Think I'm a unique case. Every time I spend $62 on a new release I badly regret it, unless it's a Nintendo title, usually. I recently bough Rodea on the Wii U. Someone may as well have held me up and robbed me.
I've never understood the economics of gaming, to be honest. Movies also have huge budgets, yet VHS, DVD, and Blue-Ray, and movie tickets are way cheaper than game prices. For example, if your game costs $60 a copy and you sold three hundred thousand copies, you just made 18 million dollars. I don't know, divide that by 100 staff, and everyone made 180,000 dollars. Maybe I'm way off, but that's a lot for a project you worked on for maybe 2 years. But even then, I'm sure not everyone gets a decent payoff, certain individuals probably reserve more of the profit for themselves than for those they employ. That's just my crude understanding of the games business. Maybe I'm completely off.
But as I've stated, many of these games that cost a fortune to make are not usually the ones that interest me. I really can't justify buying new games at $60 anymore. If game devs are not making a big enough profit margin, my suggestion is to spend less on making the game, because using an unprecedented amount of resources and technology does not in itself make a game better. I have more fun playing oldschool games than I do modern ones. This is why I wish the indie scene would come to retail. They make games on a small budget that are still good and fun to play.
I've got to lean the opposite way here. Rather than looking at what else we waste excessive amounts of money on to justify also doing it here, I'd rather look at what kinds of worthwhile purchases we can make for $80 - $100. I could think of better investments that would last you and get more use from than a single video game for that kind of money. Maybe not exclusively entertainment focused, but probably more essential and worth while than a game.
That's just where I stand, I'm not a champion of the video games industry. There is a limit to which I will support it. As much as I do like games, I'm not
that gaga about them. Despite what my collection might suggest.