[thmsths]

I understand this, but the economics of software in general is that you have high upfront costs and then the marginal costs are minimal. Better tooling has helped keep these upfront costs from growing too much (developing a game in 2025 is MUCH easier than in 2005), the distribution costs have shrunk too and the size of the market has exploded. Given these is it really unreasonable for consumers to expect the prices to stay flat?

[bitwize]

The economics of video games is that they are enterprise software, at least major releases from large companies are. They have large teams made up of intercommunicating subteams, large budgets, even bigger marketing budgets, corporate mission criticality (failure of a game can break a company or studio), and significant server infrastructure that must be kept online and maintained. These days they're even usually written as customizations to existing frameworks (called Unity or Unreal rather than Java EE or Spring).

So there are significant upfront and ongoing costs to releasing a game like Mario Kart World. $60 per copy just isn't going to cover those costs. The only options are to charge more upfront or introduce purchasable cosmetics and the like to extract that value from the customer another way.

[surgical_fire]

> developing a game in 2025 is MUCH easier than in 2005

Developing a game is also a lot more expensive in 2025.

[seba_dos1]

Maybe the biggest ones.

[MajimasEyepatch]

The biggest ones are the ones that are going to cost $70-80, which is what we’re talking about.