When I bought a $60 game in 1996, I knew it was a complete product. It might have a bug that made it impossible to finish, but returns are a solved problem. I knew I had a product that was made, possibly incompetently, for fun, or to tell a story.
I wasn't buying something that was trying to nudge me into spending another $400 on different pixel colors, or worse, different characters, abilities, or effects.
Modern video games have adopted techniques used by the gambling industry to trigger essentially addiction, because game companies prefer 3 whales to a thousand happy individuals buying the game a single time and playing it forever happily.
Because they were not satisfied with making a million dollars off a video game. That wasn't enough money.
You used to be able to buy games used for a tiny fraction of the original price, and you used to be able to sell games you finished or didn't like. Now you have to pay the full price, every time, irreversibly.
Here's the thing: if I can't afford a game because it's so outrageously expensive, I'm not going to just not play it and miss out, I'm going to pirate it.
And now that I'm an adult who totally can afford these things (after bypassing all the roadblocks that the world's entertainment companies put for customers from Russia), I still pirate everything because that's what I'm used to, and that's what I'm convenient with.
That's fine, the problem is people acting like it's outrageous to charge $60 for 100+ hour length multi-million dollar projects. Factorio recently increased its price by $5 to $35 in line with inflation and gamers are outraged. How dare they charge more money, it's totally immoral, etc. I don't get why people feel outraged about it.
My main complaint is not that games cost this much money, but rather about digital distribution. Especially with console games, it used to be such that you could buy pre-owned cartridges/discs and sell yours. It was really cheap to you, and technically the game developers also got their asking price for each copy they sold. You were also able to swap games with friends who had the same type of console.
With digital distribution, you still pay the full price, but your copy is "single-use" in essence. You're never getting any of that money back. And, the only way to buy games digitally is "new" for that full price.
You don't pay for the labour to produce it, you pay for a gamble over an investment.
The labour to produce the game can totally be paid if the price of the game is reduced but the amount of copies sold increase by a significant amount to make up for the price reduction.
And wallet and income of the consumers in region X of the world do not stretch magically because game companies in region Y decide to invest more on games. It is not that simple.
While I'm not saying most people by far aren't doing it to save money, I have bought switch games and then emulated them just to try the graphics at 4k 60fps that isn't possible on the console.
That's the part I'm sad about - that we won't get emulated games that look and feel better due to faster hardware in the future. Money isn't an issue for me.
