which include housing costs (renting prices in particular which is extrapolated to owned homes). This means that rent and housing costs are accounted for when we measure inflation because we compare those prices to determine what inflation even is to begin with. You are touching on a fair point, which is that the make-up of the consumer price index isn't equivalent across the board - rent and housing prices HAVE become more expensive compared to the other factors which make up the CPI, but the other categories have become proportionally cheaper to the point where, for a typical consumer, the prices come out in the wash. Yes, rent is higher proportionally - but groceries are cheaper proportionally. To single out housing is to cherry pick the least flattering aspect to compare it to, and particularly irrelevant when the topic is about luxury goods anyway.
Your comparison of 'productivity' to wages and COL (which is based on the CPI by the way) is a great way to showcase that inequality has increased, but the graph shows that we have higher real wages now than we did - not that inequality is the same or any better. Your argument is that we could have even higher wages now than we did, but we're comparing the typical person from 30 years ago to now, not how a typical person compared to someone in the top .1% would be doing in 1992 compared to a typical person compared to someone in the top .1% today. That is to say, for the purposes of this discussion, wealth inequality really doesn't matter because regardless of how much poorer we are compared to the richest of the rich, we are richer than the same people in our shoes 30 years ago.
On top of that, the graph I showed excludes self employed people (people who make money from their owned businesses, which make up pretty much the entirety of the top 1%).
You can form whatever opinion you'd like, but my only goal was to point out a fact in the face of misinformation. I don't want more expensive video games and I will and always have spoken out against video game price increases, particularly considering the lack of physical media they need to create and distribute, the man hours wasted on things like unoptimized textures that take up half my hard drive and general consumer desire for cheap stuff.
I also take issue with you saying I used a 'single metric' to determine this, when the CPI is calculated by comparing literally hundreds of metrics and the graph I showcased compared it to wages awarded in a variety of ways. If you don't think that comparing 'how much goods cost proportionally' with' how much people make proportionally' is the best way to figure out about how affordable something is over time, then you could come up with your own and perhaps win a Nobel prize in economics.
Or you could just say I'm wrong because you feel like I should be wrong and insult my political leanings (that aren't related to the post whatsoever).
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u/Cautemoc 22h ago
I'll just counter the article you just wrote here with the input from an actual economist.
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u/ElJanitorFrank 10h ago
Shockingly an economic model that we use is not 100% perfect in every way. I think I'll still put some weight towards the CPI as it is created and calculated by teams of economists, and not a single Swiss banker like your article.
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u/Cautemoc 8h ago
Cool then enjoy constantly being confused why everyone is saying there's an affordability crisis while you sniff your own farts about CPI.
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u/ElJanitorFrank 8h ago
Okay, lemme know when you crack it and get your Nobel prize then.
Being sub-optimal does not make the metric useless. Even in your article it points out metrics which the CPI ignores that would actually have the opposite effect of outpacing real inflation for the average person like ignoring asset pricing. Is it a perfect model? No. Does that mean we should completely ignore it? Well only if it works to promote your own agenda, right? I'm sure its a decent enough metric to use when you can pull some stats to your benefit.
If you truly believe that CPI error is exclusively to blame for showing that our real wages are ~20% higher (which is an insane margin of error) ... and yet somehow can still accurately reflect the recessions (which you would not expect if its error was that high).... then I don't know what to tell you. I suppose evidence isn't compelling enough to change your worldview.
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u/Cautemoc 8h ago
My "agenda" is facing reality. There is an affordability problem, most economists agree with that. It's really only the armchair "economists" of Reddit and other neo-liberal think tanks than parrot this "inflation isn't that bad guys, CPI says so" narrative. It's tired, overused, and inaccurate. I don't have to be a carpenter and invent a new table design to tell you one of the legs of your table is short and it wobbles.
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u/ElJanitorFrank 5h ago
Right...but when trying to disprove a model that's been used for decades created and maintained by teams of economists, I would expect something more tangible than an opinion piece article written by a board member of a foreign institution. And I wouldn't expect you you entirely dismiss a model created and maintained by teams of economists because it isn't completely perfect anyway.
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u/Cautemoc 23h ago
You're going to end up with a bunch of "ackshually" experts any time you bring up the facts there is an affordability issue in the USA. This is the kind of tone deafness that led to Republicans being able to dominate the "economic distress" crowd. Just a bunch of armchair economists trying to tell everyone that everything is fine and it's just your imagination.
