Have you considered being a CEO for a gaming corporation?

Games haven't gotten more expensive since ever. Like I said above, The Original Donkey Kong for the SNES was 66 usd. It releases in 1994.

If they weren't profitable at the current price they wouldn't be charging the current price.

And "budgets keep going up!"

Whose fault is that, guys? Were those numbers placed on you by a witch's curse? No. You spent $100M on one game, it made $300M, so you spend $200M on the next game. Games didn't get twice as hard to make, between those decisions. They didn't require twice as many people or twice as much time. You're just treating them like a factory where more capital in means more revenue out.

The original Doom was made in nine months by a team that fits in an elevator. Yeah, it's simpler than modern games, but they had to make the nearly-unprecedented engine and all their own tools as they went. It's not like anything's harder, now. People have basically recreated that seminal title as solo one-week game jam projects. A modern handful of professional computer nerds can pick from a handful of modern high-end toolchains and start banging out content, today.

If the market for video games only supported six-digit budgets - there would still be video games. Big ones, fancy ones, creative ones, whatever. Would they be the spectacles that currently get advertised to death? Nope. But they also wouldn't produce as many unstable bug-fests as those sprawling mega-projects. Nor would they be announced in 1999, previewed in 2006, delayed in 2017, and launched to middling reviews in 2025.

Studios that aren't injected with obscene capital and forced to deliver "AAA" money-trees tend to shoot their shot and move on to the next game. That's how they survived and grew as plucky little private affairs, before some publishers swallowed them whole and turned them into a sequel factory for their breakout hit.

If your games cost too much money to fail, stop giving them more money.

Are you talking about RE4? Because they were actually talking about an Apple port (iPhone, iPad and Mac, with people being able to play on all platforms with one purchase) of the recent remake, which is a 2023 game which only really borrows the story and some layouts from the 2005 game.

They were a lot cheaper to make back then too.

Rare spent 18 months developing Donkey Kong Country from an initial concept to a finished game, and according to product manager Dan Owsen, 20 people worked on it in total. It cost an estimated US$1 million to produce, and Rare said that it had the most man hours ever invested in a video game at the time, 22 years. The team worked 12–16-hours every day of the week.

These days that's indie game territory.

The Donkey Kong you bought in 1994 had to pay not only for development, but also for the package, for the circuits (think a 1TB SSD in 2023), for distribution, etc. Do you see modern companies having to pay for any of that?

My dad still reminds me that when he bought me Dr. Mario for NES on release, it was $90USD. I remember seeing many a game at Toys R Us with price tags of up to $120.

But I can name plenty of games in 2023 that cost more $66. Shittons of console titles are $70 now!

Prices are comparable because a cartridge in the 90s was as expensive, comparatively, as an SSD is today. Have you ever bought a game and received a free SSD with it?

Adjusted price is a common talking point here, but it ignores the other side of inflation... that wages have stagnated and rising prices obviously means that people have less spending money.

Consider also that there is a lot of choice with the back catalog on PC as well as free games (that people can make in their spare time at no cost thanks to FOSS tools and free information). Pre-broadband, gaming was more of a take-it-or-leave situation.

So yeah, I think most people already see increasing prices as being motivated by greed. And some people likely see the $60 price as already greedy when games are often filler and spectacle (with poor QA testing on top of that, because they know people will pre-order it anyway, and then buy the later DLC or cosmetics).

@MomoTimeToDie

The problem is the game industry, in the meantime of never going beyond the $60 threshold, found a far far more lucrative way of making money than just raising the MSRP. In fact, they found multiple ways of making money: skinner boxes, loot boxes, micro transactions, season passes, FOMO storefronts, etc etc. And even though we may agree that the MSRP eventually has to increase, they won't suddenly give up on those anti-consumer, predatory practices.

It's not unreasonable but at the end of the day, we buy these games to waste time. There's not a whole lot of justifying why im going to spend more on something i use to just unwind when i can buy plenty of 20$ games that will give me hundreds of hours of entertainment

How much of the cartridge sale was profit to the developer?

The hardware of the cartridge cost money. Distribution to retailers cost money. The retailers took their cut.

I wouldn't be shocked at all if the publisher's net revenue per game is significantly higher in real dollars than it was in the NES era.

The MSRP for a NES cartridge includes the circuits, the manual, the box, the physical space, the license and a finished game. Do you get any of these with modern AAA games?

They sell vastly more games than before. And there isn't a media anymore. And they should have increased their productivity in all these years.

Video games are not a good. They're a digital product, a service. The cost is completely decorrelated from the amount you sell. Which is why it is so profitable.