"At least that's the way I remember it ... anyone have a different recollection of that era?" Yeah... I was a software developer for a living when CD-ROM came out... and like most places our software was less expensive on CD than it would have been otherwise. Was it more expensive than the previous floppy releases? Sure. It was also a new versiona dn would have been more expensive anyway. Software pricing is easy... it's basically... unit_price = ((development_cost + production_cost) / unit_sales) * profit_factor Where profit_factor is 1.3 for 30% profit and so on. Publishing on CD-ROM dramatically reduces production costs over floppies, and piracy reduces the unit_sales.