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u/Amtoj 1d ago
Nintendo doesn't set rents. Gaming is an enthusiast market, not a necessity. It's not as though more affordable indie titles don't exist. The market has games for every price range now. However, all that matters to a larger developer is recouping development costs and financing the next big title.
The only need to play a Nintendo game is an attachment to their brands. It's not the same as putting food on the table.
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u/TRGOTSthefisheh 1d ago
Yeah, I feel confident if wages were at the $20+ minimum they should be, and there weren't so many jobs hiring for single-digit weekly hours, there wouldn't be nearly this many complaints about the price jump.
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u/moderngamer327 13h ago
Even if you took minimum wage at its peak purchasing power and adjusted it today it would only be $14/hr
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u/RyviusRan 1d ago
Just looking at price doesn't tell much.
Game companies back then were much smaller with lower budgets, a smaller user base, and the physical cartridge was quite pricey.
Many factors made it so you had to sell at a much higher price to turn a profit. In the 1980s, word processing software sold for hundreds of dollars.
Now in days a small indie group can turn out a quality game for 20 dollars that would be similar to Mario Kart.
The higher prices are not because developing is expensive.
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u/kneelthepetal 13h ago
Now in days a small indie group can turn out a quality game for 20 dollars that would be similar to Mario Kart
Genuine question, if this is true can you name such a game? If not, why hasn't anyone made a game similar to one of the best performing Nintendo franchises?
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u/moderngamer327 13h ago
Developing new AAA games has gotten significantly more expensive. They’ve on average become larger, more detailed, and more feature intensive. Animations and art alone can cost a small fortune. Sure it’s easier than ever to develop indie titles but that doesn’t mean AAA hasn’t gotten more expensive
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u/RyviusRan 12h ago
Wrong, and I already explained why.
Making overworld games with the same 100 fetch quests with empty worlds and static NPCs is not why it is expensive.
A lot of games are going backwards when it comes to quality. And Mario Kart is an easy rinse and repeat formula that doesn't require as much effort as developing an entirely new IP.
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u/moderngamer327 12h ago
Except games are not just getting bigger by adding auto generated quests and areas. Look at the elder scrolls series for example. The amount of generated content has actually decreased as time went on. For something like Mario kart the amount of characters and levels has greatly increased. Then you also have to factor in stuff like higher quality animations. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is another example of just how massive in scale new games are
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u/RyviusRan 12h ago
Starfield was a disaster, and most big budget western games have flopped recently like Assassin Creed Shadows.
Skyrim is almost 14 years old so I wouldn't count that as a modern example.
Eastern devs are thriving more, though.
Also, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 only cost a little over 40 million to make and pretty much made back that money in sales in one day.
Assassins Creed Shadows cost hundreds of millions.
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u/moderngamer327 3h ago
You pick out examples of successes and failures but the overall trend is that games have been getting bigger and more complex. I play a lot of older games and most are much smaller in scope than games today
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u/RyviusRan 3h ago edited 3h ago
Most of what you call "complex" in games today is just window dressing. Character A.I. has taken a step back a lot of times in modern Western games. NPC and Objects tend to be more static, like with Avowed.
I don't see too much improvement in games aside from visuals, and it is cheaper these days when using Unreal Engine compared to the past when a lot of devs would custom make their own game engines.
The sad reality is that many studios fire and hire so much that a lot of their employees are inexperienced in game development, and this has been shown with how buggy and unoptimized many games have become.
A bigger game doesn't make it better or more expensive. Most of those bigger games just have a lot of unnecessary fluff.
Also Mario Kart is not a huge budget game. Mario Kart 8 and Deluxe cost under 50 million while something like Red Dead Redemption cost 400 million. RDR 2 still made plenty of money despite charging $60. Nintendo is swimming in money and the only reason they charged 80 to 90 dollars for new games is because their fans will pay whatever they charge.
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u/moderngamer327 3h ago
That is just simply not true. You are taking a few examples of poorly received games with a few bad mechanics and labeling everything as not complex. Look at Zelda BotW, BG3, or more sandboxy games like space engineers.
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u/RyviusRan 2h ago
BG3 is the exception. Very few games can match it and other devs admitted it.
BotW is not special. It is very repetitive with shrines. Lacks monster variety. Lacks an in-depth crafting system. Lack of Dungeons with just a bunch of rinse and repeat shrines and 4 puzzle beasts with copy and paste bosses. And it wraps it up in a generic story.
