"What other entertainment medium that's mass market is at $60 a pop?" said Cliff Bleszinski, lead designer at developer Epic's 360 title "Gears of War," due next year. "If video game pricing continues to go up, we will crash."

Bleszinski acknowledges that developing a next-gen game is more expensive than making a title for an Xbox or PS2. He estimates that his "Gears of War" team will max out at 30 or 40 people, as opposed to the 25 he would have used to make a game for the pre-360 era. But he thinks increasing prices is not the answer. "I think video game prices need to go down," he said. "Fifty dollars is far too much for an impulse buy. Sixty dollars is completely out of the question."

"We believe that premium titles command premium pricing," said EA spokesperson Tammy Schachter when asked why EA's first-run 360 titles were selling for $10 more than the company's first-run titles for Xbox, PS2 and GameCube. "These are deep, rich, complex games."

In fact, games for the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo and the mid-'90s Nintendo 64 sometimes went for even more. "I can remember spending $80 on a cartridge," said Smith, who, while in the seventh grade, had even spent $100 to import the Japanese version of "Strider" for his Genesis. It was Sony's entry to the market with the first PlayStation in 1995 that began to push prices down to $50 and even $40 for new games.