Nagiko from ‘Blow In the Game Slot‘ has a post up at the moment about the price of current games (Gears of War) and where the money really goes.

ON A $60 GAME OF GEARS:

* 25% (aka $15) goes to pay the art and design guys.
* 20% ($12) goes to pay the programmers and the engineers.
* 20% (also $12) goes to your friendly neighborhood retailer.
EB / GameStop, whoever.
* 11.5% ($7) goes to a “Console Owner Fee” - ie. whichever one
of the Big Boys made your hardware (Sony, MS, Nintendo.)
* 7% ($4) goes to marketing, and puts Mad World and Marcus Fenix
on MTV.
* 5% ($3) goes to “market development” — paying for cardboard
Standees of the Gears Crew and elbowing other games out of the way
for shelf space at your local retailer.
* 5% ($3) goes to actually manufacturing and packaging the disc.
* 5% ($3) is spent paying the Man for IP licenses or maybe
hiring some big name voice actors. If your game isn’t an original IP,
here’s where you get dinged by Marvel, Disney, or Ray Liotta’s agent.
* 1.5% (just $1) goes into the publisher’s pocket.
* 1.5% (also $1) goes into the distributor’s pocket.
* 0.3% (about 20 cents) goes into corporate costs. Management,
overhead, lawyers, etc.
* 0.05% (less than 3 cents) go into the cost of paying for the
Developer’s Hardware. Who knew an SDKs can cost tens of thousands of
dollars?

Now, When reading this, I remembered something I watched a while back. It was a British TV show about games that used to show back in the early to mid Nineties on ITV. The show was called ‘Bad Influence!‘ and you can actually download some of the shows from their website just to see how bad 90s TV really was. I watched one of the episodes awhile ago which had a review of Yoshis Island: Super Mario World 2 for the SNES. In the review they stated that the price of the game was £60. Which equals roughly 117.85 US dollars. That is way way expensive. Luckily, things have changed since then with pretty much every 360 game costing around £40 ($78) and most Wii games are the same (as were Gamecube games actually).

Luckily games have gone down in price since the mid nineties. I assume that heavy price was due to the manufacture prices of complicated cartridges. But still, you can see that if that was the price to pay for first hand games, its no wonder why it was seen as a ‘geeky’ pasttime.

Source: Blow in the Game Slot

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