In brazil it's been a steady increase since forever, the last game I bought day one was Persona 5 on ps3, now I can only buy AAA when they get deep discounts.
It's ironic to think that when console piracy was easier, original games were cheaper, but now that it's a pain the ass to crack a PS4 and 5 (don't even know if 5 is cracked), they are more expensive than ever have been; and on xbox hackers just gave up, microsoft locked it down GOOD after the 360.
They're more expensive than they were 15 years ago, but are not more expensive than they were 30 years ago.
I remember my dad paid like $120 for fuckin' Dr. Mario on the NES when it was brand new. Meanwhile, up until a few years ago, I had enjoyed spending no more than $50 for a brand new title. Now, depending on platform, it's between $60 and $70. Though I see the new NHL game is $99 and as far as I could tell, that was the base game not even a collector edition thing. It also shows NHL23, one I own, for the same price. I got it for $10 at GameStop used lol
There are several approaches to this. What is "expensive"?
First, there are the costs of a game in relation to ones enjoyment in playing it. This is hard to measure, as it is an individual question. But one key factor in this is "duration of play". Imagine a game that you play for many, many hours, either by binge-playing it, or slow playing over a long time. We paid 60 or 70 Euro for Animal Crossing back then, but we easily sunk 1000+ hours into that game, as it is very relaxing and de-stressing after work. At 6 or 7 cent per hour, this is cheap entertainment. On the other hand, if you buy any title at AAA costs and throw it into the corner after a few minutes, the costs per hour are way worse.
Then: Some games take more development effort than others, and thus cost more. Whether the level of detail or whatever caused the increase in effort is worth it is another question.
Another cost-driving factor are IP costs. You can get a simple jump-and-run game for e.g. €10, or essentially the same game with Pokemon or Micky Mouse for €50.
In the end, if a game is too expensive, vote with your wallet and don't buy it. It's not an essential thing, it is just a game.
Not to pile on, but print ads from the 90's are wild to look at. Sonic 3 launched at $70. You know, games that require a couple of hours to complete casually. Stuff got replayed a LOT.
Some Nintendo 64 games got up to the $80 range in the late 90's before PlayStation really started taking off.
What made matters worse was the publishers didn't have as much price control as they do now, so game and accessory prices would vary store to store as retailers tacked on additional margins.
When I look back at what a Game boy game costed, and scale it up to today money(as much as $60cad, equivalent to $120cad in today money).... I feel so bad for my parents. I know they had a bit more spare money back then even being considered poor than what people have now. But it's pretty crazy how much they costed. And our first family computer was over $3000cad in 1990, which would be more than $6000cad today.
Despite how it feels, gaming is pretty cheap now. The prices may be close to the highest number they have ever been, they are not close to the highest cost they have been.
I have a very long backlog to play and feel no pressure to play the very latest releases. Being a patient game does have some perks. One of them is that I get to buy a lot more games (ence the backlog).
There’s some decent arguments in here about how it is cheaper than it ever has been. But I can tell you that even though I make more money than I ever have in my life, I haven’t bought a brand new game in about 4 years because of how much it costs to just live now.
Go ahead and adjust games price to account for inflation, at least $90+, and see how many new games just flop. People will prioritize living over gaming. If suddenly people can only buy half as many games then you will see half the sales.
Well there's also just a lot more games now, and even retro games that have been around are competing (I'm playing RE1 for example, bought it recently cuz I've never played it before)
So I don't think it's intrinsically due to other life costs being high. When you have games like battlebit and palworld and lots of ftp games just saturating the market it's hard to justify charging so much. People literally don't have the lifespan to play all the games that exist and will continue to be created over time.
While the software for current games is substantially cheaper, the hardware is more expensive at this point in time. The Switch is spendy for a nearly 7-year-old system. The PS5 has had a price increase, when we saw a big price cut for the PS2 at two years in. Accessories, depending on where you live, are up 25% or more from retro eras (especially Joy-Cons).
PC prices have come back down to earth now, but during the GPU shortage, it hadn't been more expensive to put together a gaming PC since the 90's/2000's.