[manmal]

> For example, I spent $30 for Atari video games in the 1980s and it was a lot less expensive to produce. That game would cost $90 today with inflation.

And the Nintendo Switch has sold 5x as many consoles as did Atari. Likely a similar scale for games sold. Nintendo very likely makes more in total than Atari did, even with lower prices.

[johnnyanmac]

I don't know, maybe. The economies of scale and 40 years of iteration make it hard to compare apples to apples like that. As well as the fact that Nintendo's game team went from maybe 5-10 Japanese designers that can fit in a garage (well, not a Japanese garage) to multiple thousands of employees focusing on different sectors of the business.

The main surprise is that they can bs surprisingly lean with their core development teams to this day. Apparently Super Mario Wonder had a core team of around 20 devs.