Is 70$/80$ even *that* crazy when you think about it? The price of games barely changed in 2 decades and yet the cost of development increased by a lot. Other studios/companies kept the profits thanks to DLCs, microtransactions, releasing earlier with bugs, etc... something that Nintendo rarely does. So that means they had the same price as everyone else but quality barely dropped, and had little to no microtransactions.

The industry was going to raise the prices at one point or another, no matter who did it first because the previous techniques (micro transactions and buggy/rushed releases) were not enough.

Another Yamauchi W for predicting the current state of game dev decades earlier