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Ill preface by saying I didnt read the article. But I also think that the state of gaming today is much worse than it was in the early 2000s for millennials.
When I was growing up, games had to come out complete so they were generally much more polished. However, when the Xbox360 came out, console makers gave the ability to devs to release patched versions via updates. Initially it was a great idea - devs could fix bugs they might have missed while testing. But then this quickly spiralled into studios forcing devs to release 1/2 baked games in a horribly broken state.
I also think how much you generally have to pay for games has gone way up with respect to the cost of living. Video gaming is much more of a luxury now, than a simple past time. Plus there are so many F2P mobile games out there, that there is even less of an incentive to get into a console / PC gaming.
I gotta argue against the games costing more compared to cola. A new Nintendo game in 1988 was $40 to $50. At that time hamburger was 99 cents, a value meal from a fast food place was $4, a house was $80,000, a new car was $10k to $18k, and you were pretty much a Middle class family if you made $45k\year. Some original NES games even hit $60 a piece.
So videogames are one of the few things that haven't kept with inflation. In no small part due to more people purchasing games and less physical overhead, but that doesn't take away from my stance. 40 years later and a game price has gone up by like $20.
And the other side of the coin, with the advent of DLC, being able to take a complete game and carve pieces off of it to sell separately for more profit.
For a long while, DLC has been just an excuse to foist unnecessary content on the consumer for sales. There are a few notable exceptions in this like Fallout 3 and New Vegas, earlier Borderlands, and, surprisingly for me, the recent Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon DLC.
For the most part, though, I have not bought DLC without thoroughly vetting it. I'm not talking about cosmetics. I'm talking about actual story/content additions being overpriced fetch quests which turn out to be, more often than not, just vehicles for even more useless cosmetics.
As an example, Fallout 4 DLC (much like the basegame itself) was a mistaken purchase seated in brand loyalty/a hope of redeeming the title. The DLC featured cosmetic additions for their Sims style settlement minigame, a couple cutesy fetch quests for armor, and two unfinished/unremarkable story DLCs that played like the elevator pitch of what would have eventually been fleshed out if this we're an earlier entry in the series.
With most story DLC, at best, you get a lackluster and entirely forgettable addition to the basegame. At worst, you get horse armor disguised as a new campaign or an unforgivably half assed hodge podge of storylines that cheapen the rest of your experience with the game.
Edit: of -> if
Gaming was always expensive. Super Mario 3 was 50 dollars in 1990. That's 120 dollars in today's money.
That was at its infancy though. And the market for video games is bigger than the movie and music industry combined, which wasn't the case back then.
Makes sense for niche hobby to be expensive and then fall over time as the potential userbase for it grows, so price adjusting to maximize profits by finding one that reaches as many people as possible versus trying to stay afloat off fewer consumers.
Every era of video games was affected by its business model. Games used to be far more obtuse to sell guides and hint hotlines, and they used to be hard to the point that they were less fun so that it took longer to finish them. In the early 2000s, when the industry was largely between alternate revenue streams, you tended to get a lot of padding so that they could put a larger number of levels as a bullet point on the back of the box, so the first few levels would be great, but somewhere in the middle, they'd be pretty phoned in.
I don't necessarily agree with you on this specific point (although I agree with the rest of your comment).
Gaming is unfathomably cheap nowadays and the conversion $/hrs is incredible. While yes, day 1 prices are higher than they used to be, discounts are frequent (excluding Nintendo platforms) and games tend to last a LOT longer than they used to. Excluding old-school JRPGs, I don't remember many games from the PS1 era lasting more than 10/15 hrs. Nowadays that's the baseline length for any single player game, and it goes only higher from there.
And that does not include the plethora of F2P and live service games that people can waste literally thousands of hours into, free giveaways (I have hundreds of titles on Epic Store that could probably satisfy all my gaming needs until the day I die), etc...
The cost of gaming has gone up only if you are a Nintendo aficionado who adamantly refuses to jump to any other platform and buys all new releases day 1, or a PC master race whose eyes strain from playing games at anything less than 300 fps on the latest NVIDIA card. For any other demographic, gaming prices are fine and more approachable than ever.
Street Fighter II was $80, and then they asked you to buy the game again for each updated revision.
The real difference between then and now is that when games were on cartridges, every game was expensive. No exceptions. Now, the real reason why paying $70 for the latest AAA feels like a ripoff is because sitting right next to it is Balatro for $15 and Marvel Rivals for free.
Triple AAA titles that are now 75% off or lower with complete editions from a couple of years ago is also what new AAA titles are competing against.
Release a non finished game, and finish it only if it's a success (TM)