Always love these threads when people whine about $70 games, all while $70 dollar games are setting sales records.
Until Sony raised the price to $70 in 2020, the cost of games hadn't increased from the $60 price point in
fourteen years. Before that, they hadn't increased from the $50 price point for
ten years. Name any other entertainment industry whose price remained the same for such long stretches without increases. You can't. They have all increased while offering fewer features. Movie prices are higher, music prices (both physical CD and digital MP3/FLAC) are higher, subscription services have increased the total cost of access to media. In the same time span we went from DVD to Blu-Ray to HD Blu-Ray to digital movie purchases, each one increasing in price.
You all bitch and moan but are going to buy the games regardless.
Gamers think they are immune to inflation.
A Big Mac costs double what it did in 2005 but lord forbid the heckin gamerinos go up by 15%.
Not just inflation but also the basic cost of doing business.
The cost of creating games has become
astronomically high. There was an article back in 2012 that stated the total development budget, including marketing, for Mass Effect 3 was $40M. CDPR has stated it cost them a total of
$316M to make Cyberpunk 2077. The development budget for Hogwarts Legacy was $150M. The cost of making games has tripled, but asking an extra $10 for them (when literally everything else in the world is increasing in price) is somehow a bridge too far...