Phantasy Star: Fringes of Algo

But whenever you guys comment you make it farther and farther, if they have to be made specially by machines and require more stuff, it shouldn't make them cheaper, right? I live just a ways from a store that will sell any genesis game for less than a regular PS or Xbox game.

if they have to be made specially by machines and require more stuff, it shouldn't make them cheaper, right?

No. Think of it like this. If I wanted to make a series of NES, Super NES, and Game Boy games, I would need three distinct machines to assemble each type of game. Let's say each machine costs $1000 (it would be much more, but just for example). Plus I would also have to buy the plastic cart shells. Only Nintendo makes those, because they have a patent on the design. That means I have to pay whatever Nintendo wants to charge me. If they want to charge $10 per shell, then I can't argue that if I want to make the games. If I want to print 1,000 games, that's $3000 for the machines and $10,000 for the shells, totaling $13,000. We're not even counting other costs here, like the circuit board, memory chips, or the gold and silver used on the circuit boards.

If I wanted to make Playstation 2 games, Xbox games, and a movie DVD, I could do all of those on one single machine because they all use DVD discs (again, $1000 for the example machine). I can get the DVD discs from any of many manufacturers, so I can pay a much lower price for them. One company might charge $10 per disc, but another will charge much less, say $5 (In reality no company would charge even that much). For 1,000 discs, that's just $5,000, for a total of $6,000.

I live just a ways from a store that will sell any genesis game for less than a regular PS or Xbox game.

Genesis games sell for less now because they're older and harder to move off the shelf than those others. That's more about current demand than production cost. I've seen PS and Xbox games that sell for less than some Super Nintendo or Genesis games.

When a game first comes out, the publishing company has a say in what price is on it. They call that the Suggested Retail Price. When Genesis games came out, it was common for them to occasionally be very expensive. Phantasy Star IV originally cost around $100!

After games have been in circulation for a long time, as Genesis games have been now, the publishing company no longer sells them. They're sold only by second hand dealers, so those dealers have full control of the prices. They set prices based on demand. Fewer people want Genesis games these days, so there is low demand, leading to low prices. Some games, like SNES Chrono Trigger, are in very high demand, so they might sell for a lot more than even their original store price.

Alright that explains it much better.