Bloody Wolf goes for more on PC Engine.... Why?

[TheClash603]

How times have changed!  That's interesting that 100,000/200,000 sales were deemed a hit.  By that logic, that probably means a game with tens of thousands of copies sold did pretty good.

Today game success is measured in millions due to the crazy budgets of AAA games.  Sure it's different for independent companies and e-shop types of games, but the growth of game budgets for major studios is crazy.

I wonder how many copies the old bomberman games sold.  Bomberman R on switch has sold around 1 million copies and I believe is the most successful game in the series.

[SavagePencil]

Game prices also haven’t increased much in 30 years, still hovering around the $50-$60 in the US.  At 100K units, that’s $6 million bucks, of which a developer might walk away with a million, which should be enough to pay off debts from the current game and afford the start of the next game.  Those numbers haven’t changed significantly, but salaries and team sizes sure have...

[Black Tiger]

GTA V is supposed to have a development budget of $265 and if marketing was comparable to big budget films, then it was likely a similar number on top of that.

I don't think that the R&D, first year manufactoring and marketing of any 8 or 16-bit consoles came close to just the dev cost of that one game.

[SavagePencil]

Right; Wing Commander III in ‘94 pushed barriers at $4 million, and budgets went exponential from there.  Game prices stayed the same.  Install base and dev team size required to meet the status quo kept growing, making it harder to take risks.

[Winniez]

Would be interesting to know about PCE sales figures game by game. But as I understood that data is not really available. I bet the later Hucard games sold in relative low numbers. From my very limited research I also got an impression that 100k - especially for later Hucards - was a smash hit.

I remember hearing that Magical Chase was the best selling Hucard at some point, probably in one specific month. Still strange that the Japanese version is so expensive, I get that the US release saw an extremely limited print run and the demand for the Japanese version comes from there. But there are so many Japan only games without any US release, many of which are likely more scarce than the Magical Chase.

Blazing Lazers is definitely more common than Gunhead, in Europe there were still new old stock few years ago. And also at this point its a fair assumption that the demand for PCE games in general is greater than for Turbo games. For Turbo the market is pretty much North America, for PCE its the whole world, including North America.

[Winniez]

One big difference is that back then the actual manufacturing cost of games was pretty high where as its mere pennies now. When you think about it the CD games were not that much cheaper when they first came out.

Atleast in Japan they used to price games based on the ROM-size and possible addition chips, basically how much it costs to manufacture the cart.

[esteban]

One big difference is that back then the actual manufacturing cost of games was pretty high where as its mere pennies now. When you think about it the CD games were not that much cheaper when they first came out.

Atleast in Japan they used to price games based on the ROM-size and possible addition chips, basically how much it costs to manufacture the cart.

Yes, and I think there is at least one example of NA using the ROM-size pricing:

Toys R Us had R-TYPE priced at something ridiculous $69.99 in 1990 dollars from the first time it appeared and for at least a year afterwards... I always thought it might be some weird

No, I don’t really have any proof, beyond my anecdotal evidence, but I can’t fathom why only R-type commanded this price... (I don’t think it was the strength  of the “R-Type Brand” that could command this price).

For comparison, the other TG-16 games were priced at 39.99-49.99 range (in general). CD-ROM titles skewed higher ($50-60).

[Necromancer]

One big difference is that back then the actual manufacturing cost of games was pretty high where as its mere pennies now. When you think about it the CD games were not that much cheaper when they first came out.

I've not seen much of anything historical on the cost to press games specifically, but you can find stuff on music CDs.  Assuming a disc is a disc and the price would be comparable, they were cheap: $4 each early on but down to just a buck in the early 90s.  No doubt that's in large quantities, though, so the per unit cost would've been much higher if they tried to spread the setup and mastering costs to 1000 units or less.

[Punch]

No way manufacturing costs were larger than $15 per disc in 1989 (and the $15 is a very conservative guess!), discs always were more cheaper than PCBs with ROMs and plastic in it. The price difference in early TGX16 CD games can probably be explained more by operational costs (expensive as hell devkits, having to hire someone to master audio tracks into a DAT tape for manufacturing, difficulties in debugging and programming, more resources spent on the game overall). Remember that even the first game for the PCECD was developed with a borrowed Hu7CD system (Alfa System went to Sapporo to develop Fighting Street as Hudson was the only one with the CD dev system for obvious reasons).

And even if it was very expensive early on, it probably dropped in price dramatically during the early 90's.