I was comparing games prices last week and I found that prices from the 80s aren't too different from modern game prices.
Elite was £20 in 1984 and that would be £66 today, which is not very different from what a good game for the PS5 costs today.
Except that games then were made by one or two people and nowadays games are made by teams with coders, musicians, artists, etc.
Yeah, the games industry is in a pretty big crisis right now, and I think change needs to happen both ways:
Consumers need to understand that keeping games at the same price for decades despite rising costs and inflation is not realistic. If they want the industry to thrive, they need to be ok with games being more expensive.
Meanwhile, developers need to stop making games so expensive. This is an entertainment industry / corpo problem, really. Companies have seen the big profits and decided that only the big profits will do, which means you need to make a big open world cinematic experience, which is expensive, and because it's expensive, they won't take risks on making anything actually interesting.
The only way gaming moves forward is if we make riskier games that cost less to produce, which is why indies are the ones making the good games these days.