Update thanks to thethatfox:
Physical game cards may also not actually contain the game:
Nintendo Switch 2 Game-Key Card Overview
Game-key cards are different from regular game cards, because they don’t contain the full game data. Instead, the game-key card is your "key" to downloading the full game to your system via the internet.
Update 2: There is probably a difference in Game-key cards and card that contain real game data. So we don't know right now how often these game-key cards are used or if nintendo is using them.
.. and also both are a lot more expensive than they were before
* not counting inflation.
I'm not saying it doesn't suck but SNES games were over $100 adjusted. It's kind of crazy game prices have been inflation proof for ~2 decades.
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.
Huh? Money is worth a lot less than it did in the 70s by any real metric. And wages are way higher too.
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.
Many people still rent games, for even cheaper then they did back then. Xbox Gane Pass and similar services are popular for a reason.
Most of the games I buy today are less than $10 anyway. What I want from games has really changed, and a lot of the time I’m just playing free Roguelikes rather than commercial games.
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.
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.
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
It's the cost of the CEOs and shareholders that are driving prices up.
I've been waiting for prices to go up on video games for about 7 years and am surprised they haven't gone up more, this is pretty fair imo.
They've been ~$60 since 2002?
They've been ~$60 since the early 1990s. At least.