Recently, the developer of the original Fallout, Tim Cain, released a new blog dedicated to the "Physical Version VS Digital" confrontation. He shared his vision of what is happening with game prices.
For quite a long time, the cost of AAA games was at about the same level — $60 — but in recent years the situation has changed.
According to Tim, prices remained so for so long due to digital distribution. It reduces the costs of developers (no need to pay for printing discs), so theoretically, prices for consumers could be reduced.
However, this did not happen: game creators began to spend less and earn more, which restrained the growth of prices:
Do you know about the savings thanks to "digital"? It should have been passed on to consumers [price reduction] when everything became digital. But that didn't happen. The argument I hear is that "development costs have risen, so [prices] have been balanced." I don't think they were balanced. It is probably digitalization that is the reason why games resisted price increases, that is, [did not grow with inflation]
Tim Cain shared his memories:
I've talked about this before. I used to buy games for $59 in the 90s. These days, that would be a very expensive game, and those were standard games for the Super Nintendo. But this saving from "digital" was not passed on to consumers [although the cost price has significantly decreased with the advent of digital format]