[x0x0]

It's not so complicated though -- for big budget games, the budget has gone up while the box price has been eaten by inflation. People still pay $60 for a game in the midst of 9 figure dev budgets. $60 isn't enough money to make many types of games, leaving publishers with three choices: charge everyone more, charge a bunch of people a little more (dlc, some loot boxes, ads), or charge a handful of people a ton of money (loot box mechanics searching for whales).

When you watch interviews with some of the early doom developers, the level designers could make a level a week. Now levels in Doom Eternal are years long collaborations between a team of people. Content costs have exploded.

There's an identical trend with ios apps btw: an email app in the late 1990s like Eudora cost $100 to $150 with paid updates. Now people expect email apps to cost under $10 with lifetime updates while doing 10x as much.