Unfortunately considering how many of these gamers are willing to pay extra $30€ just to get 1 week earlier access to a game, I’m afraid you are wrong in this regard and we’re going to see prices go up even more. Piracy is also dying, either because of groups disbanding or getting sued, or because of DRM getting better and more widespread, and once that is gone it’s going to let publishers jack the price even higher up.

I’m pretty much resigned to just play indie and AA games at this point, there’s no way I’m paying 60 or more for these broken, bloated and often overpriced products. There are few exceptions but even they will be driven to higher prices eventually.

To be fair to Capcom, I think that an ideal world for them would be not having to compete against games whose expectations and ideations are out-of-wack with the price point and requires huge sales numbers to even be profitable.

For example, SF6 has a full single player mode that exceeds any of the output of previous games. While the quality of this single player mode is sub-par, it’s still very ambitious compared to their old method of releasing fighting games (Arcade mode and Versus mode, with some mini games – that’s all!) and it finds itself having to compete with other 60 dollar titles whose scope is often outlandish while knowing full well that a fighting game can never move FPS game figures, for example.

The 60 dollar game made a lot more sense in the era of the PS2 where games were often linear experiences, sometimes lightly to heavily cinematic. A game that was made like MGS2 could be sold today for 60 dollars and it would have a very hard time competing against huge blockbusters like Starfield, with some probably scoffing at the idea of paying 60 dollars for that experience. (See Armored Core 6 – a good example of this that actually happened.)

Super Mario Bros also only sold about 2.5 million units in the first several month after release. Baldur’s Gate, for example, sold almost 6 million in 2 weeks. The NES sold 2.5 million units in its first year. The Switch sold 13 million. Even the worst selling modern console, the Xbox Series X sold 8 million in the first year. While individual game prices have not risen, the total number of sales has dramatically increased. So pardon me if I don’t think the cost of games not rising has been a problem for publishers and developers of AAA titles. Their real problem has been putting out good content that enough gamers want.

I can understand woth this information companies wanting to charge more, but I feel like standards need to be higher and refunds guaranteed. They can’t ask us to spend 100’s of dollars on half-complete, buggy messes of games AND also want to charge for DLC and have micro-transactions.

While i agree that prices have been stagnant, its also a game of companies wanting to reduce risk. You have unicorn examples like Baldurs Gate 3 which took its time to develop a game, and has stated they dont plan on making paid expansion content, meaning where they at they see the game as profitable, despite spending 5 years in development for it.

Part of the reason why some games have balooned cost is because of improper spending of the money. Many spend a lot of money on marketing which tends to have an overly inflated cost on its own, due to the fact that people have a preference to play whats familliar, however its been shown that also actually making a good game with little marketing also works, and a lot of dev studios havent gotten to that point yet.