Cost to Manufacture NES Cartridges

[BubbleBobble]

Hey, I'm working on a project on unlicensed NES games. Color Dreams (a company that produced plenty of poor quality unlicensed carts) claims that Nintendo made licensed developers pay up to three times more to manufacture cartridges than it would cost for Color Dreams to produce them for themselves without stating actual figures. I've scoured the internet for more information on the price of manufacturing a single cartridge, but have yet to find anything! Anyone know the numbers or perhaps some resources or information I may not have stumbled upon yet?

[Pixelboy]

So you want to manufacture a single NES cartridge? That would be prohibitively expensive. You might as well just take a Super Mario Bros donor cart, remove the label, and voilà.

 

Or you should just check here: http://www.nesreproductions.com

[BubbleBobble]

No, I don't want to produce one. I want to know how much it cost to produce one! How much did Nintendo spend on each individual cartridge?

[Pixelboy]

No, I don't want to produce one. I want to know how much it cost to produce one! How much did Nintendo spend on each individual cartridge?

Oh, well then, it all comes down to how many are fabricated. If you make only a small run, then it can get very expensive, but if you have thousands made, the per-cart price comes down dramatically.

 

The plastic casing of an NES cart, for example, could cost as little as a single dollar to make, IF you make, say, over 5000 of them (this does not include the cost of the custom metal mold required by the plastic injection machinery).

 

I'm not too sure about prices for the electronics inside the cart, but the same logic applies: The more you make, the cheaper the per-unit cost gets.

[fiddlepaddle]

Nintendo charged a fee for each cartridge manufactured whenever any developer wanted sell games. The developer had to negotiate with Nintendo for that right, and each contract was unique depending on the number of games, the territory where they would be released, and the clout of the developer. That fee was a significant part of the retail price/wholesale cost of each game. In addition, Nintendos production costs were likely the highest in 1984/1985 during initial production and would have dropped each year with experience and economies of scale as they got bigger and bigger volumes in their factory. This means the "cost" of making the games was variable for Nintendo, and different between each developer.

 

Third party unlicensed games, such as those by Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree, Tengen, and others, most likely all had different costs to manufacture due to the different volumes and overhead structure of the different organizations. To make things even more difficult for you to do your research, all of these companies would have considered the cost information a secret to be protected from the competition, so it may be very difficult to find using any public sources. The costs could certainly be estimated, however, based on production volume.

[dendawg]

I don't have any evidence to back it up, bur I remember reading an anecdote in one of the gaming magazines at the time that Nintendo charged 3rd party developers $35 US for every single N64 cartridge produced. I could only assume they charged roughly as much per NES cart back in the day.

Edited July 20, 2010 by dendawg

[PsychoKittyNet]

Well, on Retro USB the case is 4 dollors and a standar board is also 4 bucks, while a MMC1 is 9. Still, it is missing a lot of chips and since they are not a big operation...who knows really.

[tz101]

I don't have any evidence to back it up, bur I remember reading an anecdote in one of the gaming magazines at the time that Nintendo charged 3rd party developers $35 US for every single N64 cartridge produced. I could only assume they charged roughly as much per NES cart back in the day.

 

That seems mighty steep considering that most NES games retailed around $40-50 at consumer outlets. It wouldn't leave much margin for profit, would it?

[dendawg]

Well i'm sure the prices were proportional for NES carts. As I said in my previous post I have nothing to back it up with. Nothing but memory on my end.

[Video]

It wouldn't have cost Nintendo over $10 to produce a cart, as they had all the molds and board, etc. I seem to recall someone saying once that the liscense fron Mintendo was like $35, which sounds like a lot, but heh, I don't know.

 

I do know what it costs to make 2600 parts, just scale that up to no more than 2K (excluding the rom chips)

[godslabrat]

Someone wrote in to Nintendo Power in the very early years, and said that an NES cart cost $5 to make. Nintendo didn't deny it, they only explained that the true "cost" of the cart was in developing the game and artwork.

 

So... odd, you'd think if it weren't true, they'd have shot the guy right down instead of slow-dancing with the answer.