Well they never specified more or less than $60.
And for my part I’m talking averages. Prices were very much less consistent then they are now.
To my memory, at least with PC games, it wasn’t retailers so much as distributors.
My friends and I were nerdy little shits and subscribed to a bunch of different PC gaming magazines at the time. At least one of them would publish price listings. Which games were moving to what price on what date that month. It’s part of how you knew to go to the mall.
From what I gather it was about pushing through production runs. Producing software at the time being much like publishing anything. You’d have a “printing” of x copies ordered up by a distributor and you wouldn’t make more till those distributors wanted more. If they didn’t it went out of print. That distributor wanted to push through it as fast as possible so the price steadily dropped.
And there were a lot of local retailers in smaller towns that just didn’t play that game. I remember our local computer shop regularly charged over $100 for any and all games. Even for very old ones.
I can remember popping in a few times in college as that had left them with a lot of very old stuff hanging around. The thought was it might be a decent place to pick up harder to find retro stuff. Still charging $120 for 15 year old games. Ones that were $20 on Ebay.
