Yeah how dare they!
This discussion has come up before here, don't remember the thread though. Might have been last year's E3 or the new console thread.
Video games are one of the few thing that have substantially dropped in price over the years.
Looking back at 1996 and the prices of SNES games:
Illusion of Gaia: $95
Killer Instinct: $88
Earthbound: $90 (IIRC it was over $100 when it was released)
Super Punch Out $80
Mario Kart: $63, which was what, 3-4 years old by that point?
(source:
http://www.cdarchive.ca/UltimateVideo1996.pdf )
If video games followed inflation in Canada, new games would be over $130 today.
Not only that, but I find prices drop on games much faster than they ever used to, and you didn't have the big E3, boxing day, etc. sales on video games in the 90s at all, let alone to the scale they have now.
The fact that companies are making money hand over fist with micro-purchases and crappy little iPhone games, which one would think would either translate into standalone games either climbing in price or slowly vanishing, I'm fine paying sub-100 for something I can sink 100+ hours into.