Idk. I think gamers are overly upset about $80 games. While I am sympathetic to not wanting the price to go up, the fact of the matter is that brand new video games cost pretty much the same as they did 30 years ago, while the cost of everything else has basically doubled in that time. I know it's probably not what is going to happen but if $80 video games are what it takes to get us away from shitty microtransactions in full price games, then I'm all for it. I know the crowd on Lemmy will just say they should make less profit and do neither but that's just not how the world works right now and nobody is going to do that.

Food for thought- here are some prices in 1996 and today

New video game: 1996- $67 (Super Mario 64), 2025- $70

McDonald's Big Mac meal: 1996- $2.45, 2025-$9.29

Base package Honda Civic: 1996- $10,360, 2025-$24,250

Average apartment - 1996- $550/mo, 2025- $1,540/mo

Median annual income- 1996- $20,109, 2025- $50,200

Doesn't one of these stand out?

[–] inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago

And let's take this outside of the myopic view of only looking at inflation.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenues-by-platform/

Console gaming revenue: 1996 - 7 billion, 2022 - 30 billion

Let's look at specifically Nintendo here since we're talking about Super Mario 64

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2001/011121e.pdf

2001, 664 million in profit, adjusted for inflation in 2022 dollars, 1 billion.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/84668/nintendo-made-6-billion-net-sales-1-7-profits-in-q322/index.html

2022, 1.7 billion dollars in profit.

You forget that in 1996 the gaming pool was also magnitudes smaller compared to today and despite all of the whining about increased development costs, which I also think is bullshit but that's a different conversation, profits have increased to keep up.

So my opinion, no there's absolutely no justification for a 80 dollar price point when you look at the over all picture.