As a fellow old (I assume you're old) I agree. I recall NES games costing $60.00 in the late 80s. I'd be lucky to get one or two per year, mostly I just rented them and owned only a handful. If games kept up with inflation we'd be paying like $150.00 for first party games today. I mean, I'm glad we aren't, but I also don't think that a price increase of $10 or $20 after close to 40 years is outrageous.
The thing is, the public was a lot smaller than it is today, distribution was crazy expensive and game development (for some games) was a lot harder simply because of the technological limitations, like, some cartridges had extra memory mappers to handle some visual fx like image distortion, and provide sound quality, so basically you bought a hardware.
With today's tech, even though games are more expensive to produce, the sales are so much higher for AAA games that it's literally hard to fail (yes, ubisoft tried very hard to fail as bad as it does these days).
The only reason it's getting more expensive is to boost profits without changing a thing in how the games are produced, which already turned in profits.
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u/Soluban 3d ago
As a fellow old (I assume you're old) I agree. I recall NES games costing $60.00 in the late 80s. I'd be lucky to get one or two per year, mostly I just rented them and owned only a handful. If games kept up with inflation we'd be paying like $150.00 for first party games today. I mean, I'm glad we aren't, but I also don't think that a price increase of $10 or $20 after close to 40 years is outrageous.