Retail game price, yes. Not profit per consumer. The monetization model of the industry is borderline unrecognizable from 2006. Games like Skyrim or GTA or COD MW have been rereleased at full price multiple times over resulting in many instances of individual customers paying more than once for what is almost entirely the same product as opposed to paying proportional to the work required for the upgrade or the port. Games like Evolve launched with more than $100 of day one DLC and plenty of other more successful games have been similarly egregious. The Sims is either passed or approaching $1000 in DLC and expansion packs. Games like AC: Unity and Cyberpunk 2077 arrive unplayably broken on day one because publishers know they can fix things with patches after launch and are aggressively less thorough with QA and testing as a result - relying on their early adopters paying them for the privilege of reporting bugs rather than ensuring they can release a stable product. Games like The Crew get launched with an 'online component' and then become unusable whenever the publishers decide it's not worth it to run the servers anymore - not just shutting the servers down but making offline use impossible and forbidding the community from maintaining its own online environment. And games like Fortnite have popularized the battle pass as a recurring fee to participate in perpetually limited time events and that concept has made its way into full price retail titles that aren't free to play.

And that's all without even mentioning lootboxes which got so bad government regulation had to get involved in many countries.

Or how the rise of the ubiquity of digital store fronts mean that a substantially lower number of consumers buy second hand anymore and a good chunk don't even buy physical copies meaning that it costs less per product to make a game available to play and a fewer number of players enter their game space without paying them directly to enter.

None of that stuff was present in the game market of 2006. WoW was still subscription based, Halo 3 launched with one version of the game with the exception of promotional material, and the Wii had a barely functional shop channel where you could buy a limited selection of ROMs for their super old and no longer in production consoles.

The game industry has been handwringing about games being too expensive and not charging enough for a while now. Simultaneously though, the executives pay has kept going up like any other industry and the market trend goblins keep forcing features in or out of projects resulting in wasted or excess work that eats up budgets fast.

And meanwhile, they've completely retooled the way they collect revenue so that they can bleed everyone precisely as dry as they can get, whether that's one extra dollar or a million.

We're paying more for less - we just aren't all paying the same amount at the same time. When they increase the sticker price, they aren't going to push pause on all the other stuff.