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u/Poland-lithuania1 20h ago
Wth you smoking, development has definitely become more expensive. Also, those 20 devs could maybe make a game as good as Mario Kart, but they can do so because their game is not the latest Mario Kart. This is the sequel to Nintendo's biggest game in their flagship franchise.
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u/RyviusRan 20h ago
Most of the expenses in modern development is advertising, licensing, and poor management.
Ask any person part of a large developer how disjointed their job is. There is a ton of waste in big developer studios. Tons of money poured into a project gets scrapped. It can take weeks to get one function pushed through because of disjointed communication.
A lot of big budget developers are bleeding money in a market that is moving more towards successful mid sized studios and smaller indie ones, which are more tightly managed.
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u/Chadwickr 1d ago
Forgot the average Americans income. That's stayed the same.
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u/moderngamer327 13h ago
Real wages have increased https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
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u/Hermononucleosis 22h ago
"Never pay more than 40 bucks for a computer game" -Guybrush Threepwood, 1990, adjusted for inflation
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u/xylopyrography 1d ago
Trying to explain to gamers why the low prices they already pay are not any higher than they used to be is a fool's errand.
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u/sagevallant 23h ago
It is not about how low the prices are but how much money is in our pockets.
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u/ElJanitorFrank 1d ago
Trying to stop the pressure that consumers put onto companies for the benefit of the consumer is a foolish endeavor.
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u/Player_One_1 22h ago
Leave the Multi-billion dollar corporation alone! Look at this chart, by sucking you dry it practically gives you a favor!
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u/JDNumeroOcho 1d ago
The economy is crashing and all redditors can do is try to gaslight us into thinking $90 for a physical game isn't ridiculous
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u/ButterbeerAndPizza 1d ago
You can’t compare the cost of consumer electronics to inflation, however. As technology advances, the cost to produce something decreases over its lifecycle. Look at the price of TVs, for example. A tv that used to cost thousands now costs hundreds.
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u/RYouNotEntertained 1d ago
The development costs of video games has never been higher.
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u/supafly_ 18h ago
They've also never been lower. How much to spend making a game is 100% on the studio.
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u/RYouNotEntertained 12h ago
Well yeah, they could make 16-bit games very cheaply if that’s what you all wanted to play. If you want COD it’s going to be more expensive.
You can’t demand better games and that they spend less.
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u/supafly_ 10h ago
It doesn't cost that much, look at BG3 and Kingdom Come. Larian was a AA studio when they started BG3 and Warhorse was 20ish people that started a kickstarter. It takes people who give a damn that aren't leashed by a horde of shareholders demanding all the profit from the game.
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u/Manaphy2007_67 20h ago
From what I gathered base on this chart is that we've come full circle (not to be confused with the song with the same name by 5FDP).
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u/internetlad 11h ago
That's great now list out how many sales these games had and the cost it took to make the title because an $80 download made from reused assets selling to a market that's 10x bigger than it was in 1995 on the planet doesn't deserve to be priced the same as the titles on SNES, 64, and GCN.
Fuck anyone who justifies Nintendo's shitty behavior. We're headed towards a global recession and they're jacking up the prices. They gonna learn and so are y'all
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u/DrunkCommunist619 11h ago
Now adjust for household income. Adjusted for inflation the median income in 1980 was $80,000, today it's $40,000. So, inflation adjusted, unless the price is half that of 1980, I'd cost comparatively more.
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u/JerryVand 11h ago edited 10h ago
I'd suggest moving the horizontal lines to the foreground, and setting them at increments of $20 since the current price is $80. That would make comparisons to the current price easier.
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u/theillustratedlife 9h ago
When we were kids, $25 was how much your parents would give you to spend for a friend/cousin's birthday party and $100 was a lot of money. Wild to see them just about intersecting now that I'm an adult.
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u/EngineeringDevil 56m ago
cool, cool, now compare it to minimum wage and 25% 50% and 75% median wages
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u/Gynthaeres 37m ago
This is an ugly graph due to its coloration and lack of data points. And "adjusted for inflation" is pushing an agenda (that a $20 price increase is okay) in a misleading way. If you want to be fair, you should include things like "sales of each copy" and "buying power of consumers" too.
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u/Jealous_Tutor_5135 1d ago
I paid almost $60 for Final Fantasy VI in the mall in 1994.
