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.
…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.