Volume of video game sales has changed monstrously over the years as it moved from a niche hobby to mainstream
SNES Mario kart - 8.76 million copies sold worldwide
Switch Mario kart 8 - 67.34 million copies sold world wide.
SNES mario kart (inflation adjusted) earnings - 1,095,000,000
Switch Mario kart earnings - 5,252,520,000
Game dev budgets have obviously exploded in that time and nintendo doesn’t disclose their budgets but on average its estimated snes titles got about 1-2 million and switch/wii u titles got 30ish million. That’s a sizable increase in development that wildly outpaces inflation, for sure, but their earnings obviously did too.
your pricing is higher when volume of sales is lower because you have to cover overheads and still make a profit.
When volume is significantly higher the pricing can be lower. You can still cover your overheads because even though you make less money per unit, you overall still can make the same amount (or in this case, 5x as much) because of the increased sales volume
The “need to increase prices” is motivated by several factors like a weak yen and remaining fear from the commercial failure of the Wii U but it’s primarily greed and hostility to consumers. Mario kart is the most successful nintendo game so it is not fair to use it solely as the metric but it is also not as if their other games all suffer and that they don’t make shitloads of cash; 11 billion last year and 12 billion the year before.
And those numbers don’t include companies that are commonly associated with by divested from nintendo like the Pokémon company, which made another 1.9 billion on top of that last year. And unlike many western AAA developers their development costs appear to be far more controlled, with estimates of 20-30 million per game vs something like Spider-Man 2 for the ps5, which was over 10x that at 315 million. According to the leaks the first Spider-Man game cost over 100 million to make and made 827 million back.
this argument is so fucking dumb
Volume of video game sales has changed monstrously over the years as it moved from a niche hobby to mainstream
SNES Mario kart - 8.76 million copies sold worldwide Switch Mario kart 8 - 67.34 million copies sold world wide.
SNES mario kart (inflation adjusted) earnings - 1,095,000,000 Switch Mario kart earnings - 5,252,520,000
Game dev budgets have obviously exploded in that time and nintendo doesn’t disclose their budgets but on average its estimated snes titles got about 1-2 million and switch/wii u titles got 30ish million. That’s a sizable increase in development that wildly outpaces inflation, for sure, but their earnings obviously did too.
Because they… sold more copies?
yes obviously
your pricing is higher when volume of sales is lower because you have to cover overheads and still make a profit.
When volume is significantly higher the pricing can be lower. You can still cover your overheads because even though you make less money per unit, you overall still can make the same amount (or in this case, 5x as much) because of the increased sales volume
The “need to increase prices” is motivated by several factors like a weak yen and remaining fear from the commercial failure of the Wii U but it’s primarily greed and hostility to consumers. Mario kart is the most successful nintendo game so it is not fair to use it solely as the metric but it is also not as if their other games all suffer and that they don’t make shitloads of cash; 11 billion last year and 12 billion the year before.
And those numbers don’t include companies that are commonly associated with by divested from nintendo like the Pokémon company, which made another 1.9 billion on top of that last year. And unlike many western AAA developers their development costs appear to be far more controlled, with estimates of 20-30 million per game vs something like Spider-Man 2 for the ps5, which was over 10x that at 315 million. According to the leaks the first Spider-Man game cost over 100 million to make and made 827 million back.