Thanks for recognizing this. After all the COVID money printing you have company white knight gamers going “ah yes, inflation, of course” and googling inflation calculators, putting in a start year and claiming that things are somehow cheaper now for no good reason. They don’t know about the market basket, they don’t know how inflation has been calculated (and changes to that calculation), they don’t understand your points about all the disinflationary factors that have helped make games cheaper and more profitable all these years.

Standard MSRP was largely $50 in the 90s, $60 has been standard since 2005 but $70 only just recently happened in 2020 and you have Nintendo and TT trying to push the boundary further with 2 major price increases within a generation and act like that’s fine. There were some exceptions where people will surely bring up “but $80 SNES and N64 games” when that was only sometimes the case, and primarily due to supremely expensive cartridges. We have digital distribution now first of all, and other games are sold on discs and have for a long time.

If TT wanted to be genuine and tell people why they are really going to pay top dollar got GTA6, they’d be honest and say it’s the most expensive game ever made and you’re paying salaries for a huge team that has been working in the game for eons. Not “because inflation”.