[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.