Cost of NES/SNES/etc. carts for developers back in the day?

I've heard rumors that back in the 80s, NES developers had to pay $9 US per cart for the lockout chip alone! I would hope that included the licensing fees. Anyway, anyone know what the costs were for Nintendo/Sega developers to get carts made back in the 80s/90s? How the costs changed as time passed (ie. MMCs becoming cheaper)? I'm really curious! Someone must have documents or such with the pricing information!

 

You'll find, I'm sure, that the developers didn't make the games, but Nintendo had them made.

Developers send the final code to be burnt to ROM / on ROM to Nintendo, who make the carts. Same as a Saturn CD, Dreamcast CD, Playstation CD....

So, to answer your question, the only information on the price of a cart back then would be from an internal Nintendo source. They may possibly have sold prototyping carts... although looking at some of the shabby proto cartridges, I'm not totally sure about that! In that case, it would probably have been like those 2600 prototyping boards that you see on eBay - in fact, I remember seeing a SNES proto that was just a PCB.

 

Of course Nintendo manufactured the carts! However, the developers/publishers did in fact pay Nintendo to get their cartridges made, heh. My question was how much they had to pay Nintendo, and how the prices changed over time, etc. For example, by the time MMC3 cartridges came out, CNROM would surely have dropped in price.

Nintendo did sell prototyping cartridges. The SNES ones are quite common. The NES ones include NES-TKEPROM and so on. Some developers didn't pay for these proto carts, and instead, modified exisiting carts to use EPROMs and such.