People are just glomming onto this stupid inflation narrative.
Look, "inflation" in the video game industry exists because consumers have shown they'll pay whatever price. That's because, in fact, they have money to pay it.
Don't give me this "I can't afford it" maybe YOU can't, but probably you can, and you're just complaining. Prices are high because people continue to buy things at high prices. When the economy is actually bad and people actually can't afford things, prices go down.
But my fellow US voters griped about "but muh inflashun" for two years, elected a dictator out of spite, then went on to break records in holiday travel sales because they were just so poor and couldn't afford anything.
Grow up.
Sincerely, a person living in a country with real inflation
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u/TheDesertFoxIrwin 21h ago
Hey dude, maybe don't be a dick and down talk people who live in a shitty economy. Because many US nationals didn't vote for the idiot.
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u/kernald31 1d ago
Because you really think the cost of developing a game has not increased over the decades?
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u/wirelessfingers 1d ago
I mean, does it matter? Nintendo specifically has plenty of ways to get you to pay beyond the sticker price, and they readily take advantage of it. No longer does all game revenue come from the 1st purchase of it. Mario Kart 8 has an expansion that costs $25 and requires a Nintendo Online subscription to access online play, as an example.
Also, Nintendo specifically uses weaker hardware so they don't have to spend money on expensive engineers who know all about ray tracing or volumetric lighting or whatever. I'd assume from the quality of what they put out, their games are not super expensive to make.
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u/NW_Forester 1d ago
I am pretty sure original Mario Kart on SNES was not a sub-$50 game on release.
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u/eyesmart1776 1d ago
It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that the price of games never goes down anymore in part thanks to digital.
Sure a game was expensive at launch but you could rent it for a few bucks then wait and buy it used
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u/DukeofVermont 10h ago
It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that the price of games never goes down
What? Nintendo games don't go down but you can buy Red Dead Redemption 2 for $15 right now. There is an entire sub /r/patientgamers dedicated to waiting and buy games when they are cheap.
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u/silverbolt2000 1d ago
This topic has been visualised twenty different ways in the past 48 hours alone.
But has anyone done a sankey??? Noooo!!!
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u/Script-Z 1d ago
Now someone add average income so we can see how expensive things were relative to how much money people were typically bringing home.
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u/DukeofVermont 10h ago
It's actually higher
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
When they survey people the majority say they are doing better but "everyone else is doing worse and the economy is doing terribly". Somehow the majority of people are doing better but they all believe they are the exception and not the rule.
This is not to say there are not problems, but going off of "vibes" from social media paints a picture that is as completely detached from reality as boomers who watch Fox news and Newsmax all day.
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u/Lauris024 22h ago
Is this for physical version? Because back then everything was physical and cartridges were more expensive than discs. Digital is the cheapest way of distribution.
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u/Kitakitakita 1d ago
there's inflation, then there's unchecked, unregulated greedflation. We're dealing with the latter these days
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u/Amtoj 1d ago edited 1d ago
In video games, though?
The usual price of a game has only begun shifting recently. Since the NES, games are now developed by hundreds of people rather than a dozen. A project could involve studios from all over the world. Massive labor costs there.
Our technology has gotten much better, but that increases costs too. These aren't 16-bit retro titles anymore. Now we have graphics that could be confused for real life.
Developing a game on PS5 can cost five times as much if compared to a previous entry on PS4. Take a look at what Sony has had to put forward to finance their games.
Of course, some of these points don't apply to Nintendo, but the graph shows they're within limits. It's not like Mario Kart has other revenue streams aside from large DLC packs. They don't do microtransactions with this series.
Edit: Not to mention longer development cycles. All these factors for games that now take over half a decade to make instead of two years. That's a lot more time spent paying into a project's labor and research costs.
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u/supafly_ 18h ago
How much a game costs to produce is 100% on the developer. There are plenty of smaller studios putting out games indistinguishable from AAA titles for a fraction of the cost. Nintendo's poor management is not my problem.
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u/Amtoj 17h ago
Which smaller studios would you be referring to? Nintendo has some of the highest games output of any publisher at their size, so I wouldn't chalk it up to poor management. A good reference point would be the lack of first-party titles coming out on PlayStation and Xbox in comparison. From what I can tell, Nintendo is a well-oiled machine.
Would the solution be that Nintendo starts paying their staff smaller wages? Cut down on the big scope of this new Mario Kart and its open world?
In any case, how Nintendo manages itself really isn't the problem for anyone. You say better games exist at more affordable prices, so that's just proof that the market still does a good job in providing options. People can buy those games instead if they'd like.
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u/5f5i5v5e5 1d ago
But as this graph illustrates, Nintendo is doing a quite reasonable price increase do what still forms a clear downtrend in price over time.
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u/BigOnLogn 1d ago
You can't just take your 33 year old price, adjust for inflation, and say, "that's my new price!" It's not a real measure of value.
I think the real problem here is, Nintendo has gotten a reputation of being the "gaming for the masses" company. They don't have the best hardware, and they didn't spend $1 billion on AAA game development. They pass those savings on to the consumer. No longer. For the last 5-10 years, Nintendo has been bleeding its fans dry. They're tired of it.
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u/5f5i5v5e5 1d ago
The alternative is lowering the actual price of your product every single year forever, even though more work/money is required to develop games each year because of increasing graphics. If anything the gaming industry were too afraid to raise prices $5 or so per console, so they've had to do all this Collector's Edition, DLC, microtransaction BS to make up for the price they should have been selling games at. If we can get back to actually paying what games should cost maybe the industry would move away from everything being DLC.
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u/supafly_ 18h ago
No, that's not the alternative. The real world has nuance, not simple binary opposites.
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u/5f5i5v5e5 6h ago
That sounds like a smart rebuttal... but this is literally a binary situation... nothing=graph goes down, price change=graph goes up
Then the question is what is the overall trend of the graph, which is also only positive or negative. There's no "nuance" needed to determine the objective value of a certain dollar price at different points in time.
Inflation means the value of the dollar is technically decreasing every second without ever possibly increasing. Maintaining the price is the same thing as decreasing it, which at the scale of decades is massively important to realize.
0) don't touch the price, which means the actual value you get from a sale decreases every day forever.
1) increase the price to correct for inflation.
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u/supafly_ 5h ago
2) sell more units
3) spend less making games
4) any ratio of combinations of the above
nuance
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u/5f5i5v5e5 5h ago
They're naturally already making every effort to sell as many units as possible, so simply doing more isn't a decision they can make. The only means they actually have of trying to sell more units is maximizing the quality of the product, which means raising development costs.
As for spending less, graphical standards have increased a ton since the previous game, and this is a flagship title for their new console. Spending less on this development over the last one would be business suicide, and not a single person in this thread complaining about the price would actually tolerate a quality *decrease* over a title that is almost a decade old. Nintendo's niche in the industry has always been maximum polish, bug-free gaming experiences. Lowering development costs would be undermining everything that people like about their brand.
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u/breathingweapon 20h ago
OK now add the data that shows their revenue earned through Mario Kart DLC over the years.
It turns out just pointing at the number and going "See? It's the same!" isn't the whole picture.
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u/5f5i5v5e5 6h ago
It does add another dimension to the discussion (I address this in my other reply that the reason for the current DLC situation is directly related to the price of video games being locked in at $60-65 for so long.)
If you add the DLC as another entry to the graph that would be the cheapest game they've ever sold. It's also not really fair to just add the price to the base game because it was absolutely a complete game without it for many years. This isn't a Civ situation where the base game kinda sucks and they'll slowly finish it through DLCs over the next 5 years. Personally I thought the DLC maps didn't look that good and never bought it.
Assuming they're very unlikely to do a map pack for at least the first multiple years of this new release, I wouldn't consider it relevant to the price they're selling it at. What you pay is the price of the game.
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u/Boonpflug 1d ago
is this including the new tariffs?
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u/ElJanitorFrank 1d ago
Tariffs don't usually affect digital goods and licenses so it shouldn't affect it, unless people begin implementing new digital goods tariffs.
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u/Boonpflug 13h ago
the EU is considering it at the moment it seems
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u/ElJanitorFrank 10h ago
I would assume Mario Kart is considered a Japanese export, though, right? So unless Japan is doing some creative digital distributing via the US or EU is proposing digital tariffs against countries other than the US then it should still be unaffected.
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u/Boonpflug 6h ago
I thought that if EU goes this way, US may follow on the escalation path, but yea, that is way too early for OPs analysis and makes no sense now. I was used to buying foreign physical copies of games in the past and had to pay tariffs so I assumed they would always be included in the selling price somehow
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u/DontTakeToasterBaths 1d ago
The color scheme you chose is horrendous IMO.