Not so much defense, more like "uhh, yeah, things cost money, inflation exists, welcome to the real world", and I can't disagree honestly. People gotta use an inflation calculator on old games.
This meme does have real "too late, I drew you as the soy cuck and myself as the chad!" energy.
They no longer have to make and ship cartridges to distribute them. They just let you download said game. The margins are insanely large. Add in they not longer subsidize consoles and release a new one every few years... yea. also the technology isn't improving that much as we have reached a pretty big limit on screen size etc. No more big innovation to make graphics look perfect- it is just art style now and most of the games reuse what works.
Everyone else is talking about the labor costs, but shipping digital downloads isn't free. The data has to be hosted on servers capable of delivering the bandwidth for thousands of people to download the game simultaneously and get it done in a reasonable amount of time. That's probably a few hundred thousand dollars annually per game. Higher for the first couple of weeks and months when demand is higher.
Cheaper than manufacturing the cartridges, sure, but not free. And since they are still manufacturing cartridges, they still have to pay for the machines and bespoke molds and assembly lines, but now with a smaller economy of scale since they're getting far fewer sales of the cartridge version.
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u/Avnesya 1d ago edited 1d ago
Is there actually "people" unironically defending em at this point?
Legit asking
edit : typo