Gamers like to make it sound like $70 is a new thing today for video games. When, I’ve seen adverts of games back in late 90s and early 90s that were priced $70. It’s always been around so I find it ridiculous that so many of them complain that the pricing is too high when, it’s been a thing.
Even more dumb is that sales are stupidly frequent so why even bother trying to pay $70 anyways besides FOMO.
It definitely was a thing if you bought them new. http://i.imgur.com/zf92o.jpg
…The fucking console only cost $100. If that ad is the default, that’s fucking insane.
No console went for $100 new when it first came out. Those were the prices long after the economy of scale made it a profitable gamble to sell the hardware at a loss to drive game sales and make up the difference and then some.
I remember Super Nintendo games at ~$60-$70 at first release. They quickly came down in price to ~$40-$50 after a month or two.
deleted by creator
Consoles were usually $300 new. I remember spending $600 on a 3DO.
That’s the second generation of Genesis/Megadrive, so at that point they were probably selling it as a loss leader having minimised production costs.
The real money is in the games, so you make the console cheap and create more customers for the games.
Looks like that ad came out in 1996 based on the games featured (a lot of sports games release the year prior to the date of the title). By then the Sega Genesis was already 7 years old and was fairly obsolete by then, as the Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation, and Nintendo 64 had been released. That’s why it was only going for $100 then.
Yep, I paid £65 for Street Fighter 2 on the Megadrive, back in the early 90s. A huge amount of money then, but worth it given how much I played it.