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    [OC] Has Mario Kart Really Gotten More Expensive (US)?
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    [OC] Has Mario Kart Really Gotten More Expensive (US)?


    • Source: For nominal prices I used various sources. The price of recent games is easy to find on Wikipedia, older games oftentimes varied a lot in price so I resorted to finding catalog screenshots from the 90s and parsing through posts on forums from the 2000s. It may well be the case that the nominal price you paid for Mario Kart games in the 90s varies by ~10 USD one way or another. I then ran the numbers through an inflation adjustment tool with July 2025 USD as the baseline. This site was also quite useful although it most certainly underestimates the nominal price of the 90s games: https://gamerant.com/mario-kart-game-launch-price-adjusted-inflation-difference-increase/
    • Clickable source for real income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
    • Tool: R, ggplot2

    Posted by provoking-steep-dipl

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    22 Comments

    1. sam_my_friend on

      The truth hurts so much. I’ve bought new AAA games for $50 no more than… What felt like… A couple of years ago?

      I’m getting old.

    3. Beefstu409 on

      Thank you for posting this Jesus. For some reason gamers think all game developers should make 750k/year and all video games should be free. We are lucky where we are right now, games are more expensive than ever to make and relatively unchanged in price.

    4. Bbbq_byobb_1 on

      This is such a confusion graph to read. Literally just putting price adjusted for inflation would be better. 

    6. CMDR_omnicognate on

      Yeah but this isn’t representative of spending power as such, mario kart may have stayed more or less equal in respect to inflation since 2014 but wages have not increased at the same rate as the inflation, so people have less comparative disposable income.

    7. TheRagingAmish on

      In 2001 a top notch AAA game cost $50

      My Xbox titles mostly cost 50

      24 years of inflation puts you at $80

      Yeesh…I feel old

    8. breakthro444 on

      Games should be $100+ by now. There is no commodity in existence besides maybe GPUs and consoles where the consumer simultaneously demands that the product get better with each new iteration *AND* expects the price to remain the exact same for years.

      We sat on $60 for nearly two decades. That’s wild.

    10. Hotpotabo on

      People get so mad at me whenever I say that games are better and cheaper now compared to when we were kids. I know “better” is subjective but to me it’s so obviously true.

    11. HonestButtholeReview on

      I remember paying $60 for games in the early 90s, which was so much money back then, especially for a child. So many chores done for one game bought because the cover looked cool and a magazine said it might be good…

    12. Patccmoi on

      That’s just generally true that games 30 years ago were SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive. As a teen having to save up 60-70 CAD$ for a game was a lot when I was making like 5-6$/h. Now games are about 90 CAD$ with the minimum wage over 15$/h.

      Went from like 10h of minimum wages work to 6h of work to buy a full price game. Which totally matches your graph.

    13. IncarceratedScarface on

      I thought it was odd games were $60 for so long. I wish they just would have incrementally increased prices like $5 instead of raising them $20

    14. toniblast on

      I don’t get people defending price increases in video games back then. Create the game, make the cartridges or CDs, boxes, transport them to the store, and then sell them to the customer. Now most games are digital. It’s so much easier and cheaper to sell games now.

    15. Dracogame on

      Salary growth outpaced inflation WHERE?

      Also, at what price was the game sold? I bought Mario Kart 8 and got another full game packaged with it, Nintendo run a big promo.

    17. PennyStockWatcher72 on

      I have no problem paying $80 for a game as long as I’m getting $80 worth of quality out of a game.

    18. Freddy_Pharkas on

      Now do games made by KOEI in the SNES era. Expensive as all hell in the US. Like $90 for an import of Liberty or Death, etc.

    19. hollow_bagatelle on

      Astroturfed ass post trying to justify a ridiculous price hike.

      Ok, you adjusted for inflation, cool.

      Did you adjust for the cost of living? Did you adjust for cost vs income discrepancy over time (minimum wage should be WAY higher)? Did you adjust for innovations in packaging and production to make things an order of magnitude cheaper to manufacture en masse? Did you adjust for innovations in technology requiring less material for the game itself, which reduces weight and thereby shipping fees and gas used to transport it? Did you adjust for the cheaper and faster development processes utilizing game engines and art engines that solve 90% of the hardest parts of development for you, letting you use less people and less time to make them?

      No, you tried to defend some shit that shouldn’t be defended with the bare miniumum mathematics to back it up.

      People in the comments talking about “woah the truth hurts” no, because there’s no truth here. The truth is something that cost 5 bucks to make and ship out to be sold to you back then now costs less than a dollar to do the same. The same amount of R&D cost now takes substantially less and is done faster with far greater amount of content yielded per dollar spent. Another piece people don’t seem to consider often is price variances based on location. In the central southeastern US video games in the N64 era were $25 to $40 at my local walmart, on release day. I remember Mario N64 was 40, I remember the descent was 25, both on release. I know this because I was fucking there. I also know that during that time online marketplaces didn’t exist yet. The global price-fixing which is technically illegal yet somehow normalized by everyone at this point hadn’t started to have an effect yet, making prices WILDLY different depending on where you went. Some stores didn’t even try to carry video games because no one knew what that shit even was yet, so if you found a store that had them in say…. the middle of nowhere Arkansas, you could do like I did and pick up a copy of goldeneye sealed, a month after release for like 15 bucks.

    20. VeeTeeF on

      I definitely remember $60 N64 games back in the mid-90’s. I’m pretty sure one of the games I bought was $70. People are crazy complaining about $80 games when they’ve barely gone up in price in 30+ years.

    22. Splinterfight on

      Excluding handheld titles, it’s impressive that they’ve stayed the same price since 2001