Quote Originally Posted by bangtango View Post
Games appear to be less expensive now than they were in the cartridge days. Plus I remember there being far fewer price drops back in the 8-bit and 16-bit era compared to today.

There were a lot of 8-bit and 16-bit games which seemed to be priced at the $40-60 mark long (years) after they had been released and this is something you don't see today. Now a game might be out less than 6 months and get a price drop or two.

Never in the cartridge days did you see new releases come out at $10-20, which is far more common now (and has been since the days of the PS1). Granted that is because you couldn't really do that type of thing in the cartridge days. However, the point I am making is things are better now than they used to be.
Games now are less expensive compared to the cartridge days, but you're skipping a large period of time for comparison. Ten years ago, games were cheaper. Hell, games were cheaper in the "cartridge days" too when they weren't on cartridges. Sega CD and Amiga games were cheaper than today's games. Why are we paying cartridge prices for games on disc? And I almost never see anything under $30 anymore (and that price point is generally reserved for the Wii), unless you're talking about downloads? At one point we regularly had $20 budget games on disc, and even some $10 releases came out on Playstation (The Italian Job, for example).

Inflation isn't a good comparison because the price of media is usually outpaced by inflation. Movies, music, and so on don't cost much more than they did 15-20 years ago.