It’s basically the summation of everything about the evolution of the industry.
We had an industry where something like 10-20 games a month got released for a single system. Except on PC, one-man games from the genius garage coder weren’t a thing. You had a number of licensed devs making games on much smaller budgets than today. Some delivered, some didn’t. There was essentially a two-tiered price system with the bigger games costing top price, smaller/more obscure ones releasing at 20-30$ less; the occasional ”AAA” release could retail for a bit more than average, like special chip games, Phantasy Star IV, or some multidisc games on the Playstation.
When indies entered the scene, the pricing system had to change. Many more games got released, but the quality gap with the “proper” games was insane and still is in many instances, so the old price tiers couldn’t apply anymore. If - per silent agreement - the top releases had to stay at $60 to not scare customers used to the price, the smaller games had to be repriced accordingly. But now AAA games suddenly seemed to offer too little for the dollar. If a less ambitious game on the Wii or DS, or a good indie, could deliver tens of hours of playing for less money, how could AAA justify top price for a 8-to-12-hours experience? Then again, the costs of AAA had ballooned, so making even bigger games would be too expensive for the time. This is why DLC and horse armor entered the stage. Devs had to get more money for their biggest releases, beyond street price.
But the problem of AAA games being “too short“ was still there, and it exploded with games like The Order 1886. Beyond that point, paying full price for such a short game was deemed unacceptable. And since AAA games weren’t usually tailored for multiple playthroughs and different playstyles and approaches, the obvious solution was to make them longer. But they’re expensive to make, so how do you make them longer? Filler and padding. On top of the now ubiquitous DLC and MTX. Unfortunately, diluting a game’s length usually forces devs to toss in tons of useless, amateurish dialogue, fictitious “choices”, unengaging missions and sidequests. Oh, and this makes development times longer, too, so less big games get released and the ones that do have to milk the buyer even more and for longer. But people lap it up because hey, I payed $70 for this, it better last me a long time! This being the whole reason prices got to $70 and $80 in the first place, while it would have made more sense to keep the old system of $60 for the base game + extra money for the inevitable DLC. No, now everyone has to pay more because we all complained about games getting released incomplete because of DLC, and now everyone has to suffer 10+ hours of filler crap in every major game because the street price is too high to feel you’re getting your money’s worth otherwise.
So now we have higher cost of making games, gargantuan games that maybe 10 out of 100 people even finish anyway, higher launch prices for “proper” games, nobody plays a game twice anymore.
TLDR:
- more games get released than before
- some smaller games offer a lot of content at lower price
- AAA has to step up to justify the cost, but can’t raise street price for fear of pushing it too far
- here comes DLC, then MTX
- gamers complain about paying for incomplete games + DLC
- games get inflated with filler, costs and development time increase, street price goes up, and you still have DLC and MTX
- gamers now refuse to pay full price for a game that is “too short”
- we all have to suffer overly long games full of unfocused, uninteresting stuff and nobody got time to replay a good game ‘cuz there’s just too many
- congratulations, you played yourselves