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A thread on the pricing of #NES #homebrew games (and other things), excerpted with my thoughts from a Discord chat because it might be interesting for those who think $60 is a lot to ask for a physical cartridge, and I welcome the discussion and different perspectives. (1/13)
$60 seems pricey, but I paid $45 for Mega Man 4 when it was new back in the day, which I think equates to $70ish now, and boards are much more expensive now because they aren't mass-produced. (2/13)
Meanwhile, folks will pay hundreds for older games that don't even support Nintendo or the game developers, so I'm happy to support these indie games on outdated media whenever I can. I can't buy a cart for every homebrew, but if a $10 ROM is available I'll do that. (3/13)
(The ROMs are a fairly new, and much appreciated, development. Many homebrew games used to be released on cart once and that was it. Meanwhile, I sometimes see people begging or sharing ROMs of new homebrew games, even if they can just pay $10 for them.) (4/13)
I'm more likely to buy carts I'm pretty sure I will love, mostly platformers. And in some sense, these are more collectible than official games because they're made in more limited quantities, if that's something you care about. (5/13)
It's maybe a bit harder to justify for some people, when $60 is the cost of a new Switch game too, and many contemporary games can be purchased for much less, particularly when they're used. (6/13)
But it all depends on what kinds of games you want to play and how much you value physical media. NES happens to be my main thing :) (7/13)
I just listened to the recent @LimitedRunGames episode of @retronauts, where they discussed their repros of games like Star Wars on NES and the new Jay & Silent Bob homebrew, and it was very illuminating in terms of the cost. (8/13)
The boards for their homebrew release of GALF I think cost them $20 each, plus there's packaging and stuff. They have a new supplier for their NES boards which brings it down to $15 or so. (My numbers could be wrong, but something in that range.) (9/13)
The other thing, which I see in book publishing all the time, is people are hung up on the cost of the thing and its tangibility: "This is an eBook, so why is it as expensive as a paperback?" etc.— (10/13)
forgetting that there's a whole bunch of people who put time and money into making that thing: The author, the editors, the graphic designers, layout artists, copyeditors, proofreaders, printers, distributors and so on. (11/13)
What's the true value of a game that may have taken six years to make and a very small team spending their nights and weekends to work on it? The physical edition may cost about $30 to produce, but a lot of time and talent went into making it. (12/13)
There's also something to be said for showing support and enabling creators you like to continue creating things you will like. If someone likes my books but only for free, chances are I won't be able to keep writing professionally, so there won't be any more books. (13/13)
Thank you for coming to my NES Talk.
