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$70 for video games back in the 90s? What world did you come from?
I was paying $5 for video games back then.
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.
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.
Sure, for $5 you could get some old games from the bargain table, but some people like to play them when they're new.
One of my favorite memories is my mum taking me and my brother to a toy shop that sold games after we finished the school year and getting second hand games. Every year my mum did this for us and we'd usually get like 2 for the price of 1. We didn't have a lot of money so new games were only got on Xmas.
No you weren’t.
Yes, actually I was. New games on a single floppy disk. $5 each.
If you were buying “new” games on floppy disks for $5 in the 90’s, what, pray tell, where those games? Prance of Parma? Semper Maria?
Ken's Labyrinth, Mystic Towers, a single level of Epic Pinball...
Yeah they were cheap, but affordable for a young teenager..
Most new games were $40-50 IIRC. A few high demand would be more.
There was a day before games came on a CD. You remember the good old floppy disk? Yeah, Walmart had brand new games that fit on a single floppy disk for $5.
I remember buying ganes for my PCJr at $50 a pop in the mid-80’s lol. Sega cartridges were next.
Oh yeah, I know there were plenty of bigger, better, more expensive games pretty much all along. Still, I loved that $5 section at Walmart, I'd buy a new game almost every week when I was around 13 years old.
...That's because maybe you got them used or something? Like, name me one retail store back then selling games for $5 just out of the blue. I won't wait because you wouldn't come up with anything.
You are mixing used markets with retail prices here. Just stop embarrassing yourself.
Walmart homie. Brand new games.
I'm referring to smaller games that came on a single floppy disk. Remember those?