Game prices for the past 30 years haven’t kept pace with inflation.
I recognise the argument that publishers are shifting larger volumes of units now, which has been a factor that has allowed the industry to keep price increases below inflation for the last 30 years.
Wages not being even close to keeping up with inflation (especially housing inflation) is the real issue here, not the $70/$80 video game.
You should be angry at your reduced purchasing power in all of society, not just with the price of Nintendo games.
(Secondary less unpopular opinion, the best games out these days are multiplatform and released at least 5 years ago, buy them for << $80 and wait for sale the new releases, when they too are 5 years old)
The fact that they’re moving more units doesn’t matter, everything, including things for which the price followed inflation, sells more units than it did 40 years ago just because there’s more people on the planet and globalism is a thing.
What matters is that that money goes to enrich billionaires and not the developers making the product people are buying.
Steam takes a 30% cut on the first $10m in sales (then 25% until $50m and then 20%) and they pay their employees a lot more than industry average and the owner is a multi billionaire with a yacht collection. Same shit for publishers, the c-suites are rich from “managing” the intermediary between the development studio and the retailers, they don’t give a crap about the product as long as it sells.
Meanwhile the devs making the games have a hard time affording housing, need to deal with crunches and get laid off once the game they were working on is completed.
And what about us, the consumers? Well we’re no better off than the developers and we’re still enriching a bunch of billionaires while most of us struggle to afford basic needs.
Both publishers and retailers could afford to reduce their cut and lower prices OR to reduce their cut and leave more money to the people making the products they sell and the impact would only be felt by a handful of people (in Steam’s case, by a single person).