I byy veggies in my shop on sale. Does it mean the price is wrong? No, 30 pct people buy games on release. So, the price is absolutely fine. Simply, for many people who aren't big fans of the genre buying on release have no sense, they are smart about money. I have a lot of games to finish and buying additional on release have little sense. I rather wait a couple of months to get all patches, some qol dlc, see more reeves to be sure I have a chance to enjoy the game. Last release titles I bought were tw Warhammer 3 and cities skylines and that only because I'm fan of those franchise and was happy to support them. For anything else, it's same as for veggies - I get them cheap if there is some chance I consumer them, and even if they end in trash im kinda fine with it.
And no. We can't expect games cost same as 10 years ago. Devs have to live as well.
Except the number of customers has grown exponentially (estimates put it at over 1B+ added over the last 10 years). Successful AAA titles make multiple millions while expecting us to test their not ready for primetime code. Their costs balloon without adding value to match that, and they expect us to eat it so they can continue to increase their stock valuation. All it takes if for a majority to refuse to pay that price and then they start learning the lesson.
"Before the Internet, the gaming market was pretty straightforward. Developers didn't ship a game until it was ready, DLC wasn't there to tempt devs to intentionally leave out content in hopes of an additional payday down the road, and games were sold as physical products that had resale value."
Missing the days when manuals and world maps (cloth ones too depending on game and edition) were a thing. Sigh
This reminds me of games like Frontier: Elite II and Daggerfall. I loved all the extras that were included with many box games.
Except for Bethesda; they were selling broken games before it was cool; like Daggerfall.
What was broken about it? I don't remember running into any significant or game-breaking bugs. Their broken coding didn't become much of an issue for me until about the time of Oblivion and Fallout 3.