CITATION NEEDED.
Demonstrably false. What the hell?
While people definitely bought new games back then, I believe they bought fewer on average than people do now.
Growing up, I remember how buying brand new games was pretty rare for me and many my friends and family in the 90's. Outside of birthday and Christmas gifts, it usually involved buying used, renting, borrowing, or even just going over to someone else's house to play the games they had. The total amount of games people owned for a given system was comparatively small to today in my experience--especially for the cartridge based systems.
Personally, I was very reliant on renting when I was a kid. In fact, when I first got an N64 in 1998, I didn't actually get any games with it. Initially, I just rented them until my mom bought me a container of loose N64 carts she found for a good price at a yard sale. For the first year or so of owning it, I think the only new N64 game I got was GoldenEye. Looking back at the other cart-based systems I had at the time, most of the brand new games I got were as gifts for a special occasion and very few of them were even recent releases at that.
This is, however, merely anecdotal evidence based on my own personal experiences that I'm trying to remember from over 20 years ago. As such, I wanted to see if there was any empirical evidence to back up my memory. So I looked up the tie ratio (the average number of new games someone bought for a given console) for the older systems. According to the chart on
this page, the N64 had an attach rate of 6.83 while the PS1 and Saturn had ratios of 9.43 and 9.09 respectively. Going further back, the SNES had a ratio of 7.72 and the NES was 8.08. The ratios for the Genesis/MD and Master System are extremely high relative to every other systems (even modern ones), so I suspect these entries may be including sales data from the clone consoles with built in games and South America, where both the consoles and games were sold long after they were discontinued in the rest of the world.
Regardless, it seems that most of the disc based consoles seemed to have a higher tie ratio than the cartridge based ones. Further, with the exception of the Xboxes and the WiiU, the consoles released after the 90s appeared to have higher ratios too. If the data on this page are accurate, it would suggest there's at least some truth behind the anecdotes I and others have shared in this thread about people buying fewer new games--especially carts--during that time.
Did you not read my post? They were $60 at launch, and remained so for about a year. I literally have the receipts. Your timeframe of Sep 1996 is barely in that time range; the Playstation launched on 9/9/1995. Telling me you paid $50 for games in 97 onward is just repeating what I said: games dropped to $50 and stayed there for years.
In 1996 and early 1997, I bought a ton of PS1 games, and they were all $60 except the Namco titles. I literally have the receipts for Ridge Racer, Rayman, Tekken, Jumping Flash, Warhawk, Twisted Metal, Assault Rigs, Descent, and Resident Evil. All $60 except for Ridge Racer and Tekken, which were $50.
I don't have a hard date for the change. I paid $60 for Final Doom in October 96, but I don't have another receipt for a PS1 game until almost a year later; Oddworld and Tomb Raider 2 were $50, which by that point was definitely the standard for quite a while. Almost certainly the whole of '97, and back into '96. I bought a ton of other games that year ('96), but don't have receipts to pin it down. It was definitely in response to the N64, though, so probably near its launch.
I'm more than happy to post the receipts I mentioned. I'm 100% right about this and I can prove it.
I stumbled across pictures from a
1995 Toys R Us ad on Twitter after a brief search.
As you can see here, Mortal Kombat III for PS1 is $57.99 and that's
after a coupon, so you're right about the prices initially being higher. Don't know when they dropped down to $50 as the norm, though based on the other ads I've seen, sometime in 1996 would be a good bet. I thought they were always $50 too, but I actually learned something new today.
