Seems like something the EU should be pushing back against.

It's probably not for every game, we don't know that exactly right now. See this screenshot.

you have to consider the cost in terms of real wages though, inflation only makes production costs higher for producers, for customers money is worth about as much as it has been since the 70's; though this changes from income quantile to income quantile, and from market to market.

the price increases only reflects confidence Nintendo has in their DRM.

Except back then there were a lot fewer customers, cartridges cost a lot more to manufacture, and there wasn't countless DLC to make even more money. Also, now there are so many games that the raw supply is practically infinite.

We didn’t buy most games when I was a kid, we rented them. There were countless games we paid $5 to rent for a week and that was plenty of time to finish the whole game and return it.

I only had one rich friend who had like a hundred games he owned. He let me borrow some of them but most of them I had already rented and finished myself. There were only a few games I ended up owning myself, such as Tecmo Super Bowl and the Legend of Zelda.

Some games could also be bought used for a lot less than full price (at stores such as The Games Exchange). They also bought games back from you when you were done with them!

If I could time travel to live back then as an adult I would rent everything and only buy a game if I foresaw wanting to play it long after a week was up.

They've been inflation proof because consumers lose their shit so hard with every price increase. The price of games is just much more visible and much more conceptually ingrained than with most other products, so every increase hits consumer awareness that much harder.

Prices instead increased in other more indirect ways. Micro-transactions in their many forms are the most obvious case. The price of your "full game" may not have gone up, but then there's a nearly limitless trickle of smaller supplementary purchases adding to the cost.

Inflation was for a long time offset by a steep decline in the cost of delivering the product, and thats still true for the digital copies to a large extent, but with most AAA games blowing huge budgets on production publishers have been wanting to push the ceiling up for years now.

How does inflation matter though? The price of current games would have also reflected increases in inflation if that was the case.

With production costs that can not be decreasing

They've been ~$60 since the early 1990s. At least.

Idk, the price of everything has gone up due to inflation and other factors, makes sense that games would too.

I'm not going to buy them at that price, but it makes sense

On the bright side, your pile of shame is now so big that you can live in it and avoid buying a house!

I'm not sure if we're agreeing or not. I was only talking about physical, and Amazon, Argos, etc. always sell for cheaper than Nintendo's webstore. I sure hope physical games aren't being phased out, but maybe this price difference between digital and physical is just reflecting that digital distribution is cheaper for Nintendo than producing physical carts.