re: Never Realized How Expensive Games Used To Be

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Reason being is their profit margins have probably increased since then, because making the tech/games has gotten way way cheaper but the prices obviously don't reflect that.

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Actually the exact opposite seems to be true.
Blockbuster titles have budgets similar to that of major movie releases the past few years.

The profit margins are actually shrinking which has closed the doors on basically every major game developer out there. The last standing "giants" are EA/bioware and ActivisionBlizzard. Outside of those 2 you've got Bathesda and Ubisoft as 2nd tier developers now.

It seems like prices are where they are because going any higher would become prohibitively expensive to the consumer and studios who can set the prices (like EA and Activision) know theyre maximizing profits while smaller studios are forced to release at the $59.99 price tag knowing they will have to sell a million+ copies to break even.

Once the next Xbox and PS are released, I imagine we'll start to see our first wave of $69.99 games hit the shelves, else EA and Activision will become the Microsoft/Apple of game development.