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Furry

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Shmoopy said:
Money spent vs outcome, Concord has got to be the biggest bomb in gaming history? I've seen various lists of bombs but nothing comes this close?

Possibly adjusted for inflation the ET Atari game.

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ET is the biggest bomb in history? It was like the one of the best selling atari games of all time and probably turned a profit. Not sure why people say its a huge bomb.

Yea, it wasn't as successful as they wanted, but I'm not sure why people think its the biggest bomb of all time. There was way more wrong with the market to cause the 83 crash. ET's miss-steps were really just a preview of the greater issue.
 
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Gavinmad

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Furry said:
ET is the biggest bomb in history? It was like the one of the best selling atari games of all time and probably turned a profit. Not sure why people say its a huge bomb.

Yea, it wasn't as successful as they wanted, but I'm not sure why people think its the biggest bomb of all time. There was way more wrong with the market to cause the 83 crash. ET's miss-steps were really just a preview of the greater issue.
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"Talking out of one's ass" perfectly encapsulated in a single post.
 
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reavor

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Overwatch succeeded cos it was blizzard and they got in fairly early before market saturation
 
Cybsled

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mkopec said:
My therory is because of more saturation. Games back then were more niche. Today they are pretty much in every home. Best selling Atari 2600 game was Pac Man with 8.5 million.
We now have games selling in the hundreds of millions.
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Yes and no. One reason games were so expensive back then was the tech involved in cartridges was still relatively new and required microchips and memory (granted cost of scale would reduce the price). Plus with Nintendo, they basically had a stranglehold monopoly on both the carts and licensing. Unlicensed NES games got litigated - only time I ever saw the unlicensed NES stuff was at video stores to rent.

That was one reason Playstation was successful - CDs were cheap as fuck to manufacture compared to carts, so in turn they could charge a lot less for games and still turn a profit.
 
Ukerric

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Captain Suave said:
I paid $80 for FFIII on release. That's fucking $170 today. Games keep getting cheaper.
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Import of games to France was weird in the 80s. I remember paying 720 Francs for Ultima III, because there was only a single store that had copies of that in 1983 for the Apple II. In today's prices, that'd be 272 euros, or $300.
 
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Pyros

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Ukerric said:
Import of games to France was weird in the 80s. I remember paying 720 Francs for Ultima III, because there was only a single store that had copies of that in 1983 for the Apple II. In today's prices, that'd be 272 euros, or $300.
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Even for Nintendo stuff later on it was still weird, PAL versions usually were cheaper but they took forever to port games(often more than a year, if the game ever came at all) so it was all about importing the US versions, which came with an additional cost. Can't say I remember the exact amounts though because I was a kid so I wasn't paying back then.

I also honestly can't remember how I was buying PC games back then. I know I bought a bunch, mostly Sierra adventure games but don't remember where at all which is kinda weird. I guess once the Internet became a thing I stopped buying games in general since I was downloading everything, and once I started being an adult and buying games again, the era of Steam already started so I was just buying everything there.
 
Brahma

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Cybsled said:
Atari games were expensive back then (I remember shitty Atari 5200 games selling for like $80 at Service Merchandise), but the math doesn't make sense there unless they're adjusting for inflation and like you said they were counting the retail box price as the loss. According to the wiki article, Atari spent $22 million for the rights and had like 3,500,000 unsold games or so. If they were $50 each, that means 175 million. But if you roughly adjusted for inflation, you're looking at 525 million retail box price which is closer to that number.
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80 bucks? Man you sure? I remember them being AROUND 20 bucks, because I could get a game like every month if I saved my 5 dollar a week allowance.
 
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Furry

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Gavinmad said:
"Talking out of one's ass" perfectly encapsulated in a single post.
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Oh look its a gavinmad post, let me put on my gavinmad hat.

Season 5 Spinning GIF by Pee-wee Herman

No you!!
 
Borzak

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Didn't someone find a large amount of Atari ET cartridges in a landfill somewhere some time back. They must have just dumped a shitload of them. Brings me back to when someone dumped a lot of IBM AT hard drives off Florida to make a artificial reef.
 
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Cybsled

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Brahma said:
80 bucks? Man you sure? I remember them being AROUND 20 bucks, because I could get a game like every month if I saved my 5 dollar a week allowance.
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I mean it was Service Merchandise - probably one reason they went out of business lol. I just remember as a kid we went into one and they were selling Atari games for like $70-80 and at the time NES was out and I remember thinking even then "who would pay that much money for a dumb atari game? it's like 2 or 4 bit or whatever!".

Now that I think back on it, I think it was right around the time they were going out of business, so it was probably like Bed Bath & Beyond - everything is massively marked up. Like shortly before the one near me closed, I remember going through there and they were literally charging like 50-60% more than the Target a few stores down for the same damn thing in some cases.
 
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Brahma

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The most I remember paying for any cartridge game was 90 bucks for Phantasy Star II. Also, a decade later, paying 100+ for the special edition Madden that had EVERY team like eveeeer.
 
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Aazrael

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Shmoopy said:
Money spent vs outcome, Concord has got to be the biggest bomb in gaming history? I've seen various lists of bombs but nothing comes this close?

Possibly adjusted for inflation the ET Atari game.

www.ranker.com

The 14 Biggest Flops In Video Game History

The video game industry is one of the most profitable fields in the world, with franchises like all the Mario games and Grand Theft Auto. But even the best farms tend to yield bad crops once in a while, and the game industry is no exception. Now, these aren't just video games with terrible...
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Crazy to see Grim Fandango on that list. I always thought it was a success. But maybe it was during the end of point and click adventure games and only the die hard fans bought it. I loved it but I have a soft spot for adventure games.
 
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Ritley

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Brahma said:
The most I remember paying for any cartridge game was 90 bucks for Phantasy Star II. Also, a decade later, paying 100+ for the special edition Madden that had EVERY team like eveeeer.
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Think I paid $70 for a used crono trigger copy (obviously snes and not nes). They had already stopped making them so you couldn’t find them new anymore, but this was well before you could buy that shit on all sorts of different platforms
 
Mist

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Brahma said:
The most I remember paying for any cartridge game was 90 bucks for Phantasy Star II. Also, a decade later, paying 100+ for the special edition Madden that had EVERY team like eveeeer.
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The most I've ever paid for a video game was Diablo 4 and it fucking sucked.
 
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