On my spare time, I used to go and look at my local game store and see what games they had. They had good deals on games that were new and were affordable and fun games for the price, most were new, some were used and were sold at a little cheaper price. 

Now what's this Triple A price now?

Just like that, all of your games went from around $20-30 to over $50. Now I'm not saying that ALL games are expensive. I'm just saying how did you get PlayStation 2 games that were good for the time at around $20, to something that is over $50 now?

Let's take Star Wars Battlefront (EA) for instance. The full game is $100 including the base game and the season pass. The game is lacking features from Star Wars Battlefront 2 that make a 2005 game seem better than a 2015 game. 

Yes, you can argue that the graphics are better and that more people made the game then ever before, but how is it that video games with little content like No Man's Sky can be sold for over $50 new! Overwatch is the same price and is actually, what's that word called? OH YES, FUN.

So what happened to games becoming from like cheap to asking for your wallet now? 

(I would have made this thread earlier but I was busy doing things)

For one, inflation in general hit. Most things in general are a lot more expensive now then thy were just 10 years ago, heck in my city the price just to use the bus once doubled I remember back when the original Pokémon games came out, they were only $5.

Well, as consoles get more powerful and games get bigger, the price of course rises. If a game exploits the console's capabilities, it surely costs more.

At least over here, the popular Banjo-Kazooie (I think it was that one the rival of Super Mario 64) costed what would be translated today into $87. And we're talking about game sold nearly 20 years ago as brand new, so the inflation has played no negative role.

What made that game and other examples of games and consoles too expensive? Of course the capabilities. Everything comes with a price, and getting better performance and graphics requires an extra amount of development. Just like we can see new games launch at less than $5 (last week I saw one at $0.99) games which take the console to the extreme and have needed a lot of development will obviously cost more than that.

It also plays a role if the developers want the game to reach the crowd or they simply want it to be a money maker scam. In the latter case, we can see how they release tons of DLC and different versions with just a bit of content, while in the first case we see rather justified delays in release dates, at least until they run out of patience and their thirst for money becomes too much to handle.

Overall, games may look more expensive than in the past, but the world has changed. Everything has gotten more complex, which in turn rises the cost of development and thus the final price of the product. It's not only videogames, it's almost literally everything else. Whatever keeps being simple and easy to develop will still be cheap to your pocket, simple as that.

There's inflation which zander already brought up. I also think a big factor is the amount of time developers have to spend on an AAA game today. The more advanced the technology, the more time consuming it becomes to work with and companies now hire hundreds of staff and pour millions of dollars into making a single a game like the new Star Wars Battlefront for instance. Which cost way more to make than the original on the PS2. Since production costs are going up I don't think it's all that surprising that the prices do too. Companies need to make money after all.

Now having said that there are definitely companies who are just trying to maximize their profits in particular by the use of micro transactions or over priced DLC packs. One needs to consider that was harder to do in the past before the rise of online gaming which is part of the reason you're seeing that increasingly so today. It obviously gives results, just look at mobile games like "game of war" and "heroes charge" which from a relatively objective standpoint are pretty much based on the concept "whoever pays the most money wins" in stead of being strategy based like it markets itself to. It's both on companies for being greedy, but also the masses for buying into it in the first place.

I grew up in the 90's and gaming was certainly not cheap. The 3DO retailed for over $500, I bought mortal kombat for gameboy for $70 at a local kmart/walmart and every N64 game I remember buying was at least $50 or more unless it was pre-owned.

PS2 games are pretty much worthless which is why they are so cheap. They have horrible resell value compared to the likes of N64, DC, SNES, GBA and even PSX.

EX Palen : explained it very well.

I'd just add that some older console games are being sold fairly cheap now. Of course, in a digital format but, with some minor enhancements to the graphics. I really like being able to play many variations of Nintendo games on my WiiU- I am paying about $2-$6 on many Mario games for Ds, NES, SNES compared to $30-$60 when buying the original console game at a Flea Market. I also buy games for $5 at GameStop as they always have a sale on older games, some new, some used. I try to stay in that price range but, for my Xbox One, it's more like $30-$60 the latter being the most common price so I've only bought one game and one expansion and all the other games I have for the console were downloaded free thanks to Gold Live Membership. Yes, prices are going up for newer games but, also older games are quite affordable now plus, there's many options now to rent games so I think overall it's a good era to be a gamer .... a broke gamer that is 

Since Game Discussion is geared more towards discussion about specific games and each thread is usually linked to that topic's game page, I'm going to go ahead and move this to Video Games since I feel it's more appropriate there. Bound to get more traffic, as well.