[Jach]

Your reply on "coming straight out of gamers' pockets" reminded me of something. I wonder if there's an official term in economics for it. But it comes up when people discuss levying new taxes on various product categories (we might consider it in this thread as Epic raising their fee back up to an industry standard) and a counterargument would go something like "companies will just pass the cost through to the consumer". Except that's not what happens, what happens is the company just has to eat it and try to survive. The market has already priced the good and has reached an equilibrium. If a company could get away with raising the price to a new value, and even after accounting for a decrease in sales still end up with the same or higher profit within a static time frame, they would have already done it.

One can also look at the possibilities by modeling more than just the $60 game in isolation. Include the cost, it took $X to create, and each $60 sale chips away at $X by some $Y so that after enough sales over some time window breakeven is reached (and profit after that). A new tax means that $Y becomes smaller, so you need more sales than before to reach breakeven within the same time. Except you won't get more sales than before, because the price is the same. You have to eat the tax. You could try raising the price to say $70 or whatever is needed so that $Y remains the same, and now you only need the same number of sales as before, let the customers eat it. Except you won't get the same number of sales as before, because the increase in the product's price will result in a decrease in customer demand, you'll have fewer sales than before within the same time frame. Compared to the difference with $X, it's still the company who has eaten the tax and has to deal with its consequences on their continued existence.