Well, game costs might have gone up considerably for the AAAest of AAA games, but the game buying market has also grown quite considerably. They invest more in making them, but they are also selling more of them, so the per-unit cost of game development won't be going up as much as they complain about when pushing to retail games at $70 USD. They are also selling about half of them digitally, which means no manufacturing cost. And while Steam, Sony, MS, et-al charge their 30% cut for digital sales, almost all the big publishers have their own storefronts where they take 100% of the sale price, and I'll bet you all of the big players will negotiate a lower cut with the store owners.
Another thing, the $60 price tag is merely the entry fee for most big games nowadays. The rest of the costs are covered by the special editions and DLC, which can also push game prices up to over $100 in some cases.
Another another thing, the big publishers are raking in yearly profits in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. Except Square Enix, who lost a bunch of cash on the Avengers game but still made something like $50M last year. So any complaints that games are too expensive to make are purely an effort to make MORE money for the shareholders. They should increase wages for their lower-paid staff first and then eliminate all development crunch, reduce the ridiculous bonuses for their executives, and start being backed up against the wall in terms of profit, and THEN maybe I will accept the price hike.
ANOTHER another another thing, in the specific case of Activision Blizzard, they shift all of their profits to a shell company in Amsterdam and pay ZERO tax. And few years ago it was found that they received a government payment of $200M for some arts grant thing (I forget the specifics but trust me here!) which did little more than prop up its bottom line and went straight to the shareholders. So if anyone paid $1 in tax, they paid 100% more in tax than Activision Blizzard did, and all of that money went towards subsidising Activision Blizzard's bottom line.
ANOTHER ANOTHER another another thing, in 2019 Activision Blizzard's CEO Bobby Kotick was named as America's 45th most overpaid CEO.
ANOTHER ANOTHER another anotherANOTHER ANOTHER another another thing, Bobby Kotick has a small